From our own Michael Bourne comes a new short story, “Beautiful,” available from The Southampton Review.
Beautiful
Teaching STEM: Comics to Video Games
While the federal government is turning to video games to get kids into the math and sciences, back in the day comic books provided a near-direct link to young minds. But the medium wasn’t warmly received by the older generation (sound familiar?), and the company debated whether it was worth taking a hit with parents in order to appeal to their kids.
On Negative Book Reviews
“An appeal for the revival of the negative book review, then, is a remonstration against forced and foppish praise, where everything is good and so nothing at all is good.” In The Baffler, Rafia Zakaria writes in praise of negative book reviews and decries the “enfeebling of literary criticism.” From our archives: our own Emily St. John Mandel writes about bad book reviews.
Finnegans Draft
Ordinarily I would caution against reading a novel’s first draft, however in the case of Finnegans Wake, perhaps all rules should be tossed out the window. With this one, it seems as though any and all supplemental material might help unlock the finished product’s mysteries. Case in point: the entire first draft of Joyce’s most perplexing novel. (Of course, when all else fails, there’s always Michael Chabon to save the day.)
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We’re Gonna Make It
Recommended Reading: A chapter of Janice Shapiro’s new graphic memoir Crushable, on the subject of the late Mary Tyler Moore.
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Lewis on the Economy
While on the publicity tour for his latest book, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, Michael Lewis stops by NPR‘s “Fresh Air” to talk Greece, the Euro, California’s “third world problems,” and the Occupy Wall Street protests. The author also gets a nice write-up in the latest New York Magazine, and his interview on last night’s “The Daily Show” ran so long, they had to put the full version online. (Start “The Daily Show”‘s clip at ~21:50 for the interview.)
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