“The kitchen was the scariest part of all, however!”

This week the Paris Review launched a new online series, Big, Bent Ears, a “Serial in Documentary Uncertainty” masterminded by Sam Stephenson and Ivan Weiss. Each installation features “a combination of video, audio, photography, and writing in various arrangements and states of completion,” and the first chapter overlaps Joseph Mitchell and the Big Ears Music Festival even though “the two projects seem to share little: one concerns a wordsmith, a chronicler, and preserver of fading traditions; the other, musicians challenging tradition and musical forms on a sometimes radical basis.”

If you’re a writer planning to submit a novel manuscript to a literary agency, you might want to read these guidelines and recommendations, over at Electric Literature. Pair with Edan Lepucki’s Millions interview with her agent about publishing a first book.

After nearly a quarter of a millennium, the Encyclopedia Britannica is ending its print run. While the publication plans to move to a digital subscription based model, and to continue to gather information about the known world, many are sad to note its passing. Roxane Gay offers a particularly heartfelt eulogy:  ” it was exciting to open the huge box and pull out the leather bound volumes, so many of them, the pages lined in gold.”