A big week for books: Zadie Smith’s NW is out (read the first lines), as is Christopher Hitchens’s Mortality, a collection of essays penned while he fought cancer (our essay on Hitchens’ death) (his collection Arguably is out in paperback today). More new books: Emma Straub’s Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, Umberto Eco’s essay collection Inventing the Enemy, Davy Rothbart’s essay collection My Heart Is an Idiot, Frederick Seidel’s poetry collection Nice Weather, documentarian Errol Morris’s A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald, and the Navy Seal book about the bin Laden mission. Also, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides is now out in paperback (read Eugenides on the book’s genesis), as is Stephen Greenblatt’s Pulitzer winner The Swerve.
Tuesday New Release Day: Smith, Hitchens, Straub, Eco, Rothbart, Seidel, Morris, Seals, Eugenides
The Comedy of Existence
“Can we ever pinpoint a person’s true identity? … How can we point to something in the world with complete accuracy, without also being meaninglessly redundant? Harpo’s answer to ‘who are you?’ is a visual-gag version of the Buddha’s infuriatingly honest answer to the same question. When asked who he was, he would say, gesturing to himself: I am thathagatha (the one who is like this).” On Groucho Marx, nihilism, and the destruction of comedy over at Slate.
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Study Hall
Do people still need to study the humanities? You’d think the answer is “yes, of course,” but the issue is far more complicated than that. In a bid to sort it out, The New Republic recently asked a group of former university presidents to give their viewpoints on the matter. Sample quote: “Humanities faculty have too often conspired well.” Pair with: our own Nick Ripatrazone on coming to writing from outside the humanities.
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The Most Read Novel on Amazon
The Most Read Novel on Amazon is the Handmaid's Tale! Makes a lot of sense. Read how Amazon figured this out and the runner ups here.
I’m Good
In a way, this is the opposite of an interview: a series of conversations held exclusively between chatbots. At n+1, Nick Levine constructs dialogue straight out of Beckett. Pair with Houmon Barekat on Finn Brunton’s history of spam.
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Man Uses Twitter to Tweet About…His Roommate
Shhdontellsteve is a Twitter account devoted to "Steve," the roommate of the unnamed narrator. Kind of like The Truman Show for Twitter. (As I write this, it occurs to me that this may constitute "telling Steve." Apologies if that's the case.)
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Holy Verse
Recommended Reading: Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel on why jihadists write poetry.
Browne’s Guide to Science Writing
Want to write about science? Let Sir Thomas Browne, "17th-century know-it-all," show you how.
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