Editors’ Picks
Highlights Page 54
Susan Read’s short fiction centers on a Kafka-esque interrogation in the back room of a coffee shop — you know, the one where they wear the green aprons — that’s a stinging indictment of the byzantine policies, procedures, and psychology of being a low wage employee.
INTERVIEWER You mentioned getting permission to write. Who gave it to you? MORRISON No one. What I needed permission to do was to succeed at it. I never signed a contract until the book was finished because I didn’t want it to be homework. A contract meant somebody was waiting for it, that I had […]
Lonni Sue Johnson was a successful illustrator, when the herpes simplex virus attacked her brain; she lost almost her entire lifetime of knowledge, along with the ability to form new memories. Michael Lemonick describes how she’s invaluable to neuroscientists working to understand how we make and store memories.
BuzzFeed has a touching, intimate excerpt of Insomniac City: New York, Oliver and Me, Bill Hayes’s memoir of his relationship with late neuroscientist and author Oliver Sacks. 10-13-16 I, soaking in the bath, O on the toilet, talking, talking about what he’s been thinking and writing — short personal pieces, for a memoir perhaps. He […]
The homogenizing force of globalization means that a shopping center in Budapest doesn’t look all that different from one central Turin, or York, or Cleveland. Is “Eastern Europe” as an idea disappearing? Try Jacob Mikanowski’s essay in the LA Review of Books for some suggestions (and some objections).
Mark MacKinnon tells the story of Naief Abazid — who, at the urging of some older boys, graffitied a school wall on a lark in Daraa, Syria, at age 14. The “writing on the wall” enraged Syria’s Baathist dictatorship, and became the source of ignition in the Syrian war.