November 2011
51 posts
“A more thorough investigation in the archives of the local Grange Library would...”
– White Teeth by Zadie Smith (via novazembla)
“A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down,...”
– Henry David Thoreau (via thisjunebug)
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Media Choreography and the Occupy LA Raid →
futurejournalismproject:
Via Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic:
During the Los Angeles Police Department’s forcible removal of the Occupy LA protest last night, they chose 12 reporters and photographers to represent the media as a whole. This is called a “media pool”…
…The LAPD deployed this old-school method in a decidedly 20th-century way. First, they didn’t select a single web-based...
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nprfreshair:
From the archives: Saul Bellow
As...
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On Keeping a Notebook →
tetw:
by Joan Didion
Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores.
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The Vocation of Teaching and the Penn State... →
Paula Marantz Cohen weighs in on the issue.
Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he's... →
laphamsquarterly:
Looks like Dr. Who is alive and well in Geneva.
michellelegro:
Police said Mr Cole, who was wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age, would not reveal his country of origin. “Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate...
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The Daily Scholar: Trading Up →
When I left academia in 2008 to try to be a full-time writer, the last thing I was looking forward to was the commercial side of my new profession. Like every good leftist and many an academic, I looked on the market as evil, a place that would debase your values and suck out your soul if you gave it half a chance. But here’s what I’ve discovered in the last few years: I kind of like it a...
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The Daily Scholar: Thanksgiving Day Repainted →
“I’ve been trying to imagine Norman Rockwell trying to paint the modern American family gathered around the Thanksgiving dinner table. For four decades Rockwell was the custodian of our domestic mythology, mainly with his covers for The Saturday Evening Post, which fixed in our collective memory the sacramental moments of small-town life—Bobby’s first haircut, Barb’s first prom—and its...
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High-Grade Reading Material from... →
tetw:
Every editor, publisher, writer, and serious reader has a little stash of articles they would recommend time and again - we asked The American Scholar to list their ‘must reads’, and here they are:
When Kerouac Met Kesey by Sterling Lord Why two counterculture heroes, one representing the Beat ’50s and one the psychedelic ’60s, had a lot less in common than you might expect.
The...
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The Daily Scholar: The Accented Among Us →
Consider the foreign instructor.
Getting past this thickly accented gatekeeper to a respectable grade in Chemistry 101 or Art History 312 is a collegiate rite of passage, much like purchasing twin XL sheets or deducing that the color you know as blue might actually be the same color your roommate calls green…
Jessica Love publishes a weekly blog with us called Psycho Babble.
“The lamp said,
“Four o’clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have...”
– T.S. Eliot, “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”
Mount. So isolated, so decisive. To take action, but going nowhere. Backward. (To “Memory!” — also alone.)
Sleep. Prepare for life! And:
“Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune.”
The moon holds no grudges whatsoever.
(via winesburgohio)
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The Coming Death Shortage →
tetw:
by Charles C. Mann
Medicare, Social Security, retirement, Alzheimer’s, snowbird economies, the population boom, the golfing boom, the cosmetic-surgery boom, the nostalgia boom, the recreational-vehicle boom, Viagra - increasing longevity is entangled in every one.
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The Daily Scholar: Yankee Come Home →
“But of course,” Susan Sontag says somewhere, “New York is not America.” But of course: the notion is a commonplace, not least among the liberal classes. People like me, in other words, and probably people like you. And we all know what the formula means: that the values and sensibilities that New York epitomizes—cosmopolitan, freethinking, cultured—are somehow not America, either. That we,...
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The Daily Scholar: If It Talks Like the Truth →
Despite their obvious inconsistencies, we repeat aphorisms to one another, even to ourselves, all in the name of good advice.
Jessica Love publishes a weekly blog with us called Psycho Babble.
“One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty one and even twenty three...”
– Joan Didion, Goodbye To All That, 1968. (via xelvinn) [interview here] (via nprfreshair)
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The Daily Scholar: Dogs and Us →
A burial site discovered in Mallaha, the upper Jordan Valley of Israel, contains the 12,000-year-old bones of an elderly human. The skeleton’s left hand embraces, with unmistakable affection, the bones of a puppy.
Priscilla Long publishes a weekly column with us called Science Frictions.
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“[Readers] must be given room to play their role in the act of writing—to...”
– William Zinsser Read Visions and Revisions. 