Equipment for today’s lunch hour: 1) somewhere sunny and out-of-doors to sit; 2) failing that, a gazebo or other shelter from inclement weather; 3) a printout of Deborah Eisenberg‘s latest short story, from the current NYRB; 4) undivided attention.
Cross Off and Move On
The Reality of Slang
“What makes a word ‘real’?” Should groan-inducing words like “adorkable” be counted? Anne Curzan, language historian, gives a Ted talk about the human element in dictionaries and the importance of slang.
Get Inspired
Cristine Brache curated a great list of web-poetry videos for last month’s O, Miami Poetry Festival, and she was awesome enough to post the entire playlist online for all to see.
“Books are an existential crisis”
Kyle Winkler, in an editorial for Vouched Books (which I’ve mentioned previously), writes that “books are an existential crisis” because we can’t possibly read them all.
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The Hellman’s Virgin
Recommended Reading: Ottessa Moshfegh on eating mayonnaise for the first time.
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Face/Off
If you (for some reason) want to know more about Vladimir Putin, you could do worse than reading Masha Gessen’s biography. At The Rumpus, Kevin Thomas reviews the book in a novel medium: a cartoon. (You could also read our interview with Gessen.)
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The Next Day After Tomorrow
“If Do-It-Yourself culture continues to gain appeal as fast as climate change lays on the chaos, we will need to look to the hinterlands for both practical guidance and hints about the fashions of the future. I recently watched Werner Herzog’s 2010 documentary (directed in collaboration with Dmitry Vasyukov) Happy People, which follows a few Siberian fur trappers over the course of a year, and let me tell you: when Celsius and Fahrenheit converge, Gennady of Bakhtia does not waste his time tossing boiling water into the air just to see what happens.” On surviving the next polar vortex.
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