The upcoming Supreme Court decision on gay marriage is drawing a lot of attention. But what about the other ruling — the one aimed at grizzled old men? At The Onion, a report on Justice Alito’s recent decision, which tersely states that marriage is a pact between a man and the sea.
“The heart belongs to the tide and the deep alone”
Seems About Right
“Post-truth” has been named word of the year by the Oxford Dictionaries, reports The Guardian. Considered an adjective, its definition is “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The Dictionaries report its first use in 1992 by the late Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in relation to Iran-Contra and the first Gulf War. And we thought Colbert’s “truthiness” was funny.
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Fin
How would you feel if your novels all fell apart at the end? The writer Ann Bauer knows this feeling, and it’s painful — she says that her readers inevitably tell her the endings of her novels are all wrong. (You could also read our own Sonya Chung’s essay on literary endings.)
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New York City Reading
This week in infographics: Epic Reads has created a Book Nerd’s Guide to New York City, complete with books set in the city, bookstores, reading spots, and authors who call the city home. Pair with The Millions’s walking tour of New York’s independent bookstores.
An Issue of Perspective
Sure, male journalists are generally not the best when it comes to writing about women, but things have gotten better in the last few years, right? Maybe not.
For Whom The Bell Tolls
A personalized memento mori: Learn the year, day, and month of your demise by filling out the short survey at The Death Clock, “the internet’s friendly reminder that life is slipping away.”
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Producing The Counselor
When The Counselor (trailer here) opens in theaters this month, the occasion will mark a career milestone for Cormac McCarthy. The 80-year-old novelist has been writing original screenplays since the 1970s, but only one of them – a made-for-TV movie called The Gardener’s Son – was produced before this latest effort. Over at The Wall Street Journal, Alexandra Alter takes a look at the author’s involvement in the production of The Counselor, as well as its reception by several film industry insiders and devout McCarthy fans. (“McCarthy writing a sex scene is maybe not a great idea,” one of them says.)
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Addicted to Love
“Homer understood in the 8th century BCE what modernity has yet to accept—love can be an addiction, and when it is, we need substantial outside help.” Angela Chen writes for Aeon about finding a cure for desire.