“I’d grown up watching and playing baseball.”
How to Be a Book Critic
As part of an ongoing series, Critical Mass asks book critics to name five books that should be found in any reviewer’s library — Ruth Franklin of The New Republic posts her picks. (via Book Bench)
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Faulty Education
Recommended Reading: The Harvard Gazette on education and inequality. “If inequality starts anywhere, many scholars agree, it’s with faulty education.” Our own Nick Ripatrazone writes about closing the gap between high school and higher education.
Poetic Pugilists
For anyone searching for some weighty longreads about the current state of poetry, look no further than the lively (and longwinded) debate between Matvei Yankelevich and Marjorie Perloff sparked by the latter’s piece, “Poetry on the Brink.”
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We All Pay It Off in the Next Five Millenia
Attention all victims of debt: the author of the well-named Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber, is now taking your questions on Reddit.
The Lines Between Us
“Think of landscape. Think of how elements come to be attached to one another, how it’s impossible to separate the road from the field, the field from the tree, the tree from the water, the water from the sky. We cannot attribute natural features to the lines we design just as we cannot attribute natural causes to those dying as they try to cross them.” For Tin House, Portuguese writer Susana Moreira Marques meditates on the concept of borders and Wolf Böwig’s photography project, “Borders and Beyond.”
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DeWitt Talks Lightning Rods
Recommended Weekend Podcast: Helen DeWitt talks with Anne Strainchamps about her novel Lightning Rods, which we at The Millions loved a lot.
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Agreeable Lives
Whether or not you knew that Rose Williams, sister of Tennessee, inspired the character of Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, you’ll probably appreciate this Paris Review elegy, which goes through Rose’s short life and the effect it had on her brother.