Last February, everyone was talking about Lawrence Wright‘s epic New Yorker profile of Paul Haggis and The Church of Scientology. But now, as The New York Times reports, the Church has released Freedom, a 51-page retaliatory glossy with DVD accompaniment.
The Church of Scientology vs. The New Yorker
What Lies Beneath
In random-but-awesome news, Geoff Manaugh's BLDGBLOG reports on a new project by Dutch earth scientists to piece together what they're calling an "atlas of the underworld." Using CT scans to visualize "invisible landscape features—the ghostly remains of entire continents—hidden inside the planet," the project will reveal a surface within earth's surface. See also: our review of Where You Are, an anthology of sixteen alternative maps by a range of artists and writers including Geoff Dyer, Valeria Luiselli, and Leanne Shapton.
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JSTOR and Wikipedia Partnership
In an effort to help Wikipedia become a more reliable source, ITHAKA has agreed to provide 100 of the site’s editors with free access to the complete archive collections on JSTOR.
PW Reviews Late American Novel and More
The book I co-edited, The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, got its Publishers Weekly review this week - a very nice writeup. Also spotted this week, a longer consideration of the book at tumblr Feriatus.
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The Land of the Setting Sun
From the Ruins of Empire author Pankaj Mishra recently visited Japan and wrote about the experience for Caravan. In particular, he was struck by the ways “much of [the country] presents a spectacle of aged modernity,” and how “it is with some shock that you recall that Japan was where once the future lay, before its bubble burst in the early 1990s, and the country, pushed inward by adversity, became a strange absence in our lives.”
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Reichenbach Pilgrimage
"I am lately returned from a pilgrimage, bearing bloodied knees and a holy relic; my destination was a place of love and sacrifice that’s lived long in my heart. No Lourdes for me, though: I went to the Reichenbach Falls." Sarah Perry makes a pilgrimage to the death place of Sherlock Holmes and writes about it for the Guardian.
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The Steamin’ Demon
“Every atom of my blood, form’d in the soil of this earth, runs hot / As I wheel through this snaked monster of steel, The Steamin’ Demon.” Ride The Steamin’ Demon at Six Flags with Walt Whitman. Pair with our own Michael Bourne’s piece on how Whitman saved his life.
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Bizarre
. Six months and nearly five months since the hulubaloo oclver the original. Article had died down the church of sciebtology draws attenttion to it again. Do they practise self flagellation? I know they believe that an indication of how successful you are is how noisy your critics are; judging by the church of scientokogy’s response Wright must be doing very well indeed.