City of Quartz author Mike Davis is writing a biography of the Los Angeles Times‘ bygone publisher Harrison Gray Otis. Appropriately, the installments will be serialized by the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Serializing in the Digital Age II
‘Dazzling’ State of Wonder
Ron Charles calls Ann Patchett's new State of Wonder "another dazzling work" with touches of Heart of Darkness and The Island of Doctor Moreau.
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Medieval Advice
Need to know how to tell if someone is or is not dead? How to leave a party gracefully? How to avoid the plague? Luckily the writers of the Middle Ages had a how-to book for everything, even if that advice does include killing bed bugs by "Spread[ing] Gun-powder, beaten small, about the crevices of your bedstead" and then lighting it.
The Mediated Games.
With the close of the London 2012 Olympic Games come the media think pieces, including this one from The Atlantic, which collects some of its best memes. And this one, on the use of the gif in digital sports coverage, in the Nieman Journalism Lab, and here's Kevin Nguyen championing BuzzFeed for their Olympics coverage. Also, The Spice Girls.
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Droit ou l’Ordre
Believe it or not, but the widely publicized murder case is not just a modern phenomenon. In 1761, Voltaire became obsessed with the case of Marc-Antoine Calas, a young man who was found dead in his home city of Toulouse. At The Paris Review Daily, a post on the Candide author’s impact on modern justice.