“The short story, like the western, is periodically said to be on the brink of a comeback.” We’re currently in one such period, and the assertion “would be good news – if there were any reason at all to think it was true.” Laura Miller considers the (scant) evidence.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Playwright Bryony Lavery Explores The London Tube Bombings
Thursday, premiering next week at the Adelaide Festival, depicts the disaster through the eyes of the victims; the bombers themselves are not shown.
3D-Printing Pen Lets You Draw Sculptures
“The 3Doodle pen, developed by US start-up WobbleWorks, works much like a handheld 3D printer. It contains a mains-powered heater that melts the plastic beads used in such printers. … Lift the nib in the air and a length of plastic exudes from the nib and solidifies, allowing you to create 3D objects by building up multiple wispy strands of plastic.”
Why British Newspapers Turned Hilary Mantel’s Intelligent Speech Into A ‘Venomous Attack’ On The Duchess Of Cambridge
“Mantel was attacking the paper doll in which newspapers have imprisoned the real Kate Middleton. … The point of Mantel’s piece was necessarily invisible to parsing in a Daily Mail news story. So a story had to be made – because here was a famous writer writing about a subject of intense interest to the paper – by missing the point.”
Here’s The Speech Brits Are Arguing Over: Hilary Mantel On ‘Royal Bodies’
“These days she is a mother-to-be, and draped in another set of threadbare attributions. Once she gets over being sick, the press will find that she is radiant. They will find that this young woman’s life until now was nothing, her only point and purpose being to give birth.”
Ken Burns Wins Battle With New York City Over Central Park Five Footage
“Yesterday, a District Court judge in New York City blocked the city’s quest to subpoena unused footage that the filmmakers … gathered during production. The footage would have been used by the city lawyers in lengthy federal suit brought by the wrongfully convicted defendants.”
Yannick And The Philadelphians Begin To Reshape (Not Break) The Mold
For his second season as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Yannick Nézet-SÉguin’s “presence increases from nine to 11 weeks. Subscription concerts expand from 78 to 84, though ‘Beyond the Score’ lecture/concerts go on hiatus for lack of sponsorship. The single biggest innovation is a composer-based ‘micro-festival’ Oct. 31-Nov. 2. Three of the orchestra’s principal players will premiere new pieces.”
Mike Daisey Says His Steve Jobs Fiasco May Have Done Some Good
“I shared the concern that everything I’d done would actually cause more damage than good, but I spent a lot of obsessive time tracking all of it, and it’s clear at this point that that’s simply not the case at all,’ Daisey says, citing reports that pressure from Apple, and agitation by Chinese workers, has improved their lot.”
Atheist Churches?
Alain de Botton has been arguing that we should have temples without God(s) – and in fact an atheist congregation of some 300 souls has sprung up in north London; members “congregate to sing secular songs, celebrate life and the natural world, have readings from secular texts, like Alice in Wonderland, and have secular sermons, on topics like ‘life is all too brief and nothing comes after it’.”
We Already Have Atheist Temples – They’re Called Cathedrals (And Mosques, And So On)
Claire Creffield: “I didn’t warm to Alain de Botton’s suggestion, in his book Religion for Atheists, that we should start building ‘atheist temples’, because not far from my house there is already a splendid one. … The building is Durham Cathedral.”