The Millions » Curiosities

A Story of Decline

Thomas Beckwith — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:00:00 +0000

Last month, in a review for The Millions, Chris Barsanti called George Packer’s The Unwinding an “awe-inspiring X-Ray of the modern American soul.” Now, in The Guardian, Sukhdev Sandhu calls the book “decent, meticulous and concerned,” though it could have benefited from the “roiling prose-fire of Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi.”

“To look worse after a haircut”

Thomas Beckwith — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:00:06 +0000

Come on, admit it: you wish English speakers had a word for “one who shows up to a funeral for the food.”

A Great Career

Thomas Beckwith — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:00:19 +0000

Back in May, our own Sonya Chung reviewed All That Is, the first novel in 35 years by A Sport and a Pastime author James Salter. For another viewpoint (courtesy of the LRB), check out James Meek’s assessment of the book alongside Salter’s Collected Stories.

Tom Wolfe on “The Human Beast” and its Kingdom of Speech

Nick Moran — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:15:39 +0000

Tom Wolfe’s next book will be a “nonfiction account of the animal/human speech divide,” reports Sarah Weinman. Presumably this effort – entitled The Kingdom of Speech – will be based on the author’s “Human Beast” lecture from 2006. (A lecture he went on to explicate in a 2008 interview with SF Gate.) Hopefully the Great White Suit’s return to straight nonfiction will prove more successful than his attempt at fictionalizing Miami last year.

A Song of Spare Time

Thomas Beckwith — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 14:00:45 +0000

As you might expect, the world of Game of Thrones fanfiction is complicated, pornographic and more than a little bit intimidating.

Tuesday New Release Day: Gaiman, Hage, Bell, Delijani, Calvino, Peach

C. Max Magee — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:00:31 +0000

New this week: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman, Carnival by Rawi Hage, In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell, Children of the Jacaranda Tree by Sahar Delijani, the collected letters of Italo Calvino, and the seventh issue of McSweeney’s food mag Lucky Peach. Bonus Links: You can now subscribe to listings of literary new releases in your feed reader with this RSS feed. Plus, check out more new release RSS feeds here.

The Mingle, Part III

Nick Moran — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 19:00:36 +0000

Mark your calendars, New Yorkers. The third installment of Ryan Chapman and Jason Diamond’s inimitable networking shindigs will take place on Thursday, July 25th at the Tribeca Grand Hotel. Come for the craic and the free booze, but stay for the balloons.

Kids These Days

Nick Moran — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 18:00:04 +0000

“The complexity of texts students are being assigned to read has declined by about three grade levels over the past 100 years,” says Eric Stickney, the educational research director for Renaissance Learning.

Quantum Invisibility Cloaks: For When Ordinary Invisibility Cloaks Won’t Cut It

Nick Moran — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:00:30 +0000

This might come in handy if you’re trying to escape a bad review, or even avoid hanging out with your family. A team of physicists has developed a theory for “how to cloak a region of space from the quantum world, thereby shielding it from reality itself.” Take that, Harry Potter.

Why Are Writers Paid So Little, and Programmers Paid So Much?

Nick Moran — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:00:07 +0000

“And so despite my esteem for the high challenge of writing, for the reach of the writerly life, it’s not something anyone actually wants me to do. The American mind has made that very clear, it has said: ‘Be a specialised something — fill your head with the zeitgeist, with the technical — and we’ll write your ticket.’”