Cohen on Joyce

Have you seen this stunning map which shows “the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the US?” It’s positively hypnotic.

Attention literature-lovers and burrito-consumers: Chipotle has announced the second batch of writers, including Barbara Kingsolver, Amy Tan, and Neil Gaiman, for its Cultivating Thought series, which places short pieces of writing on soda cups and paper bags (we covered the first series here).

Recently, the BBC adapted Zadie Smith’s novel NW, converting its tale of four London natives into a ninety-minute chunk of premium television. At The New Statesman, Anna Leskiewicz writes about how the adaptation is fitting in the wake of Brexit.

Two years ago, Allison Parrish produced a diary of an expedition through “fantastical places that do not exist.” The twist? The diary was generated by a computer program, which extracted more than 5,700 sentences drawn from Project Gutenberg and later recombined at random by “switching out grammatical constituents.” An extract of the finished work, interspersed with Parrish’s nonfiction essay, can be read here.

The new film by master indie director John Sayles, Amigo, will premiere in New York on August 10th as the opening night presentation of the Asian American International Film Festival. Tickets just went on sale here; Sayles will be appearing in-person for a Q&A.  “Amigo” is Sayles’s 17th feature film and a kind of historical companion piece to his recently released epic novel, A Moment in the Sun, published by McSweeney’s.

In true Seinfeldian fashion, Arthur Martine, the Victorian writer behind Martine’s Handbook of Etiquette, drew up a detailed taxonomy of the various species of bore. These include the Loud Talker, who “silences a whole party by his sole power of lungs;” the Malaprop, who masters the art of inappropriate conversation; and the Life-Sharer, who may be familiar to the Facebook addicts of today.