Even dogs are learning STEM now. Check out this rigorous program from Rollover Academy at McSweeney’s.
STEM for Dogs
The Realities of a Tiny House
"AYN: This house was built in 1835 but, as you can see, the antiquated design elements suggest the work of a second-rate architect in love with the past who never had an original thought in his wasted life." Go check out the newest episode of Ayn Rand's Objectivist House Hunters at McSweeney's.
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“I have a lot of feelings about the meeting.”
I highly recommend reading Jennifer Gilmore's emotional essay on meeting "the birth mother."
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Form of the Future
"For our readers, time is the precious commodity they invest in every book they decide to purchase and read. But time is being ground down into smaller and smaller units, long nights of reflection replaced with fragmentary bursts of free time. It's just harder to make time for that thousand-page novel than it used to be, and there are more and more thousand-page novels to suffer from that temporal fragmentation." Tor.com on why novellas are the form of the future.
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Love Sonnet
If you haven’t watched it already, you should now. Lin-Manuel Miranda reads a sonnet in honor of his wife and the victims of the Orlando massacre at the Tony Awards. “And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.”
Recommended Reading: Jesmyn Ward
Recommended Reading: An excerpt from Jesmyn Ward's new memoir, Men We Reaped. "This is the summer of the year 2000. This is the last summer that I will spend with my brother. This is the heart. This is. Every day, this is." Pair with: The New York Times profile of Ward.
How to Throw the Best Book Events
A new “book event crowdfunding platform” currently launched in beta, and it goes by the name of Togather. To get the party started, they interviewed Tumblr guru, Year in Reading alumna and all-around publishing maven Rachel Fershleiser about what it takes to throw a good book event.
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The Investigation of Feeling
“I think it’s important that poets exist in societies because they exist in the realm of affect. Feeling is important to them. How people feel, what they feel, what breaks them, how trauma resonates through their lives... that’s a legitimate space in poetry. It’s a legitimate space for investigation.” Aaron Coleman interviews Citizen author Claudia Rankine about intimacy, her writing process, and her experience in an MFA program.
Fences
Growing up in California, our own Michael Bourne didn’t have a full sense of his own privilege until 1981, when a chance encounter with a group of teenagers dressed up as skeletons woke him up to the realities of segregation in America. In a long essay for Orange Coast Review, he goes over the meaning of that incident, complete with meditations on Marin County, his abandoned early novel and his family’s history in Danville, Virginia. Pair with: Michael’s piece for The Millions on Tess Taylor’s The Forage House.
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