ATTN: NYC. GO SEE TWO SMART AND TALENTED WRITERS FROM QUEENS TALK TO EACH OTHER.
This is seriously what Full-Stop editors dream about, and then have to take cold, cold, showers just to get ready for our Americorps jobs- Victor Lavalle and Gary Shteyngart will be sharing the stage tonight at the 92Y. If you’re in town, it’s only $10 (If you’re over 35, it’s $19, and I don’t trust […]
It sure is an interesting time to be publishing books and giving them away for free. Out in idyllic Concord, Massachusetts (how right you are, gentle reader, in fact it is the breeding grounds of Transcendentalism, American democracy and the worst grape ever), the Concord Free Press is taking the publishing crisis by the scruff […]
Have you ever wondered whether you’d fit into the upper class of late-19th Century England–and wanted to be chastized with a Victorian moralistic severity if you don’t? If this is your greatest desire, well, get in line behind the Canadians! The McCord Museum in Montreal has made dreams come true for those of us who’ve […]
Watson: Just How Scared Should We Be?
“A few weeks ago, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings got whupped up on by IBM’s Watson in three consecutive episodes of Jeopardy! Billed as the ultimate intellectual showdown between man and machine.”
Today In: Herman Melville/Dragons
I’m not going to make much of an effort to gild this lilly, so here are the bare bones: the trailer for a soon to be released film entitled Age of the Dragons appeared on Slashfilm today and it’s a reimagining of Moby Dick, but with dragons. Pause for a second. Ok, want a little more?
Smelling Books [Things to do in NYC]
This lady’s new performance art piece consists of smelling every book in the MoMA Library. According to her: The goal of this personal olfactory exploration is to foster a discussion of the future of print media, the ways we read, methods of classification, and the way in which smell is entwined with memory. Her name […]
Interview Magazine Finally Gets It Right
While I’m generally a pretty big fan of Interview, their overuse of celebrity-on-celebrity interviews is regularly nauseating. More often than not those interviews — I’m looking at you Marion Cotillard and Nicole Kidman — are nothing but ego massage and fluff. No more. In the magazine’s latest issue, Will Oldham/Bonnie “Prince” Billy/Palace/Mordecai Applebaum and his […]
Fiction is Real: Captain Ahab’s Ship Found
It’s true! American marine archaeologists have discovered the sunken whaling ship that belonged to the captain whose whaling disaster inspired Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick. The ship had basically disintegrated, but researchers found harpoons, a hook for stripping whales of their blubber, and cauldrons used to turn the blubber into oil.
David Mitchell on The King’s Speech
David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and three other fantastic novels has a piece in Prospect Magazine about Best Picture winner The King’s Speech. While the acclaimed film at best simplifies the historical record and at worst blatantly ignores it — Christopher Hitchens, like him or not, has […]
Things You Should Do RIGHT NOW: Support WFMU
The great New Jersey freeform radio station WFMU, which has neither corporate sponsorship nor government funding (i.e. NO CREEPS) is having its pledge drive right now. Tom Scharpling, the host of world’s strangest call-in show, The Best Show on WFMU, is one of the funniest people on the planet, and he’s put together his own […]