Did Gollum have a vitamin D deficiency? In the Medical Journal of Australia, Joseph A. Hopkinson and Nicholas S. Hopkinson posit that the Lord of the Rings saga could’ve been prevented had the inhabitants of Middle Earth just gotten a little more sunlight. “Systematic textual analysis of The Hobbit supports our initial hypothesis that the triumph of good over evil may be assisted to some extent by the poor diet and lack of sunlight experienced by the evil characters.”
Take Your Vitamins
Weather Advisory
“These are not stories about the weather, these are stories about life and death.” Over at Ploughshares, E.V. De Cleyre considers the weather in contemporary literature.
New Franzen in 2015
Sound the Franzen alarm! The Corrections and Freedom author will release a new book in 2015. Called Purity, the book will supposedly feature elements of magical realism (or something like it). Head over to Vulture for more.
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“We call it Book”
Old but still as timely as ever: The latest and greatest in cutting-edge reading technology from Penny Arcade.
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“Let the Games Begin,” as Bane Would Say
The Olympics Opening Ceremony this year sure was… something. Thankfully, folks more eloquent than I are here to parse its craziness for us: Jenny Diski and Rafil Kroll-Zaidi on what it was, plus Alex Shephard and the Full Stop bunch on what it should have been.
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An idiotic contention if intended seriously, given that neither neither Gollum, Saruman, Sauron, or the Orcs were human. And most characters, good and bad, lived for centuries.