Writers & Writing
“Breaking Bad”: White supremacist fable?
If you judged by TV and movies alone, you’d think “pure” drugs were seeping out of American society’s every pore, along with hot doctors and secret agents gone rogue. Even if suburban 15-year-olds don’t ask their dealers for THC percentages after seeing Oliver Stone’s Savages — and smart money says some of them are — craft beer isn’t the only boutique intoxicant buzzing around the nation’s subconscious. In the shadow of the high-fructose-corn-syrup backlash, everyone from the Olive Garden to the proverbial Brooklyn popsicle startup is trying to cash in on craftsmanship. Meanwhile, screenwriters (clever advertisers in their own right) have found that the easiest way to hook viewers on drug-dealer protagonists is to sell crack as small-batch artisanal rock cocaine.
Ars longa, vita brevis, said Hippocrates—more or less: time’s a-wastin’. The worst corollary of this aphorism, to my mind, is that we are not going to have time to read everything. In fact, we’re going to be able to read only the tiniest little bit. Some thousands of books—that is it.
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Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation
Produced by Kate Phillips, Magnum Photos Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation
The Greatest Books of All Time, as Voted by 125 Famous Authors - Maria Popova - Entertainment
Tolstoy holds a 11-point lead over Shakespeare in these literary opinion polls. "Reading is the nourishment that lets you do interesting work," Jennifer Egan once said .
“ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First and is in print large enough to be seen from the backseat of the cab as it lurches forward in the traffic leaving Wall Street and just as Timothy Price notices the words a bus pulls up, the advertisement for Les Miserables on its side blocking his view, but Price who is with Pierce & Pierce and twenty-six doesn't seem to care because he tells the driver he will give him five dollars to turn up the radio, ‘Be My Baby’ on WYNN, and the driver, black, not American, does so.”
The Best 100 Opening Lines From Books
Is Holden Caulfield Obnoxious? | Book Think
You already know where you stand on Holden Caulfield. Either you found him a kindred spirit in your youth and continue to sympathize with him—less blindly, more wistfully—as you age; or else you found him a whiner then and you find him a whiner now. According to the New York Times , the second faction is gaining ground. In an oddly statistics-free trend piece, the paper reported in 2009 that The Catcher in the Rye has lost favor among teens: “what once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many as ‘weird,’ ‘whiny’ and ‘immature.’” (No word on whether any wiseass added “phony.”) Of course, some high schoolers will trash Hamlet if given the chance, but on this book you won’t find much consensus from the literati, either.
The Wire: Slavoj Žižek and Frederic Jameson Weigh in on the HBO Series
Wendell Pierce and Dominic West in a still from The Wire . Last week, Slavoj Žižek—the clown prince of contemporary Marxist philosophy, star of The Pervert's Guide to Cinema , scene-stealer of Examined Life , and subject of the celebrated documentary Žižek!
Téa Obreht: “High-School Confidential”
I was an awkward child. Tall, gangly, and, like everyone else in my family, severely myopic.
Word Soup: Downton Abbey | Wordnik ~ all the words
Chances are you’re caught up on the anachronisms of Downton Abbey , between Ben Zimmer’s Visual Thesaurus post , his talk with NPR , his post for Language Log that goes beyond the nitpickery, and Fritnancy’s post on the 1918 anachronism, contact . But what about the words and phrases the show has gotten right? From obsolete medical terms to nautical sayings to phrases which may be common to Brits but are novel to these American ears, we’ve gathered them here, including a couple of terms that no one on Downton Abbey should be saying unless they own a time machine.
10 Recent YA Books That Totally Make Up for ‘Twilight’
If you mention young adult literature to a member of the general public, a few series will probably come to mind their mind. Hopefully, they’ll think of Harry Potter or The Hunger Games , and even though they might know the novels from the movies or Entertainment Weekly covers, at least they’ll associate young adult literature with strong, resourceful heroines and rich, detailed fantasy worlds.Charles Dickens turns 200: Why his social insights still resonate today
Charles Dickens, 1843.Literary Mixtape: Jo March
If you’ve ever wondered what your favorite literary characters might be listening to while they save the world/contemplate existence/get into trouble, or hallucinated a soundtrack to go along with your favorite novels, well, us too. But wonder no more![ Editor's note: While your Flavorwire editors take a much-needed holiday break, we'll spend the next two weekends revisiting some of our most popular features of the year.