Byline Media, a London-based crowdfunded platform for independent journalism, has launched a book-publishing arm. Byline Books’ first release, A Virtue of Disobedience by Asim Qureshi, “was typeset, proofed, and printed within five weeks of the fundraising effort’s end date, April 25.” Journalist Mark Piesing talks to Qureishi and to Byline Media co-director Stephen Colegrave about the venture.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Eva Hoffe, Heir At Center Of Court Battle Over Kafka’s Papers Dead At 85
Eva’s mother, Esther (Ilsa) Hoffe, was the secretary of Kafka’s friend and executor, Max Brod, and she inherited Brod’s archive when he died. After Esther’s death, the National Library of Israel, citing the term’s of Brod’s will, sued Eva for the papers, leading to a long string of litigation.
The Most Stolen Painting In The World
It is also “arguably the single most influential painting ever made. But while eleven-twelfths of it is intact, miraculously after so many centuries of adventures, one-half of one key panel remains missing.” Noah Charney retells the story of the “Ghent Altarpiece,” Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.
Headed Toward The Weekend And Still Catching Up
Fred Hersch Trio, Heartsongs (Sunnyside)
Sunnyside’s reissue of Hersch’s 1989 sessions reminds us how impressive the pianist was in his recording debut as a leader at the age of 34.
There’s A Place Where Viennese Operetta Can Still Seem Magical
“It’s the lederhosen that grabs you first. Two gents were walking down the street ahead of us in full Alpine rig … Among the flowerbeds and fountains that surround the main theatre of the Bad Ischl Lehar Festival a posse of young women crossed our path, all wearing embroidered dirndls and laughing. By the time we took our seats in the auditorium, we were grappling with a deeply un-British notion: that none of this was ironic. We weren’t at Glyndebourne any more.”
Why Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’ Keeps Its Hold On Us In Spite Of #MeToo
Caitlin Flanagan: “Lolita is a novel about a man who kidnaps and repeatedly rapes a 12-year-old girl, holding her captive until she escapes at 14. No one can blame the people who won’t read it. But then there are the rest of us. The book is about obsession, and its uncanny feat is to create that very same emotional state in the successive generations of readers who defend it. Moreover, many who have loved it most ardently are young women — the ones whom we might imagine being its most furious critics.”
‘Pained Admiration’: Two Indian Writers Try To Make Peace With V.S. Naipaul
“I suspect you feel it as well: how to speak about a writer whose work has been meaningful — in my case, profoundly so; I could not imagine my life without it — as well as a source of frustration or real pain. I have admired Naipaul as much as I have found him difficult to admire, a murky admixture that I find difficult to explain or clarify, and which I find with no other writer.” Pankaj Mishra and Nikil Saval exchange letters.
Can An Algorithm Really Figure Out How Sad A Song Is? (And If So, What’s The Saddest Number-One Hit?)
The folks at Spotify think so. Their valence scale (higher = happier, lower = sadder) has “been used to develop a ‘gloom index’ of Radiohead songs, to reveal the most depressing Christmas song, [and] to find out which European countries prefer sad songs (Portuguese fado really is a downer).” So data journalist Miriam Quick took the 1,080 songs that have held the top slot on the Billboard Hot 100 and looked at their Spotify valence scores – and she found that what the algorithm identifies as sad doesn’t quite track with what most humans think of as sadness.
The Spirit Of Burning Man, And Why It Just Doesn’t Fit Into A Museum
For all of its insane growth, creeping capitalism, and occasional insufferability, writes Jillian Steinhauer, the desert festival largely continues to uphold its “‘radically participatory ethic,’ the idea that there are no spectators because everyone can and should be involved in building the contents of Black Rock City.” The problem, when you try to put art from the festival into, say, a Smithsonian museum, is that “casual as they may try to be, art museums are, at the end of the day, uptight. They’re object repositories and arbiters of taste and culture. This makes them an uneasy fit with the rigorous populism of Burning Man, where everyone’s expression of creativity is welcome, no matter how primitive.”
The Edinburgh Festivals Have Gotten Too Enormous: Guardian Editorial
“For many, both locals and would-be visitors, the festivals represent not so much a joyous overabundance of culture as a costly impossibility. … The city comes under huge pressure during August: there are crowded streets, innumerable tour buses, and a city centre that can feel hollowed out by Airbnb lettings and more and more new luxury hotels. … Meantime, the festivals themselves are caught in the curious trap of endless expansionism: the notion that each year’s ought somehow to be bigger than the last, that increased ticket sales and more visitors are necessarily and unquestioningly to be celebrated.”