“Home is the place where there is someone who does not wish you any pain.” Stop what you’re doing and go read this interview with Darryl Pinckney, author of Black Deutschland, over at The Rumpus. Here’s a great Millions essay on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, which serves as a sort of (misguided) guide map for the protagonist of Black Deutschland.
Berlin Stories, Redux
Patty and Walter, anyone?
In The New York Times Magazine, Heather Havrilesky cautions against “The Divorce Delusion,” or one of modern drama’s most unrealistic tropes. “Infidelity, a love child (or two), dalliances with prostitutes, lewd online behavior; we’ve watched so many spouses bounce back from hell,” she writes, “that maybe we’re beginning to believe that there’s no trauma so great that it can’t be quickly metabolized into a courageous determination to sally forth against the storm.”
Scrubbing Facebook
Adrian Chen spoke with a former Facebook employee, and learned “how Facebook censors the dark content it doesn’t want you to see, and the people whose job it is to make sure you don’t.” In short: exploitation of “human content monitors” in the third world.
Boom Boom Boom
Fellow children of the ‘90s will remember how much that decade was a kind of Golden Age for disaster movies. Then as now, explosive blockbusters like Independence Day, Twister and Dante’s Peak satisfied a collective appetite for wide-scale destruction and mayhem. At The Morning News, Ethan Gilsdorf considers what the genre’s evolution has to say about us.
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Building Up
It’s fitting that Ray Bradbury credited his interest in architecture to an H.G. Wells story he read when he was five. At The Paris Review Daily, a previously unpublished essay by the author, who says his career in architecture started when he noticed there was no plaque at the residence of Sherlock Holmes. Related: Tanjil Rashid on Bradbury’s connection to the Middle East.
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