It might sound weird, but Jon Methven McSweeney’s really wishes you would tell him how he did with your egg whites and avocado wrap.
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More from Leon Wieseltier
A couple weeks ago, I wrote about this year’s Brandeis commencement, at which New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier argued that the humanities are under siege in America. In this week’s issue of Prospect Magazine, Malcolm Nicholson interviews Wieseltier, who claims that “we live in a culture of worthless praise.”
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V. S. Naipaul talks Reading, Writing, The Arab Spring, and Wodehouse
Among the many quotable and occasionally perplexing lines in this interview with V. S. Naipual is this one, which the Bend In The River author drops upon hearing that his interviewer, Isaac Chotiner, is a fan of P. G. Wodehouse: “I can’t read Wodehouse. The thought of, shall we say, facing three or four months of nothing but Wodehouse novels fills me with horror.”
I’d Prefer the Footnotes
Recommended Reading: This slick, new, annotated version of Herman Melville’s classic Bartleby, the Scrivener from the folks over at Slate. For more on Bartleby’s occupation of Wall Street, here's a piece that should suffice.
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The Trouble With Memoirs
"If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it. Instead hit the delete key, and then go congratulate yourself for having lived a perfectly good, undistinguished life. There’s no shame in that." Neil Genzlinger at the New York Times lays some ground rules for those compelled to write memoirs.
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Wait, What Was I Writing About?
In a fantastic piece for Full-Stop, Jesse Miller checks out Nicholas Carr (whose book was picked in Jonathan Safran Foer's Year in Reading), Paul La Farge, David Foster Wallace, and our diminishing ability to concentrate.
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That’s So Miami
The organizers of this year’s O, Miami Poetry Festival are holding an online poetry contest entitled “That’s So Miami.” To participate, submit a poem that begins or ends with the phrase, “that’s so Miami.” Entries – which can be culled from both Twitter and Instagram – are accepted in English and Spanish (duh), and submissions are posted daily on the organization’s new Tumblr. For a rundown of the festival’s other April events, check out their Facebook page.
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A Short History of the Executioner
In her short history of executioners, Stassa Edwards notes that the decision to replace “the traditional punishment” of drowning people “in a sack in a local river” was actually quite pragmatic: it was “more economical” to go with a simple beheading.
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