Sylvia Plath’s final days have long been a source of fascination and horror for many readers. In a forthcoming unauthorized biography of Plath’s husband Ted Hughes, it is claimed that one of Hughes’s more contentious poems, “Last Letter,” was written after an argument the couple had the night before Plath took her own life. Ted Hughes: An Unauthorized Life is out next week.
A Selected Weapon
The Millions Socializes
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In the Future, All Art Historians Will Work 20 Hours a Week
A couple of contrarian views on the current job market and its woes: “How Art History Majors Power the U.S. Economy” (at Bloomberg, no less) and “Cut the working week to a maximum of 20 hours, urge top economists” (sign me up).
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Letting Autism Actually Speak
“If we have no internal lives, then artists are free to make them for us, or to use us as tools for providing depth and motivation to the non-autistic characters, the real ones.” Sarah Kurchak writes for Electric Literature on the abysmal state of autistic representation in books, film, and television, namechecking both The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and A Visit From the Goon Squad, which we considered here and here, respectively.
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“Everything is handmade.”
Monologuist Mike Daisey was once devoted to Apple products. Then, one day, he “started to think, and that’s always a problem for any religion.” He began to question how his favorite products were put together, so he traveled to China with hopes of finding out. What he saw was shocking. If you own an Apple device (which I’m betting you do), you need to listen to this episode of This American Life.
Rape-Rape
Jenny Diski‘s personal take on Roman Polanski and rape, at the London Review of Books.
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