The New York Public Library has bought psychedelic guru Timothy Leary’s papers. The 335 boxes contain journals, videotapes, photographs and thousands of letters from avid trippers, including Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey and, yes, Cary Grant.
NYPL Gets Trippy
Just Being Honest
Can I be honest with you for a minute here? These colloquially updated Bible passages at The Toast are pretty funny. You could also read a brief history of colloquial titles.
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Fiction or Defamation?
The novel that had Scarlett Johansson filing charges of “fraudulent and illegal exploitation of (her) name” is due out next month in its English-language iteration. The First Thing You See by Grégoire Delacourt is ostensibly about a garage mechanic who ends up falling for a Johansson lookalike. For more on the legality of literature, here’s an essay for The Millions on J.D. Salinger and U.S. copyright.
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I think a lot about myself, therefore I am self.
In the Prospect, an essay on anesthesia, 3D printing, teleportation, LSD, and other thought experiments on self-awareness. Also, this line: “If the spectrum of selfhood begins with the roundworm, surely it ends with Proust.”
“Fruit flies or not, I do have a heart,”
It’s come to this. Since it first emerged, the @horse_ebooks Twitter feed has been alternately obsessed over and totally ignored for its ersatz Dadaism. Now a group of intrepid fans have begun writing fan fiction dedicated to its enigmatic writing prompts.
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Oxford Marginalia Group
Recommended reading: Lauren Collins writes for The New Yorker about the Oxford University Marginalia group and the fate of bookish scribblings.