According to Gilles Deleuze, “the lives of philosophers are rarely interesting.” This may have come as a surprise to Jacques Derrida, who once spent a couple days in jail after cops in the Prague airport tried to frame him for smuggling weed. (This incident gets ample coverage in a new biography of the scholar).
Decenter and Frisk
Steve Jobs
With his black turtleneck, wire-rimmed glasses and conspiratorial grin, Steve Jobs was arguably the best ambassador ever between androids and humans.
One Kind of Coating
At Bookforum, Gee Henry talks with New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als, whose new collection of essays, White Girls, tackles subjects including Eminem, Truman Capote and Gone with the Wind. The writer also delves into his affection for André Leon Talley.
Yaa Gyasi on the Inevitable Risk of Living
Yaa Gyasi discusses the theme of risk in her latest novel, Transcendent Kingdom, and how it is necessary in both pleasure and pain.
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Doug Rickard’s Google Photography
Photographer Doug Rickard employs an interesting technique for his “A New American Picture” series: Google Street View. Check out the shots he took while he “virtually [drove] the unseen and overlooked roads of America, to find bleak places that are forgotten, economically devastated, and abandoned.”
Not All Dads Are Good Dads
Andrew Thurman writes about a literary genre he's particularly invested in: the Bad Dad Memoir, typically written by the offspring of said Bad Dads.
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Give Rock and Roll Another Name
Chuck Klosterman wonders, which rock stars will historians of the future remember?
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Gough’s Tale
Recommended Reading: Janet Maslin on Peter Carey’s Amnesia. You could also read our own Garth Risk Hallberg on Carey’s His Illegal Self.
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Cleaved in Two
“As I let the shotgun drop the butt hit the bricks and the second shell fired into me…” This excerpt from Homero Airdjis’s upcoming The Child Poet, is fraught with elements of tension and discovery. Something of a künstlerroman, the book tracks Airdjis’s artistic and poetic development from his boyhood through the present day.
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