This week in book-to-film adaptation news: Kurt Vonnegut‘s Cat’s Cradle is slated to become a TV show, “which will hopefully be long enough to fill an entire week’s worth of classes” for any desperate English teachers out there.
Cat’s TV
Algorithmic Forecasting
The Financial Times takes a detailed look at the Financial Computing Centre, home of future quants, where Michael Galas is working to build "a hedge fund without employees" and a crop of PhD candidates are using social media to predict the markets. Could these algorithms one day spill beyond finance, and influence education or social sciences?
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Righteous Anger
You’ve probably heard the sad news that Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman passed away on May 2nd. In memory of Hanneman's work with the band, Greg Pollock wrote a paean to God Hates Us All, “the most important album in [his] life.”
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Looking at Something?
At Bookforum, Rebecca Donner talks with former Granta editor John Freeman about his new book of interviews, How to Read a Novelist. Freeman says that he enjoys interviewing writers in their homes because it allows him to observe them more closely: “The writer thinks you're taking notes about what he's saying, but you're really writing, ‘His head looks like a lion's head.’”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Messud; Wang; Tallent; Rothmann; Handler
Out this week: The Burning Girl by Claire Messud; The Hidden Light of Northern Fires by Daren Wang; My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent; To Die in Spring by Ralf Rothmann; and All the Dirty Parts by Daniel Handler. For more on these and other new titles, go read our most recent book preview.
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Are The Bad Sex Awards… Bad?
With news of this year’s winner fresh off the press, it’s easy to see how the Literary Review’s “Bad Sex Awards” are an annual delight to many readers (as well as an annual horror to several authors). But are they also counter-productive? As one former “winner” of the award asks, is the Bad Sex Award “anything more than a sort of moral outrage dressed up as a quest for high standards in writing?”
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An American Poem
"I offer you a moody campaign!" Illustrator Nathan Gould revisits the 1992 presidential election, in which badass feminist (and really great writer) Eileen Myles ran as an "openly-female" write-in candidate.