Jason Rice interviewed our own Emily St. John Mandel yesterday. They talk about her new book, The Lola Quartet, which celebrates its One Day Old birthday today.
Fun Fact: Emily’s Not Keen on Time Travel
The Story Writer and His Writer Friend
Beautiful Ruins author (and Year in Reading favorite) Jess Walter describes “the genesis of a story.”
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.
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On Productive Friendships
Recommended Reading: Alexandra Alter on Greg Neri’s Tru & Nelle, an upcoming novel about Harper Lee and Truman Capote.
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Not a Chore
One of the more persnickety questions a writer has to deal with is how to capitalize the title of a piece correctly. Thankfully, there’s now a website that does it for you, based on the rules in the Chicago Manual of Style.
Time Keeps On Slippin’
“What does it even mean to say that I am experiencing my life in a jumpy, random sort of manner? Each instant of my experience is the experience, whatever its temporal relation to other experiences. So long as the memories are consistent, what meaning can be attached to the claim that my life happens in a jumbled sequence?” Physicist Paul Davies on why you can’t remember your future.
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Culture Shock
“When it comes to living in a democracy, Nato Thompson argues, nothing affects us more directly and more powerfully than culture. Culture suffuses the world we live in, from TV to music to advertising to sports. And all these things, Thompson writes in his new book, Culture as Weapon, ‘influence our emotions, our actions, and our very understanding of ourselves as citizens.'”
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RIP Mike Wallace
60 Minutes pioneer Mike Wallace passed away this morning at the age of 93. At CBS’s website, colleague Morley Safer remembers his friend.
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