What’s it like working at Amazon.com’s Pennsylvania storage facility? "I never felt like passing out in a warehouse and I never felt treated like a piece of crap in any other warehouse but this one," said former employee Elmer Goris. "They can do that because there aren't any jobs in the area."
At the Washington Post, Ezra Klein introduces 'Wonk Reads': a weekly roundup of “the five best long-form stories related to economic and domestic policy.”
MacArthur Genius grants have been announced! Among this year’s winners: Former Poet Laureate Kay Ryan, New Yorker writer Peter Hessler, and poet A.E. Stallings.
Even without the @SalmanRushide Twitter handle, Salman Rushdie (tweeting as @SalmanRushdie1) has been cultivating a lively social life on the microblogging service. Since joining last week, he’s already picked up over 16,000 followers, and is currently "locked in a Scrabble deathmatch series" with Kylie Minogue.
Tom Bissell profiles Jim Harrison for Outside magazine.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 1996 novel News of a Kidnapping is selling out all over Tehran after Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi cited the book as an accurate reflection of his life under house arrest. “If you want to know about my situation in captivity,” Moussavi allegedly told his daughters last month, “read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's News of a Kidnapping.”
Titian’s “Portrait of a Man,” van Dyck’s “Portrait of the Artist,” Rubens’s “Triumph of Christ Over Sin and Death,” and El Greco’s “View of Toledo” were several of the paintings that Ernest Hemingway lingered on during a 1950 trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
