At the New Yorker’s News Desk blog, novelist and former Air Force pilot James Salter ponders the missing Malaysian airplane, and imagines what it was like to be on board: “There have been no announcements, or, worse, there has been an ominous announcement that causes panic. At some point, the passengers, perhaps coming out of sleep, know.” Meanwhile, at Wired, pilot Chris Goodfellow offers a simple theory about what happened.
Felix Salmon analyzes Dorian Nakamoto’s denial that he was the creator of the internet currency scheme, Bitcoin, as reported in Newsweek last week.
For universities, hiring off the tenure track is simply “part of the business model,” the equivalent of corporations favoring temps. Noam Chomsky on worsening work conditions for faculty.
Last week, Yasmin Nair bemoaned a publishing culture that demands that writers work for free or almost free. At Avidly, Evan Kindley agrees, but argues that you can’t blame little magazines like the one he’s writing for. The “vitality” of the latest crop of scrappy new publications—The New Inquiry, Jacobin, LARB—depends in great part on their ability to “evade or short-circuit the established journalistic market.”
At n+1, editors and contributors share what they’ve been reading. Rebecca Mead, Janet Malcolm, Grace Paley, Doris Lessing, Masha Tupitsyn, Norma Klein, Margery Kempe, Elena Ferrante, Ursula Le Guin: the list skews decidedly female. Rich Beck finds that now that he’s working on a book he can’t get past page 100 of The Wings of the Dove. Has all the writing made him “stupid and narrow”?