Over at The New York Times, Year in Reading alum Parul Sehgal reviews two books about migration, A Life Apart by Neel Mukherjee and The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota.
“The Migrant is Not A Metaphor”
The Circle of Life
Matthew Shaer takes a gander at the history of book pulping.
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Sick Burns
Daily Show writer Daniel Radosh was asked by his son’s school to sign a permission slip in order to read Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451. Hilarity ensued. Also: remember that time a bunch of parents tried to censor The Lorax?
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How Fact-Checking Works
Ever wondered how the fact-checking process works? Well wonder no longer. The Columbia Journalism Review posted an excerpt from their recently published Art of Making Magazines collection, and it explains The New Yorker’s workflow as well as the perils of “Shoot-the-Fact-Checker Syndrome.”
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If You Like TED Talks
On the Media‘s Bob Garfield hosts “The Genius Dialogues,” a new interview podcast featuring recipients of the MacArthur Foundation’s so-called genius grants. First-season guests include Radiolab creator Jad Abumrad; Luis von Ahn, founder of the language learning app DuoLingo; microbiologist Manu Prakash; choreographer Elizabeth Streb; and writer and producer David Simon. We’ve hosted a few geniuses here as well, including Ben Lerner, Yiyun Li, and Karen Russell.
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One of Ireland’s Lesser Known Sons
For those aching for more Ireland in the wake of Bloomsday, here’s a piece about noir-master Raymond Chandler’s childhood in Waterford.
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Raised on B-Movies
I’ve loved old sci-fi B-movies forever, and a staggering number of my childhood memories involve Ray Harryhausen. For this reason, I’m really geeking out over The New Yorker’s entire science fiction issue, but in particular this piece by Colson Whitehead deserves your time.
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Love Ever Write Often
“The way (Yeats) puts down a man’s head & a woman’s head side by side, or face to face, is terrifying, two irreducible singlenesses & the impassable immensity between.” The Paris Review has published a brief, fascinating letter written by Samuel Beckett to his aunt Cissie Sinclair containing an original poem and some positive criticism of the painter Jack B. Yeats. Top it off with this essay by Elizabeth Winkler about language, style, and translation–and how any of that might help to make sense of Beckett’s convoluted legacy.
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