“I think essay and memoir hang together in a balance. There’s any number of ways to strike it, but from Montaigne on down that balance seems key to their design.” The Paris Review interviews the essayist Michelle Orange, author of the recent This Is Running For Your Life.
Writing For Your Life
Jon-Jon Goulian gets another profile
For The Rumpus, Sari Botton interviews Jon-Jon Goulian to supplement his recent profile in The New York Times.
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Prophet Asimov
It's 2014, but we still don't have self-driving cars despite Isaac Asimov's predictions. In 1964, Asimov contemplated what the world would be like 50 years later. He was fairly accurate according to David Wogan at Scientific American. "Asimov got a lot right...about how technology keeps advancing at a rapid clip, freeing humans from mundane and routine tasks. It’s the Google-fication of everything."
Rote She Wrote
At The NYT Mag, Virginia Heffernan's "Drill, Baby, Drill" explores the possibility that drills and memorization might not be quite as oppressive as some of the kinder, gentler pedagogues of our time suggest and offers a list of aps to help aspiring rote learners (Nota Bene: VerseByHeart).
“The Migrant is Not A Metaphor”
Over at The New York Times, Year in Reading alum Parul Sehgal reviews two books about migration, A Life Apart by Neel Mukherjee and The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota.