Look, we get it. You’re as sad as the rest of us that Frank Ocean’s new album didn’t actually drop on Friday. Luckily, there’s a fantastic essay over at The Atlantic which examines Ocean in the context of Harper Lee and the myth of the reclusive artist: “Channel Orange, like Mockingbird, is an unapologetic masterpiece for people defining themselves at the intersection of lived experience and possibility.”
Boys Might Cry
Orsonalia
This will either make or ruin your Tuesday: a clip of Orson Welles, in 1974, reminiscing about his relationship with Hemingway. As Sadie Stein writes, “it has everything: titanic ego-clashing, disingenuous concern-trolling, bullfighting, damning with faint praise, posthumous character assassination.” You could also read Jessica Roake on Peter Biskind’s My Lunches with Orson.
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Reader’s Tan
Have you ever gotten stuck in a book? Here's a delightful little comic by Grant Snider that explores the process of losing oneself in reading.
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Joan Didion: Model
Joan Didion: celebrated essayist and author, subject of upcoming crowd-funded documentary, style icon and model?
May the odds be ever in your favor, Suzanne Collins.
The Hunger Games raked in $155 million in its opening weekend. That makes it the highest-grossing non-sequel debut of all time. Over at Salon, Laura Miller tracks the steps that led to the blockbuster's mammoth success.
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But all he eats is candy.
The history behind the iconic Esquire cover that depicts Andy Warhol trapped in a swirling vortex of tomato soup. Before photoshop! I have a reproduction of this particular cover hanging in my kitchen, and I have to tell you that I can't bear to eat canned Tomato soup at all anymore.
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The Return of the (Poet) King
"Grim was the world and grey last night / The moon and stars were fled." It looks like even J.R.R. Tolkien might have been a an angsty teen. Two previously unseen poems by the legendary author have been found in a forgotten annual printed by a small primary school in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in 1936. For another Tolkien-related blast from the past, here is W.H. Auden's review of The Return of the King, book three of the Lord of the Rings series.