I was lucky enough to attend President Obama’s Election Night rally in Chicago, and wrote a diary of the evening for The Awl. “Let’s Stay Together” played, Vivica A. Fox walked by.
Election Night in Chicago
Positively Freudian
Chances are that your mental image of Pavlov is that of a man giving commands to a barking dog. However, as a new biography makes clear, the doctor who brought us his very own adjective has a far more complicated legacy. In The New Yorker, Michael Specter writes about the man behind the bell.
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Inherited Disorders
In the Fall 2015 issue of n+1, Adam Ehrlich Sachs explores the idea of inherited disorders through nine short pieces. An excerpt: “He wanted the reader to think to himself: ‘I just read about the Holocaust. Why am I picturing this fern? What is the matter with me?’ Such was the literary effect he was aiming for.”
Twitter Fiction Festival
On Friday Twitter announced their new Twitter Fiction Festival, a “virtual storytelling celebration.” The festival will feature “creative experiments in storytelling from authors around the world,” and you can submit story proposals over here.
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The Trees! They’re Glowing!
Some amateur biologists are at work replacing lamps with bio-luminescent trees and flowers, reports Andrew Pollack for The New York Times. Meanwhile South Korean scientists have barking up an entirely different tree for the past two years. (I’m sorry for the pun; here’s an image of a glowing beagle to make amends.)
Just Listen
For this month’s fiction podcast at the New Yorker, Edwidge Danticat reads two Jamaica Kincaid stories, “Girl” and “Wingless,” following the publication of Kincaid’s recent See Now Then.
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