After the UK government decided to go ahead with airstrikes against Syria, the writer Michael Faber, in a Swiftian satirical gesture, sent Prime Minister David Cameron a copy of his latest novel with a note suggesting that “a book cannot compete with a bomb in its ability to cause death and misery, but each of us must make whatever small contribution we can, and I figure that if you drop my novel from a plane, it might hit a Syrian on the head.” He concluded: “With luck, we might even kill a child: their skulls are quite soft.”
Readers of Time magazine apparently favor Bernie Sanders for “Person of the Year,” but he didn’t make the cut for the editors’ shortlist, unlike you-know-who.
If you haven’t yet read the essay on Marianne Moore (and her mother) in the LRB by its editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers—soon to be played on TV by Helena Bonham-Carter—we hereby give you permission to put aside whatever you’re working on and do so.
Chris Ware has made an animated cover for this week’s New Yorker with the help of This American Life’s Ira Glass, whom he calls “probably one of the few people alive making a living with a semiotics degree.”
You may have heard all you want to hear by now about the contested border between fiction and nonfiction, but in case not, Geoff Dyer seems unusually well qualified to talk to you about it.
The New York Times’s Modern Love column—which can, it seems, be romantic about anything, even journalism—is becoming a (star-studded) podcast.
And First Look Media, which has had its share of image problems, now wants to help keep journalism glamorous by making entertainment along the lines of Spotlight (which it co-produced).
At Lincoln Center tomorrow night, Dennis Lim will discuss his new book on David Lynch (seven of whose films will be showing this month as part of the Lynch/Rivette double retrospective) with Bookforum contributor and Village Voice movie critic Melissa Anderson.