Among the institutions that have just won MacArthur Awards are The Moth, for promoting the art and craft of storytelling, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, for engaging the public and sparking policy change.
The Moth Wins MacArthur Award
Wikileaks, Bookshelf Voyeur
Quartz has a roundup of the books Hillary Clinton borrowed from the State Department library during her time as Secretary of State, including a memoir, poetry, and a lot of non-fiction. Pair with our piece about what private libraries reveal about their readers.
Wiki-zon
In a long tradition of online experimentation, Amazon has now started including something called “Shopping-enabled Wikipedia Pages” in its internal search results (see the second result here). Now you can view a copy of Wikipedia pages for authors like David Foster Wallace, J.K. Rowling, Jonathan Franzen, and probably thousands of others. How can Amazon do this? Wikipedia pages are free for anyone to reuse for almost any purpose, so long as the license info is displayed. Why is Amazon doing this? It wants free content that it can monetize.
Making Connections
Books by Friends, a semi-regular feature at The Atlantic, sees writer James Fallows recommend the works of authors he knows. This week, he praises a book on the history of flight, a prediction for the economy and a jeremiad on American politics by Gary Hart. You could also read our own Kevin Hartnett on Fallows and American decline.
Russian Lit Quiz
Pop quiz for all you fans of Russian literature: What’s the protagonist’s first name in Doctor Zhivago? Hint: It isn’t “Doctor.”
●
●
One comment: