“It is early August. A black man is shot by a white policeman. And the effect on the community is of “a lit match in a tin of gasoline.” No, this is not Ferguson, MO.” Laila Lalami reports for NPR on rereading James Baldwin‘s Notes of a Native Son in the context of Ferguson. Pair with Teju Cole‘s essay in The New Yorker about rereading Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village.”
“A Native Son” in Ferguson
Facebook’s Hype
The Facebook IPO was this week’s biggest story. The social media giant, which boasts 800 million members, is seeking a $75-$100 billion market valuation. But hold your horses, investors. A lot of that optimism could be empty hype. After all, look at the site’s requested valuation as a percentage of its 2011 revenue, and compare it to other tech giants like Google and Microsoft. Also, contrary to Mark Zuckerberg’s claim, most of the world does not, in fact, “have access to the internet or mobile phones.”
Sonya Chung at McNally Jackson 3/10
Millions Contributor Sonya Chung will read from her just-released novel Long for This World at McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince Street, NYC, on March 10 at 7pm.
Neutral Language and Other Myths
“Apple’s example sentence for ‘shrill’ referenced ‘women’s voices,’ and the one for the word ‘psyche’ read, ‘I will never really fathom the female psyche.’ […] The pronouns in entries for ‘doctor’ and ‘research’ were male, while a ‘she’ could be found doing ‘housework.’” The New Oxford American Dictionary needs its own guidelines for nonsexist usage.
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Kazuo Ishiguro on the Joys of Repetition
Kazuo Ishiguro discusses his newest book, Klara and the Sun, and how it echoes themes he has often explored in his previous work.
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Notes on Missouri and America.
“We don’t have to look at Iraq for an analogue to Missouri,” writes Elif Batuman. “We can look instead at Missouri, or elsewhere in the United States.” Indeed for many ordinary Americans, as Jabari Asim echoes in his poem inspired by the recent events in Ferguson, “It’s more than time we had that talk / about what to say and where to walk, / how to act and how to strive, / how to be upright and stay alive.”
On the Voynich Manuscript
You can lose entire days while researching the Voynich Manuscript on the Internet, so maybe you should begin with this overview of the matter – one that asks whether or not the entire thing is just a big hoax.
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