The New Yorker’s love-themed summer fiction issue includes stories by Rachel Kushner, David Gilbert, Karen Russell, and Ramona Ausubel. The lineup looks good, but the video “preview” is twee and pointless.
James Joyce’s eyesight worsened because he had syphilis, a scholar claims. The smoking gun is apparently a medication he was prescribed, galyl, a combination of arsenic and phosphorus that was exclusively used to treat the disease.
Rebecca Solnit celebrates the #yesallwomen hashtag, and connects it to a handful of recently coined terms describing elements of women’s experience. The new language marks a turning point in feminism, she argues: “Domestic violence, mansplaining, rape culture, and sexual entitlement are among the linguistic tools that redefine the world many women encounter daily and open the way to begin to change it.” Meanwhile, Mallory Ortberg explains “how not to review women’s writing.” A few things to avoid: denying that the work at hand is art or arguing that it’s “immodest”; claiming that one set of experience is more valuable than another; referring to women artists as wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, or lovers of male artists; asserting that the woman in question is “eccentric or atypical”; and claiming that only one work among a whole ouevre is any good.
Darcey Steinke remembers meeting Kurt Cobain twenty years ago, when she interviewed him for Spin: “Listening to the six hours of interview tapes, 20 years later, I can’t help noticing that it’s not only Kurt who seems fragmented. It is distressing how rootless and superficial I sound. I ask music-biz questions, I laugh a lot, but I am incapable of connecting with either Kurt’s anxiety or his interest in fatherhood.”
Reddit, Imgur, and BoingBoing are coordinating on a day of action against NSA surveillance. They will argue for“more direct action,” and encourage people to “install privacy and encryption tools.”
