Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.
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—Lorrie Moore, writing in the New York Review of Books about July’s debut novel The First Bad Man.

Ben Huberman | Longreads | February 2015 | 13 minutes (3,354 words)
For the past ten years Frank Warren has been collecting and publishing other people’s anonymous secrets, sent via postcard, on his blog, PostSecret. The stories behind the postcards span the entire spectrum of human drama, from tales of petty revenge to accounts of abuse and severe depression. This richness of experience — along with the secrets’ visual design, by now a recognizable mishmash of Americana, well-executed kitsch, and ironic arts & crafts creations — has kept the site popular through multiple waves of internet fads. Originally a local mail art project in suburban Maryland, the site has spawned several books, including The World of PostSecret (released in November 2014), as well as a play, a TED talk, and numerous live events. Read more…

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—Paul Ford writing in MIT Technology Review about our conceptions of artificial intelligence, and why they can scare us.

— Joe Warwick writing in The Independent about Noma’s five-week stint in Tokyo. Noma is regularly rated as the world’s best restaurant.

Sari Botton | Longreads | February 2015
A year ago this month the world lost an incredible talent. Maggie Estep, a great writer—and before that, slam poet/performance artist—died suddenly, a month shy of 51.
The loss has hit me hard, even though I had been just getting to know Maggie personally. She was someone I’d idolized from the time we were both in our twenties, she a couple of years older than I. I’d see her stomping around the East Village, where I lived, too, in a black dress with fishnets and a combat boots, utterly self-possessed and unconcerned with what you thought of her. Read more…

—From Laura van den Berg’s first novel, Find Me, about a mysterious illness that spreads rapidly across America, and what happens to the few who seemingly have immunity.

Gospel music legend and pioneer Mahalia Jackson is often associated with Chicago, where she moved as a teenager and rose to prominence, but her roots are in New Orleans. It’s there that the “Queen of Gospel” was born, and raised in a “shotgun shack of a New Orleans house,” a three-room dwelling that housed thirteen people and a dog. Her Crescent City childhood also helped shape Jackson’s political consciousness. Below is a short excerpt from “On Conjuring Mahalia: Mahalia Jackson, New Orleans, and the Sanctified Swing,” an article by Johari Jabir that appeared in American Quarterly in September 2009 (registration required):
I never did like the world-famous Mardi Gras that went on in New Orleans. It was a beautiful sight, but to me it was horrible. I have seen so many people hurt on that particular day . . . The white people would celebrate their Mardi Gras with big and expensive floats that went down the main part of Canal Street, which were very beautiful and high class . . . But for my people, for them it would be such a tragedy. If one of the tribes demanded that another “take low,” you know, bow to them, they’d kill each other and nobody was punished! The State, the law never did anything about the killings.
Note: the indented section above is from Jules Schwerin’s book Got to Tell It, as quoted by Jabir in his essay.
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In a recent issue of Haaretz, Avner Shapira profiled a woman named Jennifer Teege. Teege, a German-born black woman who was given up for adoption as a child, made a shocking family discovery in her late thirties: her biological grandfather was none other than Amon Goeth, a notorious Nazi known to many as a villainous character in the film Schindler’s List (Goeth was played by the actor Ralph Fiennes). Below is an excerpt from the story, detailing Teege’s moment of discovery:

—Scott Turow, writing in the introduction to By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from The New York Times Book Review
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