The New York Review has reprinted some of Hilary Mantel’s written advice to actors who are performing the stage adaptation of her historical novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. To Cardinal Archbishop Thomas Wolsey, she states: “You are, arguably, Europe’s greatest statesman and greatest fraud.”
Ben S. Bernanke, the former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has started a new economics blog at the Brookings Institute’s website. Inaugural post: “Why are interests rates so low?”
This June, a collection of early Elmore Leonard stories will be posthumously published.
Last night, HBO aired their documentary expose of scientology, Going Clear: The Prison of Belief, based on Lawrence Wright’s 2013 book. The show portrays this so-called religion as corrupt, abusive, and kooky, and exposes its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, as a crackpot science-fiction author whose stroke of genius was realizing that while novels aren’t lucrative, writing can pay off if it’s used to found a self-help cult. Going Clear doesn’t spend much time looking at Hubbard as a wordsmith, but over at Salon, Laura Miller reads Scientology’s founding text, Dianetics, concluding that it’s not far removed from standard slush-pile fare—except for its disturbing violent streak, and a very real sense that Hubbard is battling with mental illness and past trauma.
Andrew Sullivan, the prolific blogger who started his popular arts and culture site, The Dish, back in 2000, says he had to retire from the profession because the relentless pace of constant blogging nearly killed him. Sullivan, who was, prior to becoming a blogger, a longtime editor at the New Republic, complains that he has had to work seven hours a day—and worse, “for those seven hours or more, I was not spending time with any actual human being, with a face and a body and a mind and a soul.” He reports that he is now using his time more wisely—exercising and meditating, and not thinking about Hillary’s e-mails or the upcoming election.