Digesting Orwell

“Food-packet rhetoric, like most advertising, is mainly in the business of selling nice feelings. Especially on-trend these days is an ersatz, kitschy friendliness. On a bar of chocolate, for example, the manufacturers boast that “we use only the finest quality organic beans from our friends in the Dominican Republic”. (Isn’t it nice that they are friends?)” The Guardian on Glorious Good and Orwell

“Vintage/Anchor Books is now experimenting with selling short stories à la carte, through its Vintage Shorts digital imprint. Throughout May, to mark Short Story Month, Vintage will release a digital short story each day for 99 cents, the price of many iTunes singles.” The range is wide, form Poe, Chekhov, Imrich, and Cather to Alice Munro, Jhumpa Lahiri and Junot Diaz.

New York Times on Cold River story the same price as iTune song

"Don’t leave too much behind, or you’ll bury the good stuff.) She finds that a “shrine,” if you can manage it, is also a plus: “Choose a pretty place to live (or die) in,” Jackson writes, and “die young.” All these occurrences contribute to a compelling “personal myth,” which is worth a hundred good reviews  Bizarre complicated formula to dying as bohemian

Yemen: Saudi prince promises free Bentleys to bomber pilots who killed 1,000 IBTimes

Since 1945, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has maintained the Doomsday Clock—a clock with a minute hand that moves closer or farther from midnight (doomsday) every year depending on the direness of humanity's situation. This year, the clock is three minutes to midnight. That's two minutes closer to apocalypse than in 2014.
Here's When We're Going To Die: Check Out The Doomsday Dashboard

The labyrinth isn’t just an idea. It’s a physical thing as well. Gospodinov goes on to list the things in the world that are shaped in its image, among them DNA, the very building blocks of our existence, and our brains, the thought centers powering our own internal mazes of fears, desires, and emotions. This can’t be by accident. As he sits in the dark basement of his childhood home, locked away from others for forty-eight days straight now by choice, Gospodinov takes on the persona of the minotaur. Jumping backwards and forwards through time he happens upon a startling discovery
Gospodinov’s novel reminds us that we must never forget that we are not alone. We must never lose sense of who we are, who we were, where we come from, and where we’re going. And we must never stop sharing the resulting stories of our wondrous explorations with the world at large because we must allow ourselves to feel everything or be doomed to feel nothing at all.
Nostalgia