In A Crowded Theater: Boiling Frogs Chapters

He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool

~ Joint Conference Muse

Maggie Doherty discusses how and by whom a writer is paid might affect how and what they write. For instance, if you are being paid by a big commercial publisher and your compensation and future book publication is tied to how many copies of your current book sells, how much money it makes the publisher, then you are more likely to write the kind of fiction that caters to the mass market. And that is fine if that is what you want to do. What, however, happens to the genre of literature we call art? What happens to experimentation?

today’s writers must meet market demands. Those who succeed often do so by innovating no more than is necessary. Many of today’s most celebrated writers marry experimentalism with accessibility; they produce prize-winning fiction with just a dash of formal excitement, enough to catch the eye of cultural gatekeepers but not so much that it renders a work unmarketable. They forge aesthetic compromise and favor political consensus. Their work reassures readers more often than it unsettles them. This isn’t so much bad literature as boring literature. After all, what’s more exhausting than reading, time and again, experimentation you’ve come to expect? 

Leopold Tyrmand leaves Poland and arrives for good in the United States in 1966. On his first day in his adopted country, in New York City, he notes: “An ad of Eddie Condon playing in the neighborhood restaurant. All seems larger and better here than in Europe with the exception of frankfurters, which are not as good as in Frankfurt.” In brief, that’s Tyrmand—impish, jazz-loving, happy by nature, relieved to have breached the Iron Curtain and left its dreariness and brutality behind The past tense is out of use 

Victims of the Mexican Drug War Are Suing the Banks that Handled the Cartel’s Money Mother Jones

"The words are stretched across the air
Vast distances from here to there,
Or there to here:  it does not matter
So long as there is media chatter.
The cold words are stretched across river

“Cold War modernism,” then, doesn’t refer to experimental artwork produced between the end of World War II and the Reagan administration, but to “the deployment of modernist art as a weapon of Cold War propaganda by both governmental and unofficial actors as well as to the implicit and explicit understanding of modernism underpinning that deployment Los Angeles Review of Books

WOW Print Cold River and other books were making a recovery

Apparently there’s a special place in hell for Democratic politicians who criticize Barack Obama as insufficiently progressive. And a special place in heaven for politicians who have accepted $133,246 from the private-prisons industry but tell Black and Hispanic voters at a debate shortly before the Nevada caucuses and South Carolina primary that they want to end the private-prison system Angry Bear

The identity museum has become so pervasive, its rules so rigid, that it's almost never commented upon. Then there are Jewish museums... museums 

“‘It’s not that we’re selling by the yard,’ said the store manager, Nicky Dunne. ‘But if they’re interested in a subject’ — 19th-century French topiary, Brutalist architecture, salmon husbandry or something more obscure — ‘and haven’t properly explored books on that subject, then they come to us.'” The New York Times: How Do Our Imrich Ancestors Make Libraries Great ...

Leon Black is mystery Picasso buyer Financial Times

There is an old proverb  "open confession is good for the soul". Recently, it seems that users of social media have taken this message to heart. Every month, news services report on criminals who have confessed on Facebook. Social Media Confessions

Sunlight launched Hall of Justice, a robust, searchable data inventory of nearly 10,000 datasets and research documents from across all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the federal government 

...The Lives and Lies of a Professional Impostor

“People have a tendency not just to believe people, but to want to believe people,” he said when asked how he deceived his victims. “And that’s part of the wrong in the things that I have done, because I take that away from people.”