After heavy rains exacerbated a mold problem in two dorms and made some students sick, St. Mary’s College of Maryland has 240 students living aboard the Sea Voyager, a cruise ship about the length of a football field now docked at the school’s southern Maryland campus.
Maryland College Books “Cruise”
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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Lydia Davis, in Short
The Village Voice offers a pretty good briefing on the charms of Lydia Davis, whose Collected Stories are out this week.
Most Anticipated Addenda
Conversational Reading has put together its own “most anticipated” books list that has some overlap with our own. It’s also worth noting that the trend of posthumous publication noted in our Most Anticipated introduction, was plumbed with considerably more depth at The Quarterly Conversation last year.
On Not Dating Natalie Portman
Moby, the electronic music producer currently elbowing his way back into the cultural imaginary, has cancelled his upcoming book tour.
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The sublime everyday
Tom Perotta, author of Little Children and The Leftovers, talks about how he learned to write about ordinary life from Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town. “The tragedy is that, while we’re alive, we don’t view our days in the knowledge that all things must pass. We don’t—we can’t—value our lives, our loved ones, with the urgent knowledge that they’ll one day be gone forever.”
Virtual Typesetting
“Many of the basic rules around typographic contrast and readability for print or 2D screens change in VR. When type becomes even a little bit more volumetric, the way people perceive it and interact with it changes. The type needs to be rooted in something real, otherwise it gets a little uncanny for the user.” What should typography look like in virtual, augmented, and mixed reality interfaces? The Drum considers (via The Digital Reader). Wonder what a book fetishist might thing of all this…
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Williams on Writing
In an interview with Vice, Joy Williams explains that writing gives her “no happiness”. Pair with an interview with our own Hannah Gersen, who “would have stopped [writing] a long time ago” if she didn’t love it. You could also read Nick Ripatrazone’s recent article on fifty reasons to read Williams.
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