In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris, Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast has rocketed to number one best-seller status in France as an emblem of cultural defiance. With a title in its French iteration that roughly translates to “Paris is a celebration,” the sudden popularity of the book run even Amazon out of stock.
Paris Est Une Fête
Roger Angell on the Triple Play
Even those who detest the sport can feel the joys of reading Roger Angell’s baseball writing. Case in point: his latest dispatch, in which he remarks on a recent triple play by saying, “What’s great about [triple plays] isn’t really their scarcity but the fact that they beautifully illustrate the invisible force that hovers about each pitch and play and inning and game in this pausing, staccato, and inexorably accruing pastime: the laws of chance.”
The Nobel Curse
A simple question: has the Nobel curse killed Orhan Pamuk? You could just ask President Obama, who recently picked up a copy of Pamuk’s most recent work, A Strangeness in My Mind.
If Shakespeare Was a Programmer
“While it’s easy to dismiss coding as rote exercise—a matter of following rules—it’s worth remembering that natural language is subject to rules of its own: grammar, syntax, spelling. The best writers test these rules, bend them, or break them outright, and in doing so they keep the language alive…. With that in mind, I wanted to apply the quirks and transgressions of the great authors to JavaScript, to see where that pushed the language.” Angus Croll imagines Shakespeare as a programmer in a piece for Quartz and in his book, If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript.
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Replacement Burrito
Recommended Reading: This moving essay on secrecy, shame, and binging by Michael Sinert over at The Rumpus: “Our task is to de-son-of-a-bitch all this.”
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Featuring Jimmy Carter
Kickstarters for creative projects run the gamut from endeavors like Star Citizen to requests for food or rent money to let a writer finish a novel. In between those extremes is this, a charmingly eccentric children’s book titled Pete Peanut and the Trouble with Birthdays, which needs help covering the costs of its ambitious design. You can also buy tailor-made birthday invitations or the title character’s own furniture.
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Thanks, Amigo
In his upcoming book Borrowed Words, Philip Durkin looked at the languages that have shaped English over the centuries, charting the influence of Spanish, Italian, French and more. At Slate, he sums up his most important data with the help of an interactive tool.
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A Book A Day Keeps Depression Away
“Doctors in England will soon be prescribing books as well as pills to patients suffering from anxiety and depression,” writes Harvey Morris. Hopefully none of these bummers make the cut.