Anne Fernald writes about getting deep into her research: “Peering down isn’t enough, however. If you want to find the treasure that lies beneath the surface, you have to dive down into the well.”
The Well
The Ultimate Goodbye Gift
“When we read with a child, we are doing so much more than teaching him to read or instilling in her a love of language.” Anna Dewdney, best-selling children’s author and illustrator, died this past weekend after a battle with brain cancer. Her obituary concluded with this: “She requested that in lieu of a funeral service that people read to a child instead.”
Social Media Anxiety
Nancy Jo Sales, author of The Bling Ring, talks about her latest book, American Girls, at NPR. “In the 2 1/2 years she spent researching her book, Sales interviewed more than 200 teenage girls around the country about their social media and Internet usage. She says girls face enormous pressures to post ‘hot’ or sexualized photos of themselves online, and she adds that this pressure can make the Internet an unwelcoming environment.” You could also read Sarah Labrie’s essay on social (media) anxiety.
Quark Winner
Big congrats to Millions staff writer Edan Lepucki whose essay “Reading and Race: On Slavery in Fiction” has come in second for the 3 Quarks Daily Arts & Literature Prize.
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Dismissed As Coincidence
You’ll have to read this Curiosity to believe it! The surprise bestselling Time-Life series was wildly popular in the late 80s–but why? The answer is a bit less mysterious than one might have hoped. As a consolation, here’s a related essay from The Millions on conspiracy literature.
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A Proper Sociopath
Last week, I pointed readers to a recording of Benedict Cumberbatch on BBC Radio, reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Over at Slate, Rebecca Schuman explains why Cumberbatch is the story’s ideal reader, unpacking his “withering, perfectly enunciated deadpan.”
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Library of Lagging
“‘There is almost no work, within the vast range of literature and science,’ [Thomas Jefferson] wrote in an 1874 report, ‘which may not at some time prove useful to the legislature of a great nation.’ Thus the Library Of Congress’s mandate expanded: it would acquire anything and everything of importance … By the late 19th century, the LOC had become a kind of national brain trust, a heritage of information that aspired to timelessness.” This piece on the Library of Congress and its internet progress (or lack thereof) is fascinating and thorough. Go and spend some time with the digital archive, there are only around seven million gigabytes of information for you to thumb through.
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Sargent and Friends
In the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, Jean Strouse brings us inside John Singer Sargent’s inner circle. The exhibition, “Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends,” is on view at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art until October 4th. You could also read Edra Ziesk’s piece on what makes a friend.