Gabriel O’Malley‘s “Letter From Dublin” for n+1 is an interesting primer on the current state of Ireland following the collapse of the Celtic Tiger.
Celtic Tiger’s Collapse
Hospital Hijinks
Recommended Reading: The first chapter from Scott McClanahan’s The Sarah Book, “OH MY GOD.”
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A to Z of the Shortest Book Titles
From Andy Warhol’s A to Vassilis Vassilikos’ Z (and now Tom McCarthy’s C), AbeBooks lists the shortest book titles.
“Call Me” – Ishmael
Another phone-related book project: Call Me Ishmael, a site that collects stories about reading and life via voicemail messages. The instructions are simple: call Ishmael at 774-325-0503 and leave him a message “about a book you love and a story you have lived.” Several of these messages are transcribed and posted online every week but, if we’re being honest, we appreciate this project for the pun as much as for the stories.
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Flame Out
For whatever reason, pop music (at least in the Western world) displays an inordinate fascination with people who die at a young age. At The Atlantic, Leah Sottile takes a look at our collective fixation on the mantra “Live fast, die young.”
MetaMaus
Art Spiegelman sits down with NPR to discuss MetaMaus, which released October 4.
How the Fulbright Started
“Whatever the [Fulbright] program became,” writes Boston Globe correspondent Sam Lebovic, “it was first conceived as a budget-priced megaphone to transmit American ideas to the world, rather than as a genuine international dialogue.” Indeed, one 1940s newspaper columnist dubbed the program “an ingenious piece of higher mathematics…[that] found a way to finance out of the sale of war junk a worldwide system of American scholarships.”
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