Our own Nick Ripatrazone writes for The Atlantic about the tradition of writers who love to run, from Haruki Murakami to Joyce Carol Oates. Pair with Ripatrazone’s Millions essay on writing as training.
Miles to Go before I Sleep
1963 Was a Nice Year for Criticism
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The Ethics of Illegal Downloads
None other than Randy Cohen, "The Ethicist" of the New York Times, has decided that illegally downloading an e-book version of a book for which you've already paid full price in hardcover is "not unethical... subsequent downloading is akin to buying a CD, then copying it to your iPod." He adds, "Sadly, the anachronistic conventions of bookselling and copyright law lag the technology."
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The Perils of “Showrooming”
Emma Straub, whose Year in Reading piece ran this week, has written a great article on the perils of "showrooming."
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The Dungeon Master’s Workshop
Junot Diaz, author of Pulitzer-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, started his auspicious career in the most unlikely of imaginary places: crafting stories for his friends in the tabletop roleplay game Dungeons & Dragons.
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B|ta’arof Launches A Poetry Series
B|ta’arof – which launched last year – announced a new poetry series featuring translations of “contemporary poems written in Persian and translated into English by emerging poets and scholars in the Iranian diaspora.” The translations will be accompanied by brief interviews with the translators, each consisting of the same five questions. “The idea,” according to the mission statement, “is to pull back the curtain on the process of translation, revealing how it is subject to individual choices and proclivities—the first choice being what poem to even translate.”
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Elena Ferrante Revealed
Elena Ferrante has revealed her true identity. At McSweeney’s. You could also read this piece on Ferrante’s “encompassing vision of human experience.”
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Worse than the Delaware
You may have heard that The Paris Review Daily is recapping Dante’s Inferno. This week, Alexander Aciman guides readers through Canto 8, better known as the Canto in which Dante crosses the river Styx.
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Eaten Whales
Apropos of nothing in particular, here's a fantastic cake inspired by Moby-Dick. Apropos of whales in general, however, is this beautiful video on the disintegration of a whale carcass inspired by "Radiolab."
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