Forget learning how to fly, better practice your haiku and limerick writing skills. NASA applicants are asked to write a tweet, limerick or haiku. Is Colonel Chris Hadfield to blame?
There Once Was an Astronaut from Nantucket
RIP, Shirley Hazzard
“Ms. Hazzard’s fiction is dense with meaning, subtle in implication and tense in plot, often with disaster looming: A shipwreck tears away the parents of tiny children. A man who has waited a lifetime for a woman loses her at the last moment.” Novelist Shirley Hazzard, whose several books – including The Transit of Venus and the National Book Award-winning The Great Fire – received much acclaim, has died at 85, reports The New York Times. Also worth reading, her “Art of Fiction” interview with The Paris Review from 2005.
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Should I stay or should I god-OH?
How do you pronounce the name of the titular character from Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot? Is it GOD-oh or is it god-OH? Or is it a third variant altogether? While investigating the question for The New York Times, Dave Itzkoff has found that there may not be a correct answer, after all.
The Horror of Pharmacy, the Horror of Trains
Nathaniel Rich, who seems to have endured his 47-hour train trip without descending into madness, describes one of his favorite historical attractions in New Orleans: the Pharmacy Museum. “There are few things in life more terrifying than antiquated medical devices,” he writes.
The Pioneer Detectives Comes to a TV Near You
Last week Konstantin Kakaes — whose new book The Pioneer Detectives is our latest Millions Original — led a discussion on “how scientists search for truth and how that search isn’t always straight-forward.” You can catch a broadcast of that discussion tonight on BookTV at 7:30 PM.
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Crunching the Reading Numbers
Some cool number-crunching from Millions staff writer Patrick at the Goodreads blog. As we’ve long suspected, reading isn’t all about “new,” and the data shows a long tail of older books that are still high on people’s reading lists.
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