Is there any animal more noble than your beloved childhood pet? In this moving essay from 3:AM Magazine, Adrian Nathan West explains a couple of lessons that he learned about love and devotion from his Labrador named Jake.
See Spot Run
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One
Have you heard the one about the Holocaust historian who loves Donald Trump? No, really. Eric Metaxas, most well-known for his biography of the theologian/anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, has claimed that Trump's rhetoric is all just "schtick," and that the man himself is "culturally Jewish."
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The PhD Pyramid Scheme
The Economist has a pretty damning look at the global state of academia, particularly as it pertains to the enormous numbers of PhDs being churned out, the cheap labor they represent, and the comparatively few full professorship gigs available to them.
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Sick and Wrong
Recommended Reading: Dan Kois on his favorite books of the year. On Alissa Nutting's Tampa, he writes: “Tampa mixes deadpan social satire, lurid true-crime storytelling, and out-and-out porn into a poisonous stew.”
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Bathtub Books
"At home, I dedicate occasional whole days to reading as if I’m a convalescent. The ideal place for this is the bath, where the body floats free," Rachel Kushner told The New York Times in a "By the Book" interview. Yet just because her reading style is leisurely doesn't mean her reading is; she discusses her love of Proust and avoidance of books known for their plots. For more Kushner, read our own interview with her or her 2013 Year in Reading post.
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Good Writer or Bad Dad?
Does being a writer make you a bad father? Matthew Norman ponders his fear at Salon. "As a fiction writer, I’m perpetually in some state of preoccupation. At any given moment, I’m suffering over people who don’t exist—who will never exist." Maybe he should try Polly Rosenwaike's tactic and read fiction about the opposite parent.
The Confessions of Bill Styron
Now that you can purchase the letters of William Styron, you can note how especially funny (and sad) it is that Darkness Visible, the author’s book-of-self-help-slash-memoir-slash-confession, sold well enough to overshadow the novels that made his name.