“LET THERE BE stress. Let the body respond to stress as it does to injury and infection. Let stress be a vulture that pecks at the mind and devours the body. This will make people less likely to be stressed. When they see stress wreak wrath upon the body, they will surely calm down a lot.” It seems the big problem with intelligent design is that it had a pretty sub-par peer review.
Let There Be
nature has designed them to be irresistible
Great news for food lovers and over-thinkers everywhere: Gastronomica, the James Beard Award winning journal that takes a highminded approach to food and taste, recently began publishing writing online. Start with this lovely long article on the competition between Chinese and French black truffles. Or with a slightly cheeky revision of Pierre Bourdieu’s food space, if that’s more your, um, cup of tea.
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One Translation To Rule Them All
“Despite a glut of English translations (well over a hundred, by my count),” writes Dante scholar Robert Pogue Harrison, “New versions of the entire [Divine Comedy] poem or individual canticles continue to appear in rapid succession—six in the last decade alone.” Over at the New York Review of Books, he investigates three of the latest: Dan Brown’s Inferno, Mary Jo Bang’s Inferno, and Clive James’s Divine Comedy.
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Ramsquaddled and Pixellated
Are you familiar with the term, “clatterdevengeance”? It’s the favorite word of Jonathon Green, purveyor of the internet’s newest dirty slang dictionary, which seeks to document some of the more hilarious (and uncouth) experiments in the English language.
What Do Celebs Read?
Books from their own imprint we hope. “In the last decade, in fact, the celebrity imprint has become something of a cottage industry, an endeavor mutually beneficial to publishing houses in pursuit of stars and their lucrative fanbases and celebrities looking for another feather in their cap.” Some of the celebrities on this list might surprise you, read on to learn about which ones have a publishing imprint.
Claire Messud on the Value of an Ordinary Life
The author discusses social media, finding hope in art, and her new essay collection, Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write.
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Legendary Lovers
Recommended Reading: Becca Rothfeld on courtship and gender roles in Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, a classic work of Japanese literature written at the turn of the eleventh century.
Why We Can’t Respond To Everything
Are editors more accessible than ever before? (For what it’s worth, we list our editors’ contact details.)