According to this week’s New York Magazine Approval Matrix, our own Kevin Hartnett’s article from two weeks ago is a highbrow yet despicable piece of writing. What makes it so despicable, you ask? Apparently they blame Professor Tom Ferraro’s adulatory passage on the The Godfather.
Despicable Us
The Poetic Seas
“China will establish a naming system for seabed areas based on the country’s oldest poetry collection, the country’s State Oceanic Administration (SOA) said on Monday.”
Death and Taxes
Souvankham Thammavongsa's new fiction is required reading for anyone who's ever had a meltdown in an accountant's office.
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Flummoxing Florals
With the cold front in America right now, you would never know it’s meant to be spring. To get yourself in the season, take The Guardian’s floral poetry quiz. Sample question: “What reminds Ezra Pound of ‘petals on a wet, black bough’?”
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“but for now it’s dust in our teeth”
Recommended Reading: “Appalachian Farewell” by Mark Wagenaar.
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Convergences
Recommended Reading: Andrea Denhoed on Flannery O’Connor.
Findings
Is Findings.com a “social network that may actually make you smarter”?
Football Book Club: ‘The Sixth Extinction’
Football Book Club is back from its relaxing bye week — and in preparation of the impending Environmental End Times, these truly decent, patriotic human beings are reading The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert. So pick up your copy today, read along, and learn how we’re fucking up the planet in ways you never even imagined possible. Also: if this week’s book is making you feel slightly depressed and/or down in the dumps and/or bummed, check back with FBC all week for essays on Speak by Louisa Hall.
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The Greatest Biscuits in the World
It’s funny and fitting that Madame Proust, in a letter now on display at the Morgan Library, implored her son to share persnickety details about what time he got up in the morning. Another thing the exhibition, which celebrates the hundredth anniversary of Swann’s Way, reveals: early drafts of the book used “biscottes” in place of “madeleine.”