Well, this was unexpected. James Salter draws on his wartime flight experience to write a brief post about Flight MH370 for The New Yorker.
James Salter on MH370
New York: It Isn’t All That
Roxane Gay rounded up some of her favorite writers from “Outside of New York City.” (And she’s not talking about Brooklyn.)
I Doubt The Authors Would’ve Been Thrilled With This
Deep South Magazine‘s Hunter Murphy compiled a list of “The Greatest Bromances in Southern Literature.”
Experience + Openness + Neurology
“It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what makes a great artist creative” but The Atlantic makes a strong attempt and cites the story behind Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein as an example of what can happen “when experience, openness, and the right neurology come together.”
Geoff Dyer on Pagetti’s Syria
The devastating images of Syria shot by Franco Pagetti have been collected into a series entitled Veiled Aleppo. Over at The New Republic, Geoff Dyer writes about one of them. It’s an image, Dyer observes, that features “symbols … of the death throes not of a city but of film.”
Back to School
Need your monthly dose of Hilary Mantel? The two-time Booker Prize winner has a new story in the London Review of Books (which you can read at their website). The story is a nice complement to our interview with the author from last year.
Charles Darwin’s Interest in “Neuropsychiatric Photography”
In the late 1860s, James Crichton-Browne, director of the West Riding Lunatic Asylum, gave Charles Darwin a collection of photographic portraits depicting the “afflicted and insane.” What followed was a six-year relationship in which both men corresponded about “the physical manifestations of natural selection.”