The Olympics Opening Ceremony this year sure was… something. Thankfully, folks more eloquent than I are here to parse its craziness for us: Jenny Diski and Rafil Kroll-Zaidi on what it was, plus Alex Shephard and the Full Stop bunch on what it should have been.
“Let the Games Begin,” as Bane Would Say
Duck You Autocorrect
James Gleick talks to one of the software engineers behind autocorrect, that "impish god" responsible for turning our ids to I'ds and moviestars to Natalie Portmanteaus. In response, Jen Doll wonders whether we love to hate autocorrect "because when it messes up we're happily reminded that phones and computers are not actually smarter than people."
Proust’s Lost Time
Between June 2009 and December 2010, Michael Norris explored Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, in a series illustrated with original artwork by David Richardson. Litkicks has posted the entire stunning sequence on its site.
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Teju Cole’s Photography
Amitava Kumar writes complementary text for Open City author Teju Cole’s photography exhibit. You can check out Cole’s Flickr page over here.
Poetry Wounds
“Ocean Vuong is that rare architect of accommodation, giving the most precarious situations or embarrassing of grievances of our culture a sound environment in which they can thrive. As he kisses and tucks the parents in their beds, he sets out from the wreckage of his past towards a hard-won horizon of blunder and wonderment.” Jeff Nguyen reviews Vuong’s newest poetry collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds.
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Philip Graham in Conversation
At The Morning News, a wide-ranging conversation with the writer Philip Graham, most recently the author of The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon. Included is his account of getting a story into the New Yorker off the slush pile, and a footnote touting The Millions and other online literary venues as places to find great book recommendations.
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A Little Light Weekend Reading
Need some short story recommendations to carry you through the weekend? Elliott Holt’s got 63 of them. Cheat sheet: You can read her first, second, and third recommendations free online.
Sex Appeal
You may remember the brouhaha surrounding Bustle, the first website in history to market primarily to women. Now, in this week’s New Yorker, Lizzie Widdicombe profiles the website, which she describes by pointing out that “[its] articles are modest, but the ambitions of its founder, a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Bryan Goldberg, are not.”
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