“[Don] DeLillo’s characters long to penetrate the enigmas and intrigues of his conjured worlds; DeLillo’s readers devour his sentences, images and narratives for what amounts to something similar: for all that DeLillo — the seeker, the prophet, the mystic, the guide — sees.” Don DeLillo has a new book, Zero K, out tomorrow. Go check out this review from The New York Times, and then go take a look at this essay from The Millions’s own Nick Ripatrazone on DeLillo and American athletics.
Born Without Choosing
omg omg omg
The first known use of O.M.G. was in 1917, in a letter sent to Winston Churchill.
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You Are What You Buy
This piece by Carrie Murphy is delightful and playful and a couple other “adjective”+fuls all in one.
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Nice Wall
In August of 1911, Franz Kafka and his future literary executor Max Brod paid a visit to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa. It was, all told, a weird time to make such a trip, because a week before the two arrived in Paris, crafty thieves abducted the famous painting. So why did they go if there wasn’t a painting to see? To look at the absence, of course. (h/t Arts and Letters Daily)
How 3d Projectors Make 2d Movies Worse
Roger Ebert explains how the time-consuming process of changing the lenses on complicated new 3d projectors is diminishing the theater-going experience.
Also Need a 4-Wheel Drive
Must be willing to perform “light, household maintenance.” Harry Bliss, an illustrator and cartoonist at The New Yorker, has purchased the former home of J.D. Salinger and will turn it into a retreat for one lucky cartoonist during February 2017. Pair with our review of J.D. Salinger: A Life, a comprehensive biography of the famously reclusive writer’s work.
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Origin Story
Over at JSTOR Daily, Tara Isabella Burton writes on historical interpretations of the Book of Genesis and literal readings of a text that had been interpreted as allegory for centuries.
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Tuesday Links: Power, ReCaptcha, Junot Diaz
Experience “THE POWER OF BOOKS“You know those annoying puzzles where you type in the letters so the computer knows you’re not a computer creating a fake account or sending spam? A group from Carnegie Mellon is using these “Captchas” to help digitize books. ReCaptcha is a special type of Captcha that displays words that book digitization software is having trouble deciphering. So, by letting the computer know you’re not a computer, you can help some other computers digitize our books.I missed Junot Diaz’s appearance at the Free Library of Philadelphia where he read from his new novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but Season Evans was there.