Excerpt from Good on Paper

“The city has the beckoning power of a black hole or the Italian countryside or a castle. There is no way to explain our wiring to someone whose fairytale has always ended somewhere like Florida.” Aisha Sabatini Sloan on calling Detroit home, over at The Offing. Also check out Bill Morris’s Millions piece on movies set in the city.

We get it, you’re into finance — but what can you tell me about lit crit? This piece from The Atlantic purports to show how literary theory has its place in the world of finance: “The act of imagining the future in finance goes by other names—’vision’ and ‘invention’ are among the more respectable euphemisms—in order to disguise the presence of the non-rational in financial activity. But rarely do scholars explore the role of imagination in economic life systematically. In a realm dominated by economic and financial scholarship that aspires to be ‘scientific,’ fantasy and creativity in envisioning the future are often ignored; they don’t fit well into a model of research whose aim is to reduce unknowns and to eliminate surprises as much as possible.”

“It was a remarkable scene, to witness young people collectively shatter one another’s sense of social isolation.” Clint Smith for The New Yorker‘s Page-Turner blog about teaching Invisible Man to a high school class full of undocumented immigrants.

Photographer Stefano De Luigi, featured in the latest New Yorker, traces the route and oral tradition of Homer’s The Odyssey using only an iPhone.