It’s hard to believe that the country containing Aokigahara, or “The Suicide Forest”, has for so long ignored its abundance of clinically depressed, “overworked” citizens, but Junko Kitanaka, in her book Depression in Japan, explains exactly why that’s happened.
Japan’s “National Disease”
“A blood-sworn fan”
“So much of the way books get classified has to do with marketing decisions. I think it’s more useful to think of literary books and sci-fi/fantasy books as existing on a continuum. To oppose them, to suggest that one category excludes the other, always feels bogus to me.” Talking with Karen Russell.
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No Comment
Having grown up in Russia, New Republic senior editor Julia Ioffe is in a uniquely good position to cover the Sochi Olympics, which is why she’s writing regular dispatches from this year’s Winter Games. On Saturday, she published a piece about one of the sadder (yet more predictable) developments of the Games: foreign journalists are bombarding gay residents of Sochi with questions and requests for interviews. (She’s also manning the magazine’s Instagram feed.)
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Read Dickens Now!
Charles Dickens turns 200 in February, which is one good explanation for two new biographies (Charles Dickens: A Life) and (Becoming Dickens) appearing just in time. But even more importantly, why is now the perfect time to read him? Here’s one hint: the man’s vast social imagination.
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Save the Adverb (Heroically)!
“It reminded me once again that we desperately lack a full-throated defense of this runt of the grammatical litter. We need an outright celebration of adverbs, and it is that celebration that I offer—stridently, boisterously, unapologetically.” Colin Dickey at Slate passionately, unabashedly defends the adverb.
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