If you’re an insomniac, you probably feel an odd kinship with people who work the night shift, especially if you live in a large city which is easy to explore on sleepless nights. At The Rumpus, Jess Lowry recalls her own late nights in Manhattan.
Up with Me
Joke Science
What exactly happens to our brains when we laugh? Richard Restak (of The American Scholar) investigates.
“I run around my house with bacon on my head and Sam Tanenhaus is sending me notes.”
Ron Charles, the WaPo’s fiction critic and the witty and winning originator of the “video book review” genre, gets profiled in Publishers Weekly.
●
●
The App That Helps You Speed Read?
Riane Konc reviews the app Blinkist: “Blinkist is decidedly not a substitute for reading books. It may be a substitute for reading books that no one actually needs to read in the first place, books that only contained 15 minutes worth of an idea but had to be stretched out to 200 pages for the publishers.” The app summarizes over 2000 nonfiction books in 15 minutes: read Konc’s review and see if you should give it a shot.
●
●
Why Criticism Matters
“We live in the age of opinion — offered instantly, effusively and in increasingly strident tones. Much of it goes by the name of criticism, and in the most superficial sense this is accurate.” The New York Times approached six accomplished critics, Stephen Burns, Katie Roiphe, Pankaj Mishra, Adam Kirsch, Sam Anderson, and Elif Batuman to explain, in the spirit of Alfred Kazin, “what it is they do, why they do it and why it matters.”
Louisiana: Where Music Was Born
Riffing on R&B singer Ernie K-Doe’s one-time statement, Chris Rose writes in the Oxford American, “I’m almost positive that all music, at least all American music, comes from Louisiana.” The essay appears in this year’s OA Southern Music Issue, a reliably excellent source of tunes and writing. Indeed, as Dwight Garner put it in The New York Times, the CDs that accompany each annual issue “practically belong in the Smithsonian.”
●
●
Carving Out a Legacy
Recommended Reading: On Raymond Carver’s birthday, his brother James stopped by Electric Literature to share his memories of what it was like growing up with the man behind such works as Will You Please Be Quiet, Please and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
The Present Tense
Recommended Reading: This fantastic new story from The London Review of Books by Hilary Mantel, winner of two Booker Prizes. Here’s an interview with Mantel from The Millions on character assassination and dealing with the haters.