One of the surprises of last week’s James Beard Awards was the runaway success of McSweeney’s offshoot Lucky Peach, which ended up taking home five out of seventeen awards. On John Birdsall’s Tumblr, you can read one of the winning essays, which bears the attention-grabbing title of “America, Your Food Is So Gay.” (Related: Jessica Ferri on food writing.)
Born Lucky
Ecstasy/Despair
Shouldn’t you be busy writing? Here’s an illustrated guide to some of the common anxieties many of us feel when we’re not writing.
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And All That Jazz
Have you ever wondered what The Great Gatsby would sound like? Designer Vladimir V. Kuchinov made The Generative Gatsby, a book that features typography based on famous 1920s jazz songs. “The following work is a visual experiment, a study of how music of this era, its rhythms, syncopations and patterns could alter prose to a new typographic frontiers keeping content legible as it could be,” he writes on his website.
Beverly Cleary Turns 100
This week, Beverly Cleary turned 100. Revisit some of her famous characters like Ramona Quimby and Henry Huggins at NPR. Our editor Lydia Kiesling writes on Cleary’s memoirs, which “transcend time.”
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Harvard and MIT Go MOOC
Harvard and MIT are partnering for an MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) known as edX. Currently, similar offerings are available from Stanford, Princeton, UPenn, and the University of Michigan. Unfortunately edX and others like it will grade student papers by utilizing “crowd-sourcing” and “natural-language software.” Oh, geeze. Not that again.
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