A while back, I mentioned the prescient timing of Walter Isaacson’s forthcoming biography Steve Jobs. As you await its publication, content yourself with Forbes and JESS3’s graphic novel The Zen of Steve Jobs.
The Zen of Steve Jobs
Get Shorty
Want your writing to have punch? Want your readers to believe you? "The five-word sentence as the gospel truth...Express your most powerful thought in the shortest sentence," Roy Peter Clark writes in The New York Times. Sorry that every sentence in this post is more than five words.
More On Hitchens
In tribute to the passing of Christopher Hitchens, The Browser has collected some of his essays. His final memoir will be released in the states in April of next year.
It’s Hip to be Square
Maybe the Mayans were right about 2012. In a sign that the end times are surely nigh, MTV2 has decided to bring back Hollywood Squares "but with a modern twist." The unfortunately-named Hip Hop Squares will feature Nick Cannon, Ghostface Killah, DJ Khaled, Lamarr Woodley and... Bam Margera?
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Teju’s Twitter
Yesterday, our own Elizabeth Minkel pondered if Twitter fiction could be real art. She cited Teju Cole, a literary Twitter master, but what does he have to say about how Twitter affects his writing? "My memory is worse than it was a few years ago, but I hope that my ability to write a good sentence has improved," he told The New York Times.
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Pale Fire
You can't write about Robert Lowell without writing about mental illness -- the poet went through many stretches of mania and psychosis in his life. In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda reads a "medico-biography" of Lowell, which takes a full measure of his lifelong illness and its consequences.
Brilliant Friends
“There has been a growth in the literary depiction of a particular type of friendship, one that has in the past found itself vulnerable to dilution and deflection by the ostensibly more powerful imperatives of heterosexuality and motherhood.” On literary female friendships, from Virginia Woolf to Elena Ferrante and Year in Reading alumna Zadie Smith.
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