“A group of young, attractive, if somewhat emotionally crippled people, who otherwise seem to have things going for them, have decided upon a secret pact to effectively end their futures. They want you to join them. Dinner parties at other people’s houses are involved.” For McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Erika Vause asks the question that needed to be asked: Does this harrowing plot summary describe a critically acclaimed film of the 2010s, or does it describe your PhD program? (Spoiler alert: It’s both.) Pair with this list of horror films about writers from the archives and you’ve got a real scarefest on your hands. We’re laughing, but we’re also crying.
Strange Cults, Powerful Elders, and Other Features of Academia
“Poems Are Unimportant”
“Poems are unimportant,” said Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago, though Kate Angus and our own Nick Ripatrazone certainly disagree.
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Pinckney and Smith from the NYPL
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No Shyster, He
Thanks to the efforts of Gerald Leonard Cohen, the world now knows where the word “jazz” came from, why certain types of sausages came to be called “hot dogs” and how New York got the nickname “The Big Apple.”
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Cuppa?
“Tea has started wars and ruined lives; we should be wary of its consolations.” On the problem with tea.
#Beowulf
Medievalist Elaine Treharne teaches a course on Beowulf at Stanford, and one of her primary theoretical questions for her students is, “What is (the) Text? … What constitutes Beowulf?” So she got to thinking. She wondered what she and her students would do “with a social media version of the poem.” What ensued is a distillation of the great epic in 100 tweets, which you can read over here.
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Harper Lee Sues Museum
The Guardian reports that Harper Lee is suing the local museum in her Alabama hometown. The octogenarian author of To Kill a Mockingbird, who currently resides in an assisted-living facility, claims that the museum is profiting off her fame without providing her due compensation.
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“The image of a mountain in the viewer’s mind.”
The images in Yuji Hamada’s “Primal Mountain” series for Granta’s “Japan” issue have been made available online, and they’re gorgeous. (The rest of the magazine is well worth your time as well.)
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Noble Things
Recommended Reading: A Public Space has new fiction from Roxane Gay, whose novel An Untamed State was recently reviewed for our site by Aboubacar Ndiaye.
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