Recommended Reading: The inimitable Umberto Eco on how to travel with a salmon.
The Salmon Is Inedible
Meghan O’Rourke on Anne Carson’s Nox
At The New Yorker, Meghan O’Rourke lyrically reviews Anne Carson’s latest work Nox: “Grief is paradoxical … The literature of mourning enacts that dilemma; its solace is mainly in the ritual of remembering the dead and then saying, There is no solace and also, This has been going on a long time.”
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A Critical Take on Jonah Lehrer
Jonah Lehrer may not have exactly “self-plagiarized” his own work, but he certainly did recycle a good amount of his writing in a misleading way. And while many have criticized this kind of lazy writing, it’s worth revisiting Tim Requarth and Meehan Crist’s critical review of Lehrer’s book, Imagine, which plays a central role in this entire scandal.
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Ping-ping-ping
Back in July, Evan Allgood interviewed Alina Simone for The Millions. The writer and indie rocker talked about her new book and the phenomenon of “gilded turds” in the art world. Now, at Full-Stop, Jordan Kisner conducts his own interview with Simone, who tells him that “we’re in this age where every three seconds you’re getting pinged by some weird ‘ask’ that is almost like an invitation to a new life.”
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“Distressingly human”
“Today’s vampires have traded their capes for fashionable leather jackets, their claws for manicures.” Becca Rothfeld writes for the Los Angeles Review of Books about the “the distressingly human lives of vampires today.” Pair with our own Emily Colette Wilkinson‘s “Ethical Vampires” and “Ethical Vampires, part II.”
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The F-Bomb on the Silver Screen
Wikipedia Find of the Week: A list of films that most frequently use the word “fuck.”
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Becoming David Grann
The brilliant New Yorker reporter David Grann discusses his new collection, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes.