One Reddit user wants to know, “What are some good books to read [in jail]?” Might we recommend some works by the 19th century Russian masters?
Time to Read
Reading Courtside
From the WSJ, NBA players who read books, some of them pretty good (books and players, I guess). Also, the old “Phil Jackson gives his players books” anecdote is a familiar one, but who knew he passed out copies of 2666? (Thanks, Craig)
No, I Matter Less!
To celebrate the release of Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine, the Cabinet editors put their own magazine on trial, filling up an NYPL auditorium with academics and writers who, perhaps inevitably, began to compete in a kind of irrelevance-off. Which begs the question, answered well by The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones in Bookforum: how relevant to the wider culture is a magazine like Cabinet, anyway?
●
●
A Gut-Wrenching Account and an Ethical Nightmare
A dissection of Jonathan Franzen’s recent New Yorker essay on David Foster Wallace finds Franzen’s wires showing.
●
●
Addressing the Spider
Recommended Reading: J. M. Tyree’s new story at Guernica. “There’s a man on the bus sitting directly in front of you. He has a small brown spider crawling across his red shirt, near his left shoulder blade.” You could also watch our episode of The Book Report on Our Secret Life in the Movies by Tyree and Michael McGriff.
Commas, Commas, and More Commas
The outcome of a court judgment concerning a dispute between a dairy company and its delivery drivers hinged on a grammar. Specifically, what does the Oxford comma signify?