Fellow children of the ‘90s will remember how much that decade was a kind of Golden Age for disaster movies. Then as now, explosive blockbusters like Independence Day, Twister and Dante’s Peak satisfied a collective appetite for wide-scale destruction and mayhem. At The Morning News, Ethan Gilsdorf considers what the genre’s evolution has to say about us.
Boom Boom Boom
Wild Inspiration
Here’s a potential remedy for your writer’s block or attention deficit issues: take a hike in the woods. (Maybe even take a hike while reading a book.)
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Citations Needed
Internet trivia addicts, today is your lucky day. The Houghton Library at Harvard is hiring a Wikipedian in Residence.
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Writers on Writing
Recommended listening: Writers on Writing, a playlist of TED talks from NPR that pair well with our own Nick Ripatrazone‘s essay on “vertical writing” and Michelle Huneven‘s breakdown of “The Trouble With Writing.”
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Tuesday New Release Day
Martin Amis’ The Pregnant Widow is out today (Kakutani sez, “remarkably tedious” but The Guardian adds, “Amis might draw comfort from the long and distinguished list of Kakutani’s literary victims.”) Also out, Sebastian Junger’s War, the result of time spent embedded with a platoon of the 173rd Airborne brigade in Afghanistan.
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Gentlemen of Your Acquaintance
“A wealthy and influential harridan disapproves of you and makes sure everyone within earshot knows it. You don’t give a fig what she thinks. You flutter your fan defiantly.” How to tell if you’re in a regency romance novel.
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