What exactly happens to our brains when we laugh? Richard Restak (of The American Scholar) investigates.
Joke Science
Dublinalia
It’s common for descriptions of James Joyce’s Dubliners to label its stories portraits of Irish life. If you’d like to look at actual portraits of Irish life in 1904, however, you could do a lot worse than this series of old photos of Dublin, available online courtesy of the Google Cultural Institute.
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A Monster’s Body
Marjorie Liu is the author of Monstress, a new comic from Image. In her free time, she has also earned a law degree and published over twenty novels, novellas, short stories, and comics. Hear what she has to say about diversity, the body, and writing. You could also read our review of The Best American Comics 2014.
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Across This Land
At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova shares a series of drawings (produced in collaboration with Debbie Millman) that map the regions of the US according to literary quotations. Thoreau, perhaps not surprisingly, gets the East Coast with a quote from Walden, while Year in Reading alum Jeffrey Eugenides represents the Midwest.
Walt Whitman: Bottled and Brewed
Bell's Brewery, in Kalamazoo Mich., is set to release a series of seven beers in tribute to Walt Whitman's famous poetry collection Leaves of Grass.
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Jennifer Egan Interviews
Jacob Weisberg is hosting a series of interviews called “Conversations With Slate.” The first interviewee is A Visit from the Goon Squad author Jennifer Egan. You can catch the first two parts here and here; part three will be posted today.
The Station Fire in Pictures
A selection of jaw-dropping photos from the LA Times of the Station fire in the San Gabriel Mountains north of Los Angeles, the largest wildfire in the LA area in modern history.
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In the Middle
A lot is written about artists just starting their careers, and about those artists with a lifetime of work to look back over, but in a piece for The Enemy Barry Schwabasky considers the difficulty of being somewhere in the middle of an artistic career. After all, “most artists do, for better or worse, live through what’s come to be known as their midcareer. It’s just that they don’t often do so with ease. … The middle of the journey sometimes seems to be all about losing the way.”
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Writing and Reading Race
Recommended Reading: Katy Simpson Smith on who can fictionalize slavery and writing across time and race. Our own Edan Lepucki writes on reading slavery in fiction.
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