From Honey to War
Brooklyn’s International High School
Students at Brooklyn’s International High School come from more than forty-five countries and speak more than twenty-eight languages. Their stories are now recorded in Brooke Hauser’s new book, The New Kids: Big Dreams and Brave Journeys at a High School for Immigrant Teens.
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Code-Switching Patchworks
Over at Ploughshares, Daniel Peña traces a parallel between Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Gloria Anzaldúa’s hybrid text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. As he puts it, “To separate Anzaldúa from the larger canon (and subsequently from those books she influenced) is to ignore her contribution to American literature. It’s to say she doesn’t belong in that kind of highbrow conversation, which she so obviously does—even Nelson acknowledges that she does.”
The Rest of the Story
In this week’s New York Times Magazine, a collaboration with ProPublica has produced a 13,000-word (!) article on what happened at New Orleans Memorial Medial Center where a number of patients died in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Who says long-form journalism is dead!
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You Are What You Read
Two new studies reaffirm what good readers (and Quixote and Pechorin) have long known—when you identify with a fictional characters, you are likely to subconsciously emulate them.
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Going Bananas Over a Piece of Cake
Ever wonder where the phrase “worth his salt” came from? How about “spill the beans”? At The Smithsonian Magazine, Lisa Bramen traces the origins of food-related idioms. (via.)
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