Readings
This is provocative: I’d been wondering whether the recession will cause people to bond more, socialize more, become less isolated. David Brooks writes in his column yesterday that he thinks, on the contrary, it will cause more anomie.
“Late Bloomers,” by Malcom Gladwell, in the current New Yorker. It’s about creative process, contrasting precocious wunderkind geniuses (like Picasso) with late-blooming masters of craft (like Cézanne). Gladwell describes these as two distinct types, but I have a feeling that the reality may be more of a continuum—a great Kinsey Scale of creativity. Definitely a [...]
I’m in a reading frenzy recently: two thick novels in the last ten days. I inhaled ‘Then We Came to the End,’ by Joshua Ferris, and then moved immediately into ‘The Emperor’s Children,’ by Claire Messud. Purely by coincidence, each novel features an unstable character whose catalytic effects on the plot are driven by an [...]
I have a book review of Randa Jarrar’s coming-of-age novel, A Map of Home, out today in the L Magazine, NYC’s downtown freebie.
I’ve admired the L Magazine since it started up in ‘03-ish, and I am super psyched to be in its pages.
I’m digging Shoshana Zuboff’s column in Business Week (actually, to my surprise, I’m finding a lot of swell stuff to read in Business Week) about observing the economic panic of her neighbors in Maine.
She invokes the Great Depression and dramatically, but also bravely, she proposes opening our conversation about the economy way, way up:
"Discontinuous change [...]
"…I never fall asleep right away despite the new fatigues in my life. I think about the man from Cholon. He’s probably in a nightclub somewhere near the Fountain with his driver, they’ll be drinking in silence, they drink arrack when they’re on their own. Or else he’s gone home, he’s fallen asleep with the [...]
I just finished reading Rusell Shorto’s “Childless Europe” cover story in the NYTimes magazine. I don’t know what it says about me—maybe that it’s time for me to take a vacation from New York City—but I find the idea of a country with fewer people appealing. A little extra space, a little extra time, patterns [...]
Thanks to the marvels of the internet, I’ve just tracked down a poem that I have wanted to re-read since sophomore year of college. I remembered only the name, "Samurai Song," and the venue, The New Yorker . Granted, having known those two things, it wouldn’t have been all that hard to find. But in [...]
then I recommend picking up a copy of Marguerite Duras’s ‘The Lover’ as your something-sensational-to-read-on-the-train. It’s not the effect I was going for—it’s just the book that called to me most loudly from the ’summer reading’ 10% off rack at McNally Robinson, swear—but I thought the phenomenon too interesting and, frankly, too pronounced not to [...]
I’ve been reading a lot of different things these past couple days, including Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Reporter at Large” piece in the new New Yorker, about alternative energy in the town of Samsø, in Denmark. I loved the piece; I think it’s important to hear good news, of which there really is some, about the environment. [...]
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