Recommended Reading: A Public Space has new fiction from Roxane Gay, whose novel An Untamed State was recently reviewed for our site by Aboubacar Ndiaye.
Noble Things
“We are not supposed to be in the study. The books live in the study.”
Year in Reading alumna and New York Times Book Review editor Parul Sehgal writes about her childhood reading habits. Millions readers should take a keen interest in this write-up for a couple reasons: 1) it’s awesome; and 2) the other half of her “we” is our associate editor, Ujala Sehgal.
Darkest Images
Recommended Viewing: these entries to a contest in which entrants were asked to draw Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Pre-Anderson
Who else read the biographies of historical figures as a kid and felt bad about not having learned Greek and Latin by age ten? Would you like to feel worse?
Debatable, To Say the Least
Researchers at Google have analyzed “audiovisual patterns,” “title, description and tags,” “words associated with amusement” in user comments, “emoticons,” and even the number of o’s in the average “LOL” in various YouTube videos in order to identify the funniest content on the web. Then they set up an algorithm to rank their findings, and subjected those findings to an audience vote (which you can join over here). Based on their calculations so far, this was the funniest video of all time. What do you think?
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The Alfar
If you run into trouble in Iceland, blame the elves. 54.4 percent of Icelanders believe in the invisible creatures, and elves cause environmental protest today. “Beliefs in misfortune befalling those who dare to build in elf territory is so widespread and frequent that the Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration has created a five-page ‘standard reply’ for press inquiries about elves,” Ryan Jacobs writes for The Atlantic. Pair with: our essay on Icelandic writer Sjón.
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