This essay on the proliferation of gossip in journalism is adapted from Joseph Epstein’s Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit. In it, Epstein discusses the problem of “how straight-up, no-apologies public gossip has infected standard, or what once might have been called respectable, journalism.”
Gossip, Gossip Everywhere
The Wives of Russian Masters
“Russia’s most celebrated writers – including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn and Mandelstam – are often depicted as solitary geniuses. But many of their works were the fruits of creative partnerships with their wives. Far from being passive typists, they served as editors, researchers, translators, publishers and more.”
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“We are pouring a lot of money down the drain”
A lucid piece in The Boston Globe explains how “academic publishing is not a free market.”
Envy
Robert Birnbaum asked seven indie publishers to say which titles they wish they’d published in 2009. The last sentence of the piece (from Dalkey Archive’s Martin Riker) is particularly great.
New Vampire Weekend
According to Chris Richards at the Washington Post, the Ivy League rockers of Vampire Weekend are the unapologetic Bright Young Things of our recession era. Drinking Darjeeling on Daddy’s yacht never looked so good, he says, and their second album, Contra, out yesterday, sounds pretty good too.
Opinions… In Verse
From now until August 16th, the editors of the Los Angeles Times’s Opinion section will accept poetry submissions. Their favorites will be published in the August 25th edition of the paper.
Cetology
Classics Illustrated: Draftsman Matt Kish gives Moby-Dick the Zak Smith treatment.
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Time to Grow Up
What’s behind the rise of the new-adult genre of fiction? You could blame the rise of Millennials, but that would be, as Emily Landau argues in a piece for the Canadian magazine The Walrus, too cheap and reductive to really answer the question. Instead, she says that we should look at NA as fundamentally similar to YA, with the main difference being that NA books portrays characters on the cusp of independence. (Related: we polled a group of high school students to find out their favorite YA books of 2013.)
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