“Doctors may be tempted to give patients what we want, even when it is not good for us.” Guernica has an excerpt from Eula Biss’s forthcoming On Immunity: An Innoculation, which we featured in our book preview.
The Restaurant Model of Medicine
Born to Read
"Nothing in Born to Run rings to me as unmeant or punch-pulling. If anything, Springsteen wants credit for telling it the way it really is and was. And like a fabled Springsteen concert — always notable for its deck-clearing thoroughness — Born to Run achieves the sensation that all the relevant questions have been answered by the time the lights are turned out." Richard Ford reviews The Boss's new book for the New York Times.
We Think Alone, But We Email Each Other
“I’m always trying to get my friends to forward me emails they’ve sent to other people – to their mom, their boyfriend, their agent – the more mundane the better,” writes Miranda July in the treatment for her latest project, We Think Alone, which counts Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Etgar Keret, and Kirsten Dunst among its participants. “How they comport themselves in email is so intimate, almost obscene — a glimpse of them from their own point of view.”
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Poets Before Bros
Beer bongs are never a good idea. Besides the killer hangover you'll inevitably wake up with the next morning, you might also steal literary art. When Mitchel Potter was a frat boy in 1987, he stole a bronze bust of Robert Frost from Wichita State University and hid it in his basement for 25 years until someone tipped off the police. Ironically, Potter didn't even know who Frost was, but the prosecutor read "The Road Not Taken" at his trial.
Revealing the System
“You know, it’s dangerous to focus on one person as a way of talking about a big system. But I think Kissinger reveals the system. He’s not singularly responsible for the system—if we expunge Kissinger from history, we still wouldn’t have a Virtuous Republic—but he illuminates it like nobody else.” Greg Grandin discusses his recent release, Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman, at The New Republic.
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Dear Jack
Saul Bellow met Jack Ludwig at Bard College in the fifties. The two became friends, and founded a magazine together, called The Noble Savage. Then, not long after the magazine began running, Ludwig started an affair with Bellow's wife. Here's the letter Bellow sent him when he found out. You could also read our own Emily St. John Mandel on Bellow's novel The Bellarosa Connection.
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Brian Jacques, R.I.P.
Brian Jacques, whose Redwall series beginning with Redwall and Mossflower figured prominently in my life as a young reader, has died.
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The Salman Rushdie Channel
Slate's got a video interview with Salman Rushdie in three parts, and his speaking agency has released a rare video from one of Rushdie's previously unrecorded talks, where the man describes writers as much more vulnerable than ideas.