Prepare to lose a few hours on the glorified Wikipedia wormhole that is Daily Idioms, Annotated, then read this brief interview with the blog’s creator, material scientist Debbie Chachra.
Ethnoburb, For One Hundred
Rule No. 8: Is secret.
Colson Whitehead offers eleven simple writing rules. Also check out our review of Whitehead’s most recent novel, Zone One.
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A Religious Review
“POPE OF PURGATORY WOULD BE A SOLID BAND NAME.” Part two of a series in which Mallory Ortberg of The Toast reviews Martin Luther’s The Ninety-Five Theses.
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Bold and Messy
Over at Full Stop, Josephine Livingstone writes about Eileen Myles’s hip image and the renewed success of Chelsea Girls. Also check out Stephanie LaCava’s Millions essay on how social media helped to push Myles’s book into the mainstream.
Jersey Loyalty
The man who designed Brazil’s famous canary-yellow jersey at age 19 won’t wear it–and not out of charming self-effacement. It’s just that “the shirt is not a symbol of Brazilian citizenship. It is a symbol of corruption and the status quo.” And that he happens to support Uruguayan fútbol.
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Curiosities: As Compiled by a Hologram
So much to hate: The Beast’s 50 Most Loathsome People in America 2008Bookshelves gone wild: Plant your tree of knowledge next to your literary playground.At the Vroman’s Bookstore blog, Patrick talks about why “books need more time,” and looks at how one book is getting more than the one week it was given.n+1 launches N1BR, the book review supplement to n+1. One of the editors is Nikil Saval, who appeared in our Year in Reading series in 2008.The earliest celluloid film (from 1888) can be found – where else – on YouTube. (From The List Universe’s “Top 10 Incredible Early Firsts In Photography“)As if it wasn’t already hard enough to get up for work in the morning: Our world may be a giant hologramJack Shafer responds to David Carr’s call to “invent an iTunes for News.”
Meeting Mr. Jacobson
“A funny thing happened when Howard Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize last Tuesday… a smattering of people who were not even related to Mr. Jacobson stood and cheered.” A profile of the new Booker winner and an exploration of his winning book, The Finkler Question, in the New York Times.
Interviewing Meghan Daum
Guernica interviews Meghan Daum about The Little House on the Prairie, finding a home in Los Angeles and the necessity of restructuring the conversation about children. Pair with our own Hannah Gersen‘s review of her essay collection The Unspeakable and Edan Lepucki‘s take on Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids.