David Bowie was quite the avid reader. In his honor, his son, Duncan Jones, has launched an online book club that will focus on books Bowie enjoyed. The first book is Hawksmoor and the discussion is on February 1st. Will you be participating?
Join David Bowie’s Book Club
The Relevance of Plasma
The vigilant excavators at Longform have dug up a fairly old piece, written by the essayist Jo Ann Beard, on a time in her life taken up by cagey dogs, vanishing husbands and the plasma in Saturn’s rings.
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Schmidle’s Challenge
Nicholas Schmidle‘s riveting account of Seal Team Six’s Abbottabad raid was the highlight of this week‘s New Yorker. Yet he wrote the article without interviewing any of the team members. C. Christine Fair explains how he did it.
Words came in, marked for death.
The New Yorker has been hosting a Twitter game show, and this time around the contestants were words and in a macabre turn each word was berated by the audience, the people calling out for the death of that contestant. One word was forced to ultimately bite the bullet and will no longer be welcome in the magazine’s next issue. Tragic.
Reading with the Jetsons
Ever dreamt of using a sophisticated library where robots fetch your books for you? Well, you bespectacled futurist, guess what. (h/t The Paris Review)
Just Stop There
What do Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Year in Reading alumna Margaret Atwood have in common? They’re all great writers — and they all had only one kid.
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