Christopher Ketcham takes Harper’s readers through the “antimonopolist history” of Monopoly, “the world’s most popular board game.”
Do Not Pass Go.
Reading Poetry
“The very best way to read a poem is perhaps to be young, intelligent, and slightly drunk.” The Atlantic offers 20 strategies for reading poetry, and they pair well with Leah Falk‘s look at “Performance Anxiety: When Poets Read Aloud.”
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DIAGRAM’s 2012 Essay Contest
The deadline for DIAGRAM’s annual essay contest is fast approaching. Past winners include Peter Jay Shippy’s “Goonies: or Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Snowman’–an Essay in 7 Films” and (my all-time favorite) Cheyenne Nimes’s “SECTION 404 OF THE CLEAN WATER ACT AND THE SANTA CRUZ RIVER SAND SHARK, SUBTITLED ‘THIS TROUBLESOME REGULATORY CONSTRAINT’.”
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Double Shot of Granta
Here’s a double shot of Recommended Reading courtesy of Granta: Open City author Teju Cole on going blind, and Book of Clouds author Chloe Aridjis on Soviet-era cosmonauts.
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A Tale as Old as Time
“In contemporary capitalist societies, libraries stand out as slightly odd. While people are generally accustomed to going into a store and having to pay if they plan on leaving with something – in a library this relationship is quite different.” From AirBnB to Zipcar, startups premised on the so-called “sharing economy” tout themselves as radical and disruptive. Except that another institution – the public library – has been offering communal property for hundreds of years.
Not that the circumstances are always ideal, as our own Jacob Lambert attests in his “Open Letter to the Person Who Wiped Boogers on My Library Book.”
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To Cover or Not To Cover
It seems like we’re always directing you to Shakespeare-related literary curiosities, but that’s just because there are so many of them! Head over to Electric Literature and watch as some of the Bard’s more famous plays get a beautiful new redesign.
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Murakami’s Latest is Flying Off the Shelves
Haruki Murakami’s latest book – the title of which translates to Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and the Year of His Pilgrimage – went on sale in Japan last month, and in that time it’s been selling over a million copies a week. You can catch a glimpse of the book’s first and earliest reviews over at the NY Daily News. (By the way, did you know Murakami translated The Great Gatsby into Japanese?)
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How The Room Was Made
Readers of Millions Originals ebook Epic Fail are deeply familiar with Tommy Wiseau’s heroically bad 2003 film, The Room. So, too, are people masochistic enough to sit through the actual movie. Together, they might be wondering how such a production came to be – and how it came to fail so horribly. Well, finally a new book co-authored by Greg Sestaro and Tom Bissell seeks to answer that question. You can check out an excerpt over here.
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Your Tacit Approval
“I hate to break it to you, folks, but RTs are implied endorsements. Forwarding an article by e-mail without explaining why you are passing it on implies that you agree with it (and that you are someone who likes to waste my time). RTing something without comment means the same thing.” Uh oh.
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