New this week are William Boyd’s Waiting for Sunrise and Graham Swift’s Wish You Were Here. Readers can also now get their hands on the second two volumes in the racy, headline-making Fifty Shades trilogy.
Tuesday New Release Day: Boyd, Swift, Fifty Shades
Finnegans What, Now?
I hope you had your Wheaties this morning, because this one is a doozy. Scientists at Poland’s Institute of Nuclear Physics have discovered complex “fractal” sentence patterning in classic works of literature that is nearly identical to “ideal” mathematics. Maybe Finnegans Wake does make sense, after all.
No, I Matter Less!
To celebrate the release of Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine, the Cabinet editors put their own magazine on trial, filling up an NYPL auditorium with academics and writers who, perhaps inevitably, began to compete in a kind of irrelevance-off. Which begs the question, answered well by The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones in Bookforum: how relevant to the wider culture is a magazine like Cabinet, anyway?
How to Beat Bias Againist the News? Libraries
Lisa Eve Cheby argues that one of the best ways to beat ‘fake news’ claims (which is really media illiteracy) is to fund more libraries. Read the rest of her argument in Entropy. I’m certainly convinced.
Writing Sarcastically
Sarcasm makes the Internet go round. No, seriously, it basically does, and over at The Toast a linguist examines some of the strategies writers have developed, or are trying to develop, to communicate that sarcasm through writing, without the benefit of an eye-roll and a different tone of voice.
●
●
The Captain’s Doll
German-born footballer Bastian Schweinsteiger might just be living inside the D.H. Lawrence story, “The Captain’s Doll”. Schweinsteiger (who, it is helpful to mention, is the captain of his team) is suing a Chinese toy manufacturer for producing a doll that bears too striking a resemblance to the Manchester United midfielder. Oh, and did we mention that the “figurine” is also wearing a Nazi medal?
●
●
Infinite Jest, Illustrated
Poor Yorick Entertainment, a tumblr that attempts to illustrate the world of Infinite Jest.
Rilke, Nietzsche, and More in ’90s Movies
For LitHub, Emily Temple compiled 50 literary cameos in '90s movies, ranging from Cher and Peyton Place to Lauryn Hill and Rilke, with plenty of Shakespeare throughout.
●
●
●