You should get to know Natasha Trethewey, our newly minted Poet Laureate, and here are a few good places to start: The Missouri Review’s Summer 2010 interview with the poet, and Virginia Quarterly Review’s round-up of some of her poems.
Trethewey Named Poet Laureate
The Agony and Ecstasy of a TAL Fact Checker
Surprising news emerged today about This American Life's Mike Daisey episode on Apple's Foxconn subcontractors (previously mentioned on The Millions here, and later here). Apparently portions of Daisey's visit to Chinese Foxconn factories were fabricated, and TAL's producers failed to ensure factual accuracy because he misled their efforts. As a result, the show has retracted the broadcast (PDF), Daisey has issued a statement of defense, and the next TAL episode will cover the entire fiasco.
Typesetting in the Digital Age
From Abu Dhabi's The National, an interesting piece on the challenges of typesetting and book design on digital platforms: "With the coming of ebooks, this invisible craft must be reinvented if it is not to disappear."
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“Life is a cutup.”
Graying Beats, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, discuss the cut-up technique and shamanism during a never before published 1992 interview in the latest issue of Sensitive Skin Magazine. David L. Ulin provides commentary on the conversation.
“He could easily get seasonal work as a shopping-mall Santa.”
"Mad scientist of smut" Nicholson Baker gets the New York Times treatment.
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Uber Nichts
George Bernard Shaw had a strange relationship with Nietzsche. Alternately envious and dismissive of the German philosopher, Shaw once said he wanted to be an intellectual in Nietzsche’s mold, though he also felt Nietzsche’s thinking was addled and self-absorbed. In an essay for The New Statesman, Michael Holroyd tries to make sense of Shaw’s views.
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Listening to Joyce
We've written before about various rare recordings of authors reading that occasionally surface on the internet (a sample here) but today we add a new author: James Joyce. Open Culture has posted two recordings of the author reading from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and while the audio quality is exactly what you would expect for recordings made in the 1920s, we still recommend listening.
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The Paper New Orleans Needs
With the erosion of the 175-year-old Times-Picayune, New Orleans will soon be one of the largest metro areas without its own major newspaper publishing every day. Over at The Atlantic, Emily Badger explains the sad saga of its demise as well as the complexities and uncertainties yet to come.