J.K. Rowling loves Robert F. Kennedy. She revealed on her website that she chose the pseudonym Robert Galbraith after Kennedy and her childhood alias, Ella Galbraith. “I can only hope all the real Robert Galbraiths out there will be as forgiving as the real Harry Potters have been. I must say, I don’t think their plight is quite as embarrassing,” she wrote.
Kennedy Curse
Putting the Fiction in Nonfiction
While researching In Cold Blood, Truman Capote took pains to get the story right, so much so that the final product was, he claimed, “immacutely factual.” The tale of his labors is so well-known that Bennett Miller used it as the basis of his movie Capote. So when allegations surface that the author made deliberate errors, the story gets a little bit... awkward.
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Let’s Trade Manuscripts
"If you ask around, I’m sure you’ll be able to find a really bad novel easily enough. I mean a novel by someone who has spent isolated years writing a book they are convinced is a great work of literature. And when you’re reading it you’ll know it’s bad, and you’ll know what bad truly is." What makes bad writing so bad? Toby Litt at The Guardian investigates.
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Makes Excel Seem Like a Breeze
Hate your job? At least you’ve never been Stanley Kubrick’s secretary: “Instead of having [‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’] typed on only the few sheets seen by viewers, the director asked his secretary Margaret Warrington to type it on each one of the 500-odd sheets in the stack. What’s more, he also had Warrington type up an equivalent number of manuscript pages in four languages—French, German, Italian, Spanish—for foreign releases of [The Shining].”
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Does NASA Use Emoji?
You can sign up to receive a text alert from NASA notifying you when the International Space Station is scheduled to fly over your house.
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Real Life Crazy Rich Inspiration
Ahead of its mid August movie debut Kevin Kwan talks about the real life inspiration behind his Crazy Rich Asian trilogy. “But the people who know me, who have read the books, and who are also in that world in Singapore, Hong Kong, and other parts of Asia, don’t get it." Refinery29 has more.
House Style
"Does ‘shithole’ have a hyphen in it?" Inside a copy editor's brain.
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