Not every Craigslist ad is noteworthy, but this property listing, titled “Gorgeous Rural Mountain Acreage” and hailing from Kentucky, is a notable (and sobering) exception. Full-Stop republished the whole thing, which includes warnings that “bears are known to be about” and “beautiful water seeps.”
“A history of fire flooding and water flooding”
The Millennial Resurgence of Eve Babitz
For Buzzfeed Rachel Vorona Cote explores Eve Babitz and the white literary It Girl. “Readers, particularly literary women in their twenties and thirties, seem to be entranced by this child of Hollywood, who unabashedly relished her LA milieu and both chronicled and defended its paradoxes. But it’s still a milieu that flattens the city into one that is homogenous, wealthy, and white.” Pair with this essay about her novel Sex and Rage.
An Illusion To Think So
“We always try to create the worst opinion of everything there is in the United States, as a response to what they have always done with us. The only difference is that we do not write falsehoods about the United States. I told you that we emphasize the worst things, that we omit things that could be viewed as positive, but we do not invent any lies.” This excerpted interview with Fidel Castro over at The Paris Review is enlightening for its candor and frankness.
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Beastie Boys Books and Beastie Boys Parks
Michael Diamond (aka Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock) have signed on to write a Beastie Boys memoir for Spiegel & Grau. The book is scheduled to publish in 2015. However if you need your Beastie fix now, you can head on over to Brooklyn’s Palmetto Playground tomorrow for its renaming ceremony. Its new name? Why, Adam Yauch (MCA) Park, of course.
Science Genius
The Science Genius Initiative is a pilot project organized by Rap Genius, science teachers from ten New York City public schools, and GZA. Together, the group hopes “to change the way city teachers relate to minority students, drawing not just on hip-hop’s rhymes, but also on its social practices and values.” Indeed, as the Wu-Tang Clan emcee – who’s been working with Neil DeGrasse Tyson and MIT physicists for his new album – believes science is worth studying because it “unlocks the key to the universe, and the mysteries we don’t know.”
Criminal Justice in America: A Failure
William Stuntz’s book The Collapse of American Criminal Justice investigates “how, over the past 50 years, our criminal justice system had been transformed into an unfair, amoral bureaucracy–one that had given up on the very idea of justice.” Its genesis is worth reading about. So, too, is this related article in the most recent edition of n+1, “Raise the Crime Rate.”
What’s in a Name?
Why would anyone write a book anonymously? Maria Bustillos ponders anonymity at The New Yorker. “Anonymous is more than a pseudonym. It is a stark declaration of intent: a wall explicitly thrown up, not only between writer and reader, but between the writer’s work and his life.”
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The Other Side
“Paris had more sex than most church-laden places, and more church than most sex-laden places.” Luc Sante’s new book, The Other Paris, seeks to uncover Paris’s sedimentary layers of filth and grit. Here he is in an interview with Guernica Magazine.
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