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!
What About Your Head?
“None of us made love, we had only reproaches for one another. I hated that dependency and yet I couldn’t live without it.” This short piece by Mercè Rodoreda from the new issue of Harper’s Magazine is brutal and surprising. The piece is an excerpt from Rodoreda’s War, So Much War, out later this month.
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Holden Caulfield Has No Friends
Chances are you’ve heard that in a recent interview, Claire Messud responded to a patronizing question about one of her characters — “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you?” — by giving her interviewer a smackdown that resonated across the blogosphere. At Page-Turner, several authors (including Rivka Galchen, Jonathan Franzen and Year in Reading alumna Margaret Atwood) offer their own takes on the matter of “likeability.” (There’s also this piece by our own Emily St. John Mandel to consider.)
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The Vampire Diaries
“Charles Dickens had orphanages and workhouses, the Brontë sisters had the wild moors, and modern writers have high school.” So begins L.A. Times television critic Mary McNamara‘s take on The Vampire Diaries, the CW’s answer to Twilight (premiering tonight at 8). The show is loosely based on L.J. Smith‘s books of the same name and McNamara gives it a qualified thumbs up. She concludes that this latest addition to the vampire canon is “pure froth, but it is very welcome froth, especially in a genre that seems sometimes in danger of taking itself a little too seriously.”
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Outkube
The Onion‘s tired of incendiary comments left by trolls reading their articles. (Who isn’t?) So the publication has created Outkube, a “decoy website” rife with troll-bait. It’s hysterical. Elsewhere, they’ve started curating a list of people who just don’t get the joke.
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Jason Epstein on How Publishing Works
“Far more than any other medium, books contain civilizations, the ongoing conversation between present and past. Without this conversation we are lost. But books are also a business….” Jason Epstein explains how publishing works—and why, increasingly, it doesn’t, at the New York Review of Books. (via)
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The Future Is Now
Back in 2013, Ted Gioia wrote a piece for The Millions about an old sci-fi novel that correctly predicted the future. Since then, he’s embarked on an ambitious project that expands on his interest in sci-fi, exploring how the most radical sci-fi writers of the sixties paved the way for much of modern fiction. As he puts it, “I focus on this era in the history of sci-fi because it laid the groundwork for one of the most important developments in current-day fiction.”