William Blake may have described its “green and pleasant land” but this week England had traded green for white, as you can see in this NASA photograph (c/o Gizmodo).
England’s Green and Pleasant Land
Scientology Revealed
Janet Reitman, a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, spent five years researching Inside Scientology, which is reviewed here by Brook Wilensky-Lanford for The San Francisco Chronicle. Earlier this year, ‘Million Dollar Baby‘-screenwriter Paul Haggis spoke with Lawrence Wright of The New Yorker about L. Ron Hubbard‘s religion.
The Fiction of Borders
Molly Crabapple writes for VICE about translating Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani and the fiction of citizenship. As she explains it, “Words don’t need visas, but humans do. […] Citizenship is our most loaded form of fiction.”
Sequoia Nagamatsu Explores the Full Spectrum of Grief
In the Ring with Norman Mailer
Is there a better way to honor Norman Mailer than by throwing a few punches? Nate Freeman was bored at the book party for J. Michael Lennon’s new biography, Norman Mailer: A Double Life, so he got into a drunken fist fight in Mailer’s apartment. We bet Mailer would approve.
Brief Encounters
Overlooked Books of the Decade
The Daily Beast offers up a list of “the most overlooked reads of the past 10 years – none of which involve a wizard, a vampire, or a code” from John McGahern’s By the Lake to Pandora in the Congo by Albert Sanchez Pinol.