“I move in a desultory society and often a week or two will roll by without my going to anybody’s house to dinner or anyone’s coming to mine, but when an occasion does arise, and I am summoned, something usually turns up (an hour or two in advance) to make all human intercourse seem vastly inappropriate.” In the new issue of The Atlantic Weekly (not to be confused with the Monthly), a reprint of a classic E.B. White essay.
Pig Tales
New Contest from Kirkus Reviews
To celebrate the 80th birthday of Kirkus Reviews, the editorial staff is holding a contest in which the grand prize winner gets a literary tour of New York City. This includes “two round-trip tickets to Manhattan, two nights’ stay at the Library Hotel, two passes to the Greenwich Village Literary Pub Crawl, gift certificates to several of the city’s finest independent bookstores, breakfast at a round table at the Algonquin Hotel, and dinner at Public in SoHo.”
●
●
The Will to Climb
The Seattle Times reviews The Will to Climb by Bainbridge Island mountaineer Ed Viesturs (with David Roberts), which chronicles what it takes to climb Annapurna, a particularly challenging Himalayan peak. Viesturs appears tonight at Town Hall Seattle.
●
●
Unlocking Agrippa
In 1992, William Gibson published Agrippa, a poem coded on a floppy disk such that after one reading it would destroy itself forever. Quinn DuPont, a PhD student studying cryptography, built an emulation of the self-destructing poem and has a challenge to cyberpunks and cryptographers: be the first person to crack the poem’s code and win a copy of every one of Gibson’s books ever published.
Bright Young Thing
Who is Samantha Shannon, and why should you care about her? Well, for starters, she’s twenty-one years old, her debut novel The Bone Season is coming out next week, and her publisher suspects she may be the next J.K. Rowling.
●
●
The Cheryl Strayed Trend
Call it the Eat, Pray, Love effect for the nature lover. Cheryl Strayed fans are hiking the Pacific Crest Trail after being inspired by Wild. Strayed says she's received more than 1,000 emails from people ready to lace up their hiking boots, but a trail information specialist says he's only seen six women make the full trek.
●
●
Following the Refugees
Foreign Policy tracks refugees on their journey from Syria to Germany and illustrates their trip in a nonfiction comic.