Recommended Reading: On Scottish philosopher David Hume and cultivating an effective philosophy which “understands the world in which it operates.”
Beauty In Things Exists
Zone One Excerpt
As stated on his website, you can now read the first section of Colson Whitehead's forthcoming Zone One. (Scribd). The book will release this October, and it was tapped in our "Great Second Half of 2011 Book Preview."
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The Congenital List-Maker
In true Seinfeldian fashion, Arthur Martine, the Victorian writer behind Martine’s Handbook of Etiquette, drew up a detailed taxonomy of the various species of bore. These include the Loud Talker, who “silences a whole party by his sole power of lungs;” the Malaprop, who masters the art of inappropriate conversation; and the Life-Sharer, who may be familiar to the Facebook addicts of today.
It’s Late
Recent Pulitzer laureate Adam Johnson has a new short story in Esquire, and it’s a doozy, invoking drone strikes, Obama and Kurt Cobain in the course of its tightly-knit plot. Sample quote: “I wonder if the First Lady was the one to turn off the machine.”
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Degrees of Separation
Urmila Seshagiri writes for Public Books about Jhumpa Lahiri's In Other Words in its original Italian. As she explains it, “the dual-language Italian-English format literalizes the very ‘separazione totale’ that is In altre parole’s subject, reminding us, page by page, of potential losses.” Pair with Hannah Gersen’s Millions review of the book.
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#LastTweet
The Times collects the final tweets of a number of celebrities who died this year. They are generally banal but the context turns them poignant.
Changing Definitions
With the Internet endlessly reshaping, reforming, upending our lives, etc., it’s important to ask: what exactly constitutes a magazine these days?
The Winds of Winter Excerpt
"Somewhere off in the far distance, a dying man was screaming for his mother." Entertainment Weekly has the first paragraph of the next installment of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire.
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The Electric Typewriter Two-fer: Tom Wolfe and Susan Orlean
The folks at The Electric Typewriter have struck again, this time offering fifteen classic reads from Tom Wolfe and twenty more from Susan Orlean.
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