In an excerpt from her forthcoming book, M Train, Patti Smith explains how she gained admittance into the Continental Drift Club, “an obscure society serving as an independent branch of the earth-science community.” She was invited to join the society, much to her surprise, after sending written requests to photograph the boots of the CDC’s founder, the explorer Alfred Wegener. “I am certain I didn’t quite meet their criteria, but I suspect that after some deliberation they welcomed me due to my abundance of romantic enthusiasm. I became an official member in 2006.”
The winners of the fifteenth annual Online Journalism Awards have been announced. The top honors in the breaking-news category went to recent start-up reported.ly for its coverage of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, The Baltimore Sun for its reporting on the Baltimore riots and the Freddy Gray case, and to the Globe and Mail for its reports on the shootings in Ottawa. The winners of the general-excellence category were the Missouri public-radio station’s website KBIA, Quartz, and the Washington Post.
The staff of Atavist magazine explains why they’re “discontinuing our native mobile apps to place all of our focus on the web.”
New York’s McNally Jackson bookstore is hosting two highly recommended author events this week: On Tuesday, Choire Sicha interviews Eileen Myles, who has just seen the re-release of her classic novel-in-stories Chelsea Girls and the publication of her collected poetry collection, I Must Be Living Twice; and on Wednesday, Lydia Davis and August Kleinzahler discuss the stories of Lucia Berlin, recently collected in A Manual for Cleaning Women.
