“Another friend of mine told me a story about the Apple bus from when he worked for Apple Inc. Once a driver went rogue, dropping off the majority of his passengers as intended at the main Apple campus, and then rolling on towards San Jose instead of stopping at the satellite location, but the passengers were tech people, so withdrawn from direct, abrupt, interventionary communications that they just sat there as he drove many miles past their worksite and eventually dumped them on the street in a slum south of the new power centre of the world.” In the London Review of Books, a native of San Fran laments her tech-drunk city.
Techrification
An Existential Test
“It is a privilege and a gift and an honor to be a debut author, but it is, above all things, an existential test.” Courtney Maum writes about the darker side of publishing a first book.
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Quilting Anew
Recommended Reading: Bernadette Murphy on how knitting can be instructive for writers.
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Giving J.K. Rowling a Run for Her Rejections
Before Donal Ryan made the Man Booker Prize Longlist, his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, was rejected 47 times until an intern plucked it out of the slush pile. We bet those 47 publishers are smacking themselves on the forehead right now. Pair with: Research has shown that rejection is like physical pain.
Pro-Life Was Progressive
Recommended Reading: This review, though it is really much more than that, of Daniel Williams’ Defenders of the Unborn. Williams’ book takes a detailed look at the history of anti-abortion activism before Roe v. Wade, but more generally it seeks to complicate our entire definition of activism in the context of the pro-life/pro-choice debate.
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Untangle the Knot
Over at The New York Times, Citizen author Claudia Rankine reviews Teju Cole’s new essay collection. As she puts it, “Cole attempts to untangle the knot of who or what belongs to us and to whom or what do we belong as artists, thinkers and, finally, human beings.” Pair with this Millions interview with Cole.
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