Gaia, Pale Blue Dot, Lonely Planet, etc… It’s time for a new addition to Earth’s list of aliases: the rainbow potato. A new map of our planet’s gravity field reveals the variations in gravitational pull depending on your geographic location.
“Rainbow Potato Day” Has a Nice Ring
Discussing The Worm
“Magic I think for me is kind of personal. Like, as soon as magic is in play, then I am given permission to imagine a different world, one in which magic things might happen—one where maybe I get some magic to wield if I’m lucky. Where cool stuff might happen at any given moment, cool stuff you wouldn’t even guess at. And for as long as the story holds, I’m kind of living in that world.” John Darnielle talks with Colin Winette about E.R. Eddison‘s The Worm Ouroboros, reading high fantasy and writing Wolf in White Van.
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The Fifth Borough
Enlightenment comes in many guises, and though we usually think of it as arriving in a koi pond or a distant mountaintop, we can also find it, as the protagonist of Year in Reading alum Tom McCarthy’s new novel attempts to do, on Staten Island. In The New Republic, David Marcus reads the book.
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New Lorrie Moore on the Way
Publicity bigwig Paul Bogaards spilled the beans on Twitter Thursday night: Lorrie Moore has a new short fiction collection in the pipeline. It’s slated for March 2014 release.
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The Zone
In the past few years, we’ve seen a swell of books that focus on female friendship. The newfound popularity of writers like Elena Ferrante has given us a new wealth of books that explore this kind of relationship. At Salon, Dear Thief author Samantha Harvey examines why this is, as part of a larger discussion about her own novel and the literary landscape. You could also read our review of Harvey’s earlier novel The Wilderness.
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A Way Out
Recommended Reading: Ursula Lindsey of The Nation takes a trip to Cairo, where many of the Egyptian capital’s artists and writers are being forced to find a way out due to government crackdowns.
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