“Put on your Versace apron,” and “if wearing a four-finger ring, carefully place it on a side table before starting to cook.” It’s time to explore the 28-page “cookbook” included in 2 Chainz’s latest album, B.O.A.T.S. 2 #Metime.
Cooking with 2 Chainz
The Flying Dutchmen
This Sunday, the Netherlands will take on Mexico in the second stage of the 2014 World Cup. To explain what makes the Dutchmen so formidable on the soccer pitch, Rowan Ricardo Phillips takes a look at the many “Shades of Oranje.”
Have Eyes, Will Write
You’ve read Elif Batuman’s dissertation on the double-entry book-keeping of novelists (pdf), but now your “debit” balance is low. (Whose isn’t these days?) Enter Sheila Heti and Misha Glouberman. They can document your very essence. The Paris Review has an excerpt from The Chairs Are Where the People Go.
William Kelley, a Lost Literary Giant
“I didn’t know who William Kelley was when I found that book but, like millions of Americans, I knew a term he is credited with first committing to print. ‘If You’re Woke, You Dig It’ read the headline of a 1962 Op-Ed that Kelley published in the New York Times, in which he pointed out that much of what passed for “beatnik” slang (“dig,” “chick,” “cool”) originated with African-Americans.” Are you familiar with William Kelley? Let Kathryn Schulz be your guide on this historical literary adventure as she discovers an immensely influential writer whom most of us have never heard mentioned.
Writers Bloc Series
In Zadie Smith’s introduction to the Writers Bloc series, she writes that the program sought essays “that were not only pious, charitable or analytical but also readable, engaging, exciting.” The essays published by Guernica certainly meet this criteria. I particularly recommend Aleksandar Hemon’s essay on first graders in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Picador’s Tumblr Makes Up For Lost Time
The Picador folks joined Tumblr recently (like we asked) and they’re making up for lost time already. They’ve already instituted something called “Sunday Sontag,” and they’ve posted a Spotify playlist comprised of 140 “contextually literary” tracks.
The New VC
In Wayde Compton’s The Outer Harbour, a series of short stories take the reader from the present day to 2025, exploring a near-future Vancouver in which things grow steadily more surreal. As Emily Oppenheimer writes, it’s clearly a work of speculative fiction, yet the setting resembles our own world in uncanny ways. Sample quote: “Compton achieves the more troubling, yet ultimately more satisfying, goal of portraying the fantastical as something that is very much rooted in what we think we already know about ourselves and our world.”
Old Saws
We’ve written before about the By the Book series, in which the Times invites well-known authors to talk about their favorite books. This weekend, they interviewed the historian James M. McPherson, who recalled his childhood reading habits and cited his favorite examples of Civil War literature. Pair with: Darryl Campbell on the Civil War series by Ken Burns.