The Millions Socializes
“I think the role of the critic will remain strong even if the media landscape is constantly changing.”
Alex Ross, New Yorker music columnist and author of Listen To This, is interviewed for The Browser.
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New Marilynne!
Marilynne Robinson has a new essay (excerpted from her new book When I Was a Child I Read Books) out in Guernica, and if you’re still reading this sentence because you haven’t yet clicked the link, that’s incredible.
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Everyone Has a Book in Their Stomach
Want to get your book published? Move to Iceland. One in ten Icelanders will become published authors, which isn’t a big surprise because the country has a 99 percent literacy rate. Pair with: our essay on Icelandic writer Sjón.
Getting the Word Out
In his write up here of an important, but overlooked essay on copyright by Lewis Hyde, guest contributor Craig Fehrman noted that the Hyde essay had been downloaded only 746 times in nearly four years. Now, after the piece here about it, and subsequent linking by Boing Boing, the essay is the second most popular on the Social Science Research Network.
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The New Yorker on Flanagan
Recommended reading: The New Yorker‘s Amelia Lester reviews Richard Flanagan‘s “love story set amid horrific historic events,” The Narrow Road to the Deep North, which just won the 2014 Man Booker Prize.
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Gossip, Gossip Everywhere
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.”
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