The New Yorker to try its hand at renegade art form: the novella
Deborah Treisman says that the fiction department at The New Yorker is “often frustrated by novellas: they can do so much, and yet we can’t do much with them. There… Read more »
British Green Party rethinks their suggestion of reducing copyright terms after getting the side-eye from the likes of Philip Pullman
As we reported on April 24, the British Green Party isn’t so popular with writers right now. The party’s desire to limit copyright to 14 years from publication has dismayed writers such… Read more »
Hopscotching throughout Paris: one photographer’s celebration of Cortázar
The latest ode to the hopscotch as inspired by Julio Cortázar’s dizzyingly structure-less novel of the same name is the photography project by Hugo Passarello, now on display at the Lycée Français in an exhibit titled… Read more »
Beware of self-satisfying word search puzzles!
Fifty Shades of Grey opened in movie theaters today, and some parents in Monessen, Pennsylvania, are freaking out. Not about the movie or about the book, but about a word search puzzle… Read more »
The fate of Timbuktu’s literary and scientific heritage
On January 20, 2013, the Islamist militant group Ansar Dine set fire to the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research in Timbutku. The library and research center there housed 30,000… Read more »
Barbie’s ambitions of being a computer engineer are impossible without the help of her male friends
Barbie makes a couple of laptops crash. Oops: a virus has gotten in! But instead of fixing the problem herself—after all, she had brains enough to design a program instructing… Read more »
Liyuan Library: a destination haven near Beijing
Liyuan Library is a tourist destination. Many go there not in order to read the books but to stand inside an architectural marvel. And now there will be more tourists planning to visit, because its architect, Li Xiaodong, has… Read more »
Why flight attendants want our eyes on them and them only
A year ago, the Federal Aviation Administration allowed passengers to start using portable electronic devices during takeoff and landing. Hooray! everybody cried. But last Friday, the Association of Flight Attendants sued the FAA for… Read more »
How to paint happy little trees or turn happy little pages
In 2011, the writer and performance artist Madhu Kaza visited strangers around New York City to read them to sleep during their bedtimes. The project, called Here Is Where We Meet, titled after John Berger’s… Read more »
Revelations from Proust’s questionnaire
In the mid-nineteenth century, filling out confession albums was a popular pastime in English households and French salons. In 1886, at age 14, Marcel Proust filled out answers to an… Read more »