This edition is much longer than usual because travel and a get-together time with two daughters (and three dogs at the best dog park I’ve seen) last weekend made everything else low priority. As a result, some of these links are carried over a week.
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- Writers should take a year off, and give us all a break (“The misapprehension that even the poorest writers are worthy of an audience is spurred further by online retailers prepared to sell anything with an ISBN.”) (via)
- The Comforts of the Apocalypse (“We flatter ourselves when we imagine a world incapable of lasting without us in it—a world that, having ceased to exist, cannot forget us, discard us, or pave over our graves.”) (via)
- To Be an American (“I don’t know what it fully means to be an American, but there is nothing that leads me to believe that our forebearers would want us to sit still when everything—including the freedom of thought, the freedom to move about freely, the freedom to not be searched, and the freedom speak out against its government—is being constricted.”)
Blog Headline of the Week
Irony of the Week
Bookish Linkage
- Shit book snobs say
- Using books for cultural diplomacy
- An Isaac Asimov primer
- An argument that the Neustadt International Prize for Literature is “America’s Nobel“
- What type of books would Jesus write?
- The Daily News gives a cultural analysis of the NYTBR bestsellers list
- The inaugural LiberaryReads list has been released
- Fifteen books banned for absurd reasons
- Forty trashy novels you must read before you die (I’ve not read any of them but don’t fear my life is incomplete)
Nonbookish Linkage
- Things they don’t tell you when you check into a mental hospital
- Why Rod Serling still matters
- A study suggests that a common optical illusion simply you seeing your own brain waves
- Faces of the Middle Ages
- There is an inverse relationship between intelligence and religiosity
- Geroge Orwell on media self-censorship
- Salman Rushdie deplores the “culture of offendedness“
- If you’re reading this, Rasputin was wrong
…a big part of living a reasonable life is self-deception
Chuck Klosterman, August 11, 2013
