People taking office are swearing in using e-readers. “A Kindle is not a beautiful object,” Hannah Rosefield notes at the New Yorker. But this may be partly the point. “As cool as a copy of the Constitution from the eighteenth century would have been,” says Suzi LeVine, the American ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein, “ I wanted to use a copy that is from the twenty-first century, and that reflects my passion for technology and my hope for the future.”
Also at the New Yorker, Caleb Crain reviews a new biography of Stephen Crane. “Existential compromises fascinated Crane. Does an alcoholic choose to drink? Is a soldier blameworthy if he flees an attack that scatters half his regiment? . . . In narratives of the hopeless and the near-hopeless, of human beings experiencing powerlessness and self-delusion,
Emily Gould, whose first novel, Friendship, is forthcoming in July, has left her position at 29th Street Publishing.
Sunday’s US-Portugal World Cup game was the most-watched soccer telecast ever, drawing a total of at least 24.6 million viewers.