“My real work consists neither of prose or verse, but in the recognition of my own stupidity.” So held the Austrian novelist Heimito von Doderer. He had a point literature »
7 Thoughtful Gifts for Neighbors (Even if You Don’t Know Them That Well)
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Weight Lifting in Old Age Does More Than Just Keep Your Muscles Strong.
HMM: Increased risk for all-cause dementia in people who abstain from alcohol.
Why Book Covers Matter
New Infectious Threats Are Coming. The U.S. Probably Won’t Contain Them. New York Times
The Australian Town Keeping Square Dancing Alive
William Boyd: Q & A
Any Human Heart-author William Boyd has a new book coming out -- The Romantic -- and at The Guardian Anthony Cummins has a Q & A with the author, William Boyd: ‘The books world is much tougher now’.
Interesting (and troubling) to hear how times have changed:
How has the writing life changed since you began publishing ?As to Stendhal, I' m not so sure that he: "isn’t read so much in English nowadays", as Cummins has it -- recall also, that there's a new translation of Red and Black, by Raymond N. MacKenzie, just out from the University of Minnesota Press; see their publicity page
The 1980s was a kind of boom period but the challenge for a literary novelist now is to just keep the show on the road. It used to be you could write a novel every couple of years or so and have a perfectly nice bourgeois life. Now the mid-list has gone. The brutal fact is you either sell or you don’t. Friends of mine who’ve written 12 novels can’t get published or their advances have dropped by 80%. It’s a much tougher world.
Lookism in TikTok. Which visual features predict video success?
Why are New Yorkers eating dinner at earlier times?(NYT)
“Its people would benefit from something approximating “state capacity libertarianism with Somali
characteristics.””
Median home value on Martha’s Vineyard rose from 700k to $1m over the span of the last year. A local’s dissection of local NIMBYism.
How is drug decriminalization going in Oregon?
Danger of politicizing science
Worst book by former Trump officials