It started with Mike Daisey, and eventually led to a series of profiles in The New York Times, but ultimately Apple launched a serious audit of their Chinese sub-contractors at the Foxconn Technology plants. Now, thanks to increased awareness, those workers will see 16-25% raises in pay.
Foxconn Workers Get Pay Raise
“I can’t say that we responded with particular enthusiasm”
In 1998, not long after publishing his first novel, Dan Brown paid a visit to an English class at Phillips Exeter. Among the students in attendance that day was future New Yorker editor Joshua Rothman, whose fragmented recollection of Brown’s appearance turned into an instructive tale about “memory and its tricks.”
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A Massive Online Close Reading
On February 17th, the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program will launch a free digital course open to everybody with an internet connection. The course is entitled “Every Atom: Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself,” and registration is now open. The course will “take a collective approach to a close reading of America’s democratic verse epic."
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Breaking Newton’s Heart
"Insanity, madness, obsession, math, objectivity, truth, science and art. These friends always impress me. They’re sculptors and tailors, not scientists or spies. I’ve chosen them with the peculiar attentiveness of a shell collector stupidly combining the overwhelming multitude of broken detritus to hold up one shell so beautiful that it finds its way into my pocket, lining my clothes with sand. And then another. Not too many, so that the sheer number could never diminish the value of one." On madness and genius with cosmologist Janna Levin.
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Questioning Your Legacy
John Steinbeck's son criticizes the state of Texas for invoking Of Mice and Men's Lennie Small, in ruling that certain mentally retarded individuals can be sentenced to the death penalty. The great-great-great granddaughter of Herman Melville wonders where her great-great-great-grandfather's editor was when he wrote Moby Dick.
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It’s Tuesday! It’s New Releases
The long, long awaited posthumous publication of Ralph Ellison's Three Days Before the Shooting... has arrived. Also newly out today (in the States) is William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms.
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