The Awl is upset with Dave Eggers‘ novelization of Where The Wild Things Are, a chapter from which was published in The New Yorker along with the publicity photo that is driving them bonkers. As is the terrible writing.

Hands Off That Rumpus, Dave Eggers!

Tom Scocca: And the next nine pages, not counting the cartoons, are devoted to a piece of “short fiction” by one of the Warner Bros. movie’s screenwriters, which is a novelization of the Warner Bros. movie’s story.

This is a big, long step beyond using the fiction space to give everyone a preview of the new Jhumpa Lahiri. It is a step that carries the New Yorker off the sidewalk and into a deep ditch bubbling with raw sewage.

I am upset because it was the single most stupid piece of writing I can remember ever seeing there, bar none. Read the rest of this entry »

Johann Hari on Tracy Kidder, Strength In What Remains:

Nobody quite knows where the terms Hutu and Tutsi originated, or how. When European colonialists—first the Germans, then the Belgians—arrived in this part of Africa in the late 19th century, they found there was a division in the society between two tribes, but it didn’t seem to mean much. Read the rest of this entry »

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Never mind that we frequent this place together, is it not true that these electrons meet in a prearranged way so as to give the appearance of words, in English, a feast, a table at which you may dine or not? (Such freedom!) But if there is anything happening at all, if the web is anything, it is a vast and mostly empty shared, imagined space. The most striking thing about which is the speed and ease with which millions of minds take it up. Read the rest of this entry »

Mail Online: … a few years ago, when my husband Chris and I were on holiday with a group of friends and family in France.

Seated around a table in a rustic restaurant, one of the party noticed a stuffed animal peering beadily from a glass case and a lively discussion ensued.

‘I wonder what that is?’ said Chris. ‘I think it might be a stoat,’ said a male friend. ‘No, it’s a ferret of some sort,’ ventured my brother-in-law. Read the rest of this entry »

The power of an appeal to decency @ The Paepae

“Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you’ve done enough,’ he cried; and as McCarthy showed that he was going to go on regardless, Welch added: ‘Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?’…

But this is precisely what I think we’ve lost, in the dissolution of all things decent that the awful democracy of the Internet has brought about, and shall never see again. Not in the same way. Moral authority—where is the Joseph Welch of today? Read the rest of this entry »

Scotland. Our Eddie. Still at it, the spunky lad.

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Doug writes today about guns showing up at health care rallies and imagines, what if, instead of good ol’ boys, it was, say the Black Panthers … Oh my. Can you fucking imagine. A row of uniformed (black leather jackets and cool berets, as I recall) angry, young and solemn African-American men carrying fucking guns. Read the rest of this entry »