Recommended reading: “One of the drillers fell to his knees. Some sobbed, in the way men do when their mothers die, or when their sons are born.” An exceptional and deeply moving long-form essay in the New Yorker recounting the 69 days spent underground by the famed ’33’ Chilean miners buried in the 2010 accident at Copiapó.
On the 33
America’s Next Top Laureate
California’s San Mateo County is “seeking nominations for poet laureate, someone who can act as an ambassador for literary arts.” Do you have what it takes?
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Tuesday New Release Day: Hadley, ESPN, Gladstone
New Yorker darling Tessa Hadley has a new novel out this week, The London Train. Also out is the controversial oral history of ESPN, Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN, which reportedly offers up ample doses of insider gossip and bad behavior. And finally, there’s The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media, in which contemporary journalism is explored in a graphic novel format. Here’s a taste.
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Should We Even Publish This?
Following a recent essay on the value of ambivalence, our own Mark O’Connell explores the nature of confidence in this week’s New York Times Magazine. Perhaps not surprisingly, he writes that this year’s Web Summit convinced him that tech moguls are congenitally more confident than writers.
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Boy Meets World, Boy Meets Girl
In a perfect mix of high and low art, Samuel L. Jackson performed a slam poem about Boy Meets World on The Tonight Show. “Daughter of hippies/Name of a gypsy/’Topanga,’ Corey cries.”
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An Archive of Artist Deaths at the Met
Arturo B. de St. M. D’Hervilly's macabre archive reports the deaths of painters, sculptors, and photographers of the early 20th century.
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New Sherlock Holmes Story
The last few weeks have been all about rediscovered works by beloved authors, first Harper Lee‘s upcoming sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, then Dr. Seuss‘s What Pet Should I Get? Now Arthur Conan Doyle joins the trend with a rediscovered Sherlock Holmes short story, available online from Vulture.
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Isaac Asimov Takes on ‘The Bible’
What happens when one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers decides to take on the most widely read book in the world?
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Young and Old
After Herzog came out, Saul Bellow began the slow transformation from young Bellow into old Bellow, from the critically adored but little-known writer to the Nobel Prize winner whose views were solicited on every topic. In The New Yorker, Louis Menand writes about a new biography of the author, which tackles his early career. Related: our own Emily St. John Mandel on Bellow’s novel The Bellarosa Connection.
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