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
“Nearly Useless”
What do Treasury secretary nominee Jack Lew and J. K. Rowling have in common? No one can read their signatures.
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Tell Me Something New
Recommended Listening: Part One of Jhumpa Lahiri’s conversation with Paul Holdengraber at Lit Hub. “You know, tell me about something I don’t know. Tell me about a musician I’ve never heard of. Tell me about a poet I should be reading. Tell me something about the world, a situation that someone can explain to me in more detail.”
Different, Quieter Passions
"It soon emerged that there is a uniquely British brand of feeling, a blend of distress and composure marked by a touching compulsion to keep up appearances in the face of interpersonal dissolution. For all its prevalence and subtlety, this mode of engagement is difficult for the uninitiated to decipher or even to discern, and I would have remained oblivious of it if not for the works of Dame Iris Murdoch, a connoisseur of British emotional life in all its baffling permutations." On Iris Murdoch and the British brand of distress and composure.
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Suitor by Suitor
At Salon, Bird by Bird author Anne Lamott recounts her year in the online dating world, a year which she says was complicated by the fact that “91 percent of men snore loudly.”
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