Good news for Catch-22 fans: a previously unpublished Joseph Heller story appears in the newest issue of Strand Magazine. (h/t Paris Review)
Just Like Christmas
“Signs and Symbols” For Teh Internets
"If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not!... Still farther away, great mountains of data mining sum up, in zeroes and ones, the ultimate truth of his being." KA Semënova updates Nabokov's short story "Signs and Sumbols" (and works by other famous Russian authors) for McSweeney's, "teh internets" and the digital world.
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Emily Dickinson’s iPhone
Emily Dickinson would be a really annoying texter. At The Toast, Mallory Ortberg imagines what texts you would receive if Emily had your phone number.
Why Are Writers Paid So Little, and Programmers Paid So Much?
“And so despite my esteem for the high challenge of writing, for the reach of the writerly life, it’s not something anyone actually wants me to do. The American mind has made that very clear, it has said: ‘Be a specialised something — fill your head with the zeitgeist, with the technical — and we’ll write your ticket.’”
Up There
Northern England has its own distinct genre of crime fiction, yet it’s never taken off abroad the way its counterparts in Scandinavia and Scotland have. In The Guardian, AK Nawaz wonders why this is, arguing that “there is an argument for a common and marketable 'Northernness' - if not an identity, then perhaps a literary state of mind.”
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I Sanction This
Talk about built-in irony: the class of tricky words known as “contronyms” can mean the opposite of what you think they mean.