Over at the Catapult, Nicole Chung has launched a series on adoption, featuring essays by Megan Galbraith and James Han Mattson. You could also check out Matthew Salesses’s Millions essay on inciting incidents and new beginnings as an adoptee.
When We Were Young
Needs More Filigree
Kate Heart has put together an array of charts breaking down the covers of 2011's Young Adult fiction. Spoiler: the average book featured filigree and a white girl whose head is "mostly/ completely missing."
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Our Massive, Shared, Ubiquitous Digital Brain
Michael Seidlinger writes on how consciousness occurs online. As he puts it, “We have all become Sisyphus, pushing our rocks up a hill littered with hyperlinks and tweets, perpetually, futilely, refreshing the page of existence.” Pair with this Millions piece on the best of literary Twitter.
Who Reviews the Reviewers?
Our own Lydia Kiesling discusses James Wood’s literary “lodestars,” and also looks at “what is fascinating, if not exactly fun” about The Fun Stuff, the critic’s latest essay collection.
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On Optimism and Despair
“In your earlier novels you sounded so optimistic, but now your books are tinged with despair. Is this fair to say?” Zadie Smith's remarks upon accepting the 2016 Welt Literature Prize on November 10th, and the question of whether "multiculturalism" is a failed experiment. Read our review of Smith's latest novel, Swing Time, here.
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Perils of the Humanities Students
In Florida, legislators are wondering whether or not they should raise tuition costs for students studying the humanities, or really anything other than STEM fields. Likewise, James Dyson (yes, the vacuum guy) bemoans Britain's abundance of "students choosing to read humanities at university." As a rejoinder, one New Statesman blogger notes that the study of humanities does not inhibit technological innovation, and that as a bonus, "we gain from having people who reshape our cultural landscape and put things in new contexts."
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Playing Ball
In the early days of sportswriting, journalists weren’t necessarily focused on soccer, football or even baseball. In the forties, boxing and horse racing were still important beats, and they gave W.C. Heinz the opportunity to build his legacy. In the Times, a review of The Top of His Game, a new collection of the reporter’s sportswriting. You could also read Sebastian Stockman on the problem with sportswriting as a genre.
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