Recommended Reading: The always hilarious (and very Southern) David Sedaris on shopping in Tokyo and “the perfect fit.”
Always Changing
Now Turn to Page Thirty
Rebecca Schuman argues in an essay for Slate that extraordinarily long course syllabi are killing the college classroom. If it’s academic homicide you’re after, you might also want to check out Cathy Day’s piece for The Millions in which she suggests that academia might just be killing the novel, too.
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Notes From the First Year
“Jo Freeman, a feminist writer and activist who worked with Firestone from the beginning, said at the memorial, ‘When I think back on Shulie’s contribution to the movement, I think of her as a shooting star. She flashed brightly across the midnight sky, and then she disappeared.'” At The New Yorker, Susan Faludi writes on the legacy of Shulamith Firestone.
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Even More DFW
In honor of this weekend’s U.S. Open, Grantland‘s Michael MacCambridge is revisiting David Foster Wallace‘s epic essay on Roger Federer.
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Seeking an End to eBook DRM
Joe Wikert explains why the book industry needs to learn from the music industry, drop DRM, and adopt a unified ebook format.
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The Doctor Zhivago Plot
The CIA was known for unorthodox espionage techniques during the Cold War, but using Doctor Zhivago to undermine the U.S.S.R. is one of the strangest. The CIA helped print and distribute the banned book because it would make Soviets wonder “what is wrong with their government, when a fine literary work by the man acknowledged to be the greatest living Russian writer is not even available in his own country in his own language for his own people to read.”