It’s hard to know exactly what North Korea will do these days, but if you’re looking for context, The Morning News published a cartoon guide to recent history.
Threat Level Seven
Bad Credit
As we noted here recently about the rise and fall of Motown, the real issue was money — who earned it, who kept it, who never saw it. Now Barrett Strong, who co-wrote and sang the Detroit label’s first hit in 1959, “Money (That’s What I Want),” tells The New York Times that he never saw a penny of royalties for a song that became a classic and generated millions of dollars for the label. Strong’s story is the story of Motown boiled down to its bitter, ironic essence.
The Graveyard Movie
Neil Gaiman’s 2009 Newbery medal winner, The Graveyard Book, was originally supposed to be adapted into an animated film. Now, however, it looks like Ron Howard might take the project’s reins and shoot it in live action.
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When Good Doesn’t Win the Day
Recommended Listening: On NPR’s All Things Considered, Petra Mayer offers advice to “literature’s unpunished villains.”
New TQC
The newest issue of The Quarterly Conversation is up. Eclectic as ever, it features pieces on Yasushi Inoue, Jose Saramago, Stephen Dixon, Thomas Bernhard, and more.
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May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor
Leave the marshmallows at home, and bring your bow and arrow to summer camp instead. In Largo, Florida, the Country Day School created a camp based on The Hunger Games, where campers play intense games of capture the flag. Don’t worry, killing your fellow campers isn’t allowed.
Voracious Reading
Are you the type of reader who craves the food described in novels like our own Nick Moran? Then take The Guardian’s “Food in fiction” quiz. Sample question: “According to the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, what kind of food is eaten tomorrow, yesterday, but never today?”
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Total Eclipse
“I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong.” Longreads invites us to revisit Annie Dillard‘s classic essay “Total Eclipse,” from her new collection, The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New.
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