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Podcast: R. A. Dickey, Knuckleballs and Baseball Writing
In this week’s New Yorker Out Loud podcast, Amy Davidson talks to Ben McGrath and Roger Angell about the strange charm of the knuckleball pitch and how to approach writing about baseball: http://nyr.kr/ZY1BCQ
(Source: newyorker.com)
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Why The New Yorker Doubles Consonants
In this week’s issue, John McPhee writes about first drafts and the search for the perfect word (subscription required): http://nyr.kr/Z6WC7i, and Mary Norris explains the use of double consonants in The New Yorker: http://nyr.kr/182eHqj
(Source: newyorker.com)
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Fashionably Branded→
This week in the magazine, Kelefa Sanneh writes about Dapper Dan, the Harlem designer whose flashy fur-lined leather coats helped shape hip-hop style. Here, Sanneh and Leo Carey talk with Sasha Weiss about status and influence in men’s fashion, as well as The New Yorker style when it comes to writing about clothes: http://nyr.kr/YBpQWM
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Patricia Cornwell’s Fifty-Million-Dollar Case
Katia Bachko on crime novelist Patricia Cornwell’s recent legal battle: http://nyr.kr/YpsTBf
“Regardless of how it turns out, Cornwell will likely turn the proceedings into fodder for her next best-seller, as she does with many of her encounters. ‘It all gets infused in my writing,’ she told me.”
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On Wednesday, February 20th, we will be hosting a hangout in our Google+ community with writers Patrick Radden Keefe and David Grann, moderated by their editor Daniel Zalewski, to talk about non-fiction crime writing, and how to approach the truth when certainty is impossible.
Read Keefe’s piece from last week’s issue on the Amy Bishop story: http://nyr.kr/11tOriy share your questions or comments with us here, and tune in to our Community on Wednesdayat 4 p.m. e.t., when the writers will discuss as many as possible during their hangout.
R.S.V.P. now: http://bit.ly/11OqjwP(Source: plus.google.com)
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Podcast: Killer Narratives→
This week in the magazine, Patrick Radden Keefe investigates the Amy Bishop case. In 2010 Bishop shot and killed several colleagues at the University of Alabama. In the aftermath of that crime, it was revealed that Bishop had shot and killed her brother in 1986, which Bishop and her parents have always claimed was an accident. Here Keefe and New Yorker staff writer David Grann talk with their editor Daniel Zalewski about the Amy Bishop story, non-fiction crime writing more generally, and how to approach the truth when certainty is impossible. Also, Kelefa Sanneh on drinking Scotch. Listen now, and click-through for more: http://nyr.kr/VJIXQi
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Laptop is dusty these days. His shell is slightly scratched. But he’s still bright on the inside—even polished—thanks to the years of oiling by fingertips and palms. He bears the marks of his experience. The A, S, E, D, C, O, L, N, and M keys are worn down to a point of near-illegibility. There’s evidence of lots of activity on the BACKSPACE key—though, having just sifted through a bunch of writing from those years, I think maybe not quite enough. Crumbs were, and continue to be, a problem.
Still, he looks basically great. I turned him on. His hourglass spun…
Nathan Heller revisits the ancient laptop he used in college: http://nyr.kr/SWx1Nx
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"One reason people’s aversion to poetry sometimes passes over into strong annoyance, or even resentment, is that poems steal our very language out from under us and return it malformed, misshapen, hardly recognizable…"
— Dan Chiasson on poet David Ferry’s beautiful thefts: http://nyr.kr/WtVe8C(Source: newyorker.com)
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"What does “every love story is a ghost story” mean? It captures, I think, the futility of Wallace’s quest. What writer ever had a more passionate affair with language? For him, a thing wasn’t alive if he couldn’t write it down…"
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D.T. Max on the title of his David Foster Wallace biography “Every Love Story is a Ghost Story,” and tracing the origins of a phrase: http://nyr.kr/VyJPnS
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James Guida on coming out of the aphorism closet: “Yes, I wrote a book of aphorisms… Looking back, this fact seems newly bizarre— aphorisms!” http://nyr.kr/TFABpT
