Following a recent essay on the value of ambivalence, our own Mark O’Connell explores the nature of confidence in this week’s New York Times Magazine. Perhaps not surprisingly, he writes that this year’s Web Summit convinced him that tech moguls are congenitally more confident than writers.
Should We Even Publish This?
Burying the Hatchet
“The Hatchet Job Award appeals, in its depressingly calculated way, to the basest and most self-serving of journalistic instincts, and seems to arise out of, and perpetuate, a misunderstanding of what criticism actually is.” At Slate, our own Mark O’Connell criticizes the award for promoting the same bad criticism it claims to detest.
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Maia Kobabe on Fighting to Reach Marginalized Readers
Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer, a memoir about self-acceptance and understanding, has been challenged in schools and libraries across the country in recent months.
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Righteous Anger
You’ve probably heard the sad news that Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman passed away on May 2nd. In memory of Hanneman’s work with the band, Greg Pollock wrote a paean to God Hates Us All, “the most important album in [his] life.”
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Risk-Taker, Miracle-Maker
“Maybe the optimists are right; maybe poetry does help you live your life. And maybe they are more right than they know, and it rounds you out for death.” Andrew O’Hagan writes for The Guardian about falling in love with poetry and coming to see the poet as “a risk-taker, a miracle-maker, a moral panjandrum and a convict of the senses.”
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Tournament of Books Zombie Round
After three years of judging, and now “like one of those guys who comes back after graduation and loiters creepily around campus, remembering [his] faded glory days,” our site’s editor-in-chief C. Max Magee finally made it into the booth for the zombie round in The Morning News‘ Tournament of Books. Check out the perils of “the ARC onslaught” and which books were missing from the tournament altogether.
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From Mr. O’Connell’s article:
“I saw a keen absurdity in these barons of techno-capital, with their passionately held clichés and their cheerful belief in their personal capacity to change the world,”
That’s the best phrase I’ve read for ages! Perhaps a compromise is in order, a bit less self doubt for Mr. O’Connell and his wry, on-the-spot observations, and a bit more for the tech moguls, given their habit of foisting bug-ridden, not-ready-for-market software programs on the unsuspecting public!
Moe Murph
Dreading Next Microsoft Office Suite Upgrade