As part of their ongoing effort to steer folks away from bad journalism, the folks at The Morning News are running a series on reading news wisely. This week, Brendan Fitzgerald takes a look at misleading headlines, urging readers to “let headlines pique your curiosity, but be sure journalists deliver.”
Disaster!
The High Price
Recommended Reading: On Patricia Highsmith, Carol, and being the queer daughter of a queer mother: “I am doomed to die an ugly death or at least to be separated from my partner, probably violently. So is my queer mother and my partner and my cousin and many of my friends. We are all doomed, it seems, because this is the only story American media tells about queer women.”
Reading in Prison
“[H]is authentic education as a reader began not while he was a history major at N.Y.U. or working at a literary agency in Manhattan but at the Green Haven Correctional Facility, in Stormville, New York. There, he offered, he had read a thousand and forty-six books.” Alex Halberstadt writes about “A Prisoner’s Reading List” for The New Yorker. It’s available online, and soon a lot more New Yorker articles will be too.
Philip Roth Disses Fiction
Philip Roth, one of America’s most distiguished and prolific novelists, tells the Financial Times that he no longer reads fiction. Why not? “I don’t know,” he says. “I wised up.”
Jacqueline Woodson on the Power of Changing the Narrative
Hemingway in Love
One of Hemingway’s friends reveals in a new memoir how the writer’s secret lover changed his life and work. Pair with Stephanie Bernhard’s Millions essay about cooking with Hemingway.