The VQR‘s last issue, “The Soviet Ghost,” was one of the most heart-wrenching reading experiences I’ve had in a long time. Now it’s got a series of video interviews with Chernobyl workers to seriously depress (and also greatly inform) you all over again.
“It tasted like iron and foam was coming out of our mouths”
Tweet Like a Fiend
“Keep a close eye on your Twitter account. Important things may be said there that you will be expected to weigh in on, and if you don’t, everyone will wonder if you fell asleep in the bathroom stall of the bar last night and are still there, head sunken low next to the toilet, one lost contact lens embedded somewhere in the floor grime. Make sure they know you’re not; that was the you of 100 million years ago.” Jen Doll on writing and not-writing.
Back When Poets Had Drivers
Chilean Communists want to exhume Pablo Neruda’s body to determine his actual cause of death. The endeavor is being undertaken because Neruda’s “former driver said he received an injection which provoked a heart attack.”
Kurt Vonnegut’s Doodles
When Kurt Vonnegut wasn’t writing, he was drawing. “The making of pictures is to writing what laughing gas is to the Asian influenza,” he said. The New Yorker has a slideshow of 10 of his cubist sketches. You can find more of his doodles in the new book Kurt Vonnegut Drawings.
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The Lives of Women
The Feminine Mystique turns fifty this month, and to mark the anniversary, Noah Berlatsky wonders how Agnes Grey, an Anne Bronte novel, illustrates and critiques the arguments made in the book.
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The Truth Hurts
Good news! According to Vinson Cunningham’s new essay in The New Yorker, beauty merely “masks and perfumes … it freezes moral categories in place,” whereas ugliness, on the other hand, “is sometimes the closest thing to the truth.” Wait, is that good news? Bonus: Vinson wrote a Year in Reading piece for us.