Attention financial journalists! If you haven’t done a lengthy study of wealth in Game of Thrones, consider yourself less cool than Slate’s own Matt Yglesias.
The Stuff of Fantasy
Zombified
Recommended Reading: Michael Christie on Aleksandar Hemon’s The Making of Zombie Wars. You could also read Hemon’s Year in Reading entry.
The Story Button
There are a lot of writers who work in advertising, and it’s starting to have an impact. People are more likely to love brands if there is a story involved, according to a new study. “We’ve known for a long time there is no ‘buy’ button in the brain. But these results show there’s a ‘story’ button,” neuroscientist Paul Zak says. Pair with: Our essay on working at a creative agency after getting your MFA.
Remarks on Color
Recommended Reading: On Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein. “They have many things in common, but where they connect most strikingly is in their shared suspicion of theory and their emphasis on the visual.”
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A Time of Scarcity
“I realized that there was something wrong with an arrangement whereby a relatively affluent person such as I had become could afford to write about minimum wage jobs, squirrels as an urban food source or the penalties for sleeping in parks, while the people who were actually experiencing these sorts of things, or were in danger of experiencing them, could not.” Barbara Ehrenreich on writing about poverty.
Self-Knowledge
At Electric Literature, on knowing that it’s time to give up your novel.
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Anecdotes On-Screen
Attention all readers who want to talk pretty one day: a story by David Sedaris has just been made into a film.
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