Is the end nigh for the famed Rainbow Room? Well, if it is, it’ll live on through passages like this one from Alvin Levin’s Love Is Like Park Avenue.
The End of the Rainbow Room
Neil Gaiman Lane
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is now an actual lane. Neil Gaiman's hometown, Portsmouth, England, named a bus lane after his novel last Sunday. Sadly, the magical Hempstock family doesn't live at the end of it.
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When Technology Knows You Better Than You
Psychotherapist Ariel Garten redefines consciousness at TEDx Toronto. "The problem with escaping your day-to-day life," she says, "is that you have to come home eventually." Her question, which she answers in the affirmative, is whether we can "find ways to know ourselves without the escape? Can we redefine our relationship with the technologized world in order to have the heightened sense of self-awareness that we seek? Can we live here and now in our wired web, and still follow those ancient instructions: 'Know thyself'?"
Shirley Jackson in the Woods
The New Yorker has published another recently discovered Shirley Jackson short story "The Man in the Woods," a fairy tale that takes on some classic mythology. According to her son, it's one of many new stories found in her archives, and we can expect a new collection next year. "What was surprising to us was not that she was so prolific and had left behind so much unseen work but, rather, the quality of that work," Laurence Jackson Hyman said.
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Salman Rushdie on George Orwell
Granta posts Salman Rushdie’s 1984 essay ‘Outside the Whale’ - a response to an essay by George Orwell about the political role of the artist: “If writers leave the business of making pictures of the world to politicians, it will be one of history's great and most abject abdications.”
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See Spot Run
Is there any animal more noble than your beloved childhood pet? In this moving essay from 3:AM Magazine, Adrian Nathan West explains a couple of lessons that he learned about love and devotion from his Labrador named Jake.
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Still Concealed Mysteriousness
"What love does in this union is dark and difficult and glorious — and stands on the side of life; who would dare or even want to guess more about it than that; and indeed, you will experience it. Certainly not without interruptions and doubts." Lou Andreas-Salomé's poignant advice on love and art to none other than Rainer Maria Rilke is certainly Valentine's Day-appropriate.
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