Google is partnering with The HALO Trust in order to use its Google Earth Pro technology to detect and remove land mines in areas like Cambodia and Angola.
Good Guy Google
Metaphorical Departure
We all spend way too much time in airports this time of year, but Brad Leithauser searched for a metaphor about his journeys through BWI. As he writes for The New Yorker, “There was a piquant pleasure on the night when I first put these two experiences—morning churchgoing, evening airport-going—side by side. I’d been idly and only semi-consciously asking myself what these nocturnal intervals at B.W.I. reminded me of, and now, suddenly, I’d located my metaphor.”
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The New Gay Novel
“Garth Greenwell’s project with What Belongs to You is to remind us how illicit cruising and anonymous sex figure within the modern gay identity. As the gay marriage movement helps sanitize (and de-sexualize) queerness, Greenwell brings the dark and sordid elements of sex and promiscuity back into sharp relief.” Over at Pacific Standard, Nathan Smith writes on the new gay novel. Pair with the Millions review of Greenwell’s book.
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This Job Completes Me
“Now, I ask you, what if all along it was as simple as joining this company to fill the part of me missing? What if some deranged wiring or disease has forced me to isolate myself away instead of considering being part of a team like the one here at your company? I feel pretty good right now, and I’m not even officially part of anything. Just even filling out this application is fixing me.” Quotes from Dan Kennedy’s poetic job interviews.
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Down On Cannery Row
“I will tell them one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest story of all — the story of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of love and hate, of beauty and ugliness. I shall try to demonstrate to them how these doubles are inseparable — how neither can exist without the other and how out of their groupings creativeness is born.” John Steinbeck, American literary titan and author of The Grapes of Wrath, certainly knew a thing or two about creativity.
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Back to School
The Guardian has a list of its five favorite on-campus novels, including Jeffrey Eugenides‘ The Marriage Plot, which we ran an excerpt of back when it came out, and Donna Tartt‘s The Secret History, whose connections to the academy we’ve also explored on the site.
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Scared of the Dead
“Scared of the living, scared of the dead, and even more scared of the dead who are immortal.” Chinese censors have cracked down on social media sites following the death and hushed burial-at-sea of writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo last week, reports The New York Times.
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