“Putin, like Hitler, understood that the purpose of spectacles is to dazzle the eye while clouding the mind.” For the Daily Beast, staff writer Bill Morris writes about the thuggish dictators who love the propaganda of the World Cup. (If you haven’t already checked out our list of seven great soccer reads, do it now!)
Putin Wins the World Cup
Questioning the Score
Lucy Madison asks how the 25 National Magazine Award nominations went to 25 male writers and discovers it may be because fewer women write long-form journalism, “particularly at those publications that tend to get nominated for National Magazine Awards.”
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Perhaps They’re More Into Non-Fiction
I’m neither a therapist nor a zoologist, but maybe if we want to ward off midlife crises in great apes, we should stop reading them so much Jane Austen.
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Droit ou l’Ordre
Believe it or not, but the widely publicized murder case is not just a modern phenomenon. In 1761, Voltaire became obsessed with the case of Marc-Antoine Calas, a young man who was found dead in his home city of Toulouse. At The Paris Review Daily, a post on the Candide author’s impact on modern justice.
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A Stop-Motion Valentine
A little stop-motion film qua valentine that might appeal to V-day nonbelievers.
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A Slow Death
Gawker.com will end operations next week – and this time it’s for good. Over at the New Yorker, Jia Solentino writes about what made Gawker singular in the online world. “A lively, difficult brand of unevenness was inherent in Gawker’s work, and this still seems to confound people: Why, if it took its work seriously, would it run ‘some of both the best and worst of 21st century journalism,’” as Salon put it, and all under the same name?”
Pig Tales
“I move in a desultory society and often a week or two will roll by without my going to anybody’s house to dinner or anyone’s coming to mine, but when an occasion does arise, and I am summoned, something usually turns up (an hour or two in advance) to make all human intercourse seem vastly inappropriate.” In the new issue of The Atlantic Weekly (not to be confused with the Monthly), a reprint of a classic E.B. White essay.
Yuks of the North
“A Canadian author, a farmer, and a First Nations teenager went fishing. The farmer mostly sat there quietly while the author and the teenager tried to find common ground, even though the gulf between them felt massive.” A Canadian literary scene joke book.