Anyone who’s majored in the humanities has likely heard warnings that it’s better to major in the sciences. If, as many would have it, we live in a scientist’s world, what place is there for the arts? At the Ploughshares blog, Cathe Shubert finds a place for writers in a STEM-obsessed society. You could also read Cathy Day on the job prospects of writers.
Airy Fairy
The Stories We Tell
Of more than 23,000 front-page articles that appeared in The New York Times between 1939 and 1945, only 26 were about the Holocaust. Watch a powerful 18-minute mini-documentary about “how and why the genocide of Jews was neglected and euphemised by the Times, and by extension, the American people.” Pair with our piece about the German traditions of the Denkmahl and Mahnmahl, two different kinds of memorials with subtle, yet important distinctions.
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Bad News
Whatever your thoughts about the situation in Ukraine, you’ll feel for Year in Reading alum David Bezmozgis, who’s been writing a novel for the past four years that takes place in Crimea. After nearly a half-decade in which few people he talked to even knew where Crimea was, recent events shone a spotlight on the place, which the author had thought of as “locked in a dismal kleptocratic stasis.” (You could also read our interview with the author.)
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The Greatest Biscuits in the World
It’s funny and fitting that Madame Proust, in a letter now on display at the Morgan Library, implored her son to share persnickety details about what time he got up in the morning. Another thing the exhibition, which celebrates the hundredth anniversary of Swann’s Way, reveals: early drafts of the book used “biscottes” in place of “madeleine.”
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The Lives of Women
The Feminine Mystique turns fifty this month, and to mark the anniversary, Noah Berlatsky wonders how Agnes Grey, an Anne Bronte novel, illustrates and critiques the arguments made in the book.
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Neil Gaiman Lane
The Ocean at the End of the Lane is now an actual lane. Neil Gaiman’s hometown, Portsmouth, England, named a bus lane after his novel last Sunday. Sadly, the magical Hempstock family doesn’t live at the end of it.