Closing tabs

Twin talk.

Building the fictional bridges on Euro notes in the Netherlands.

Henry Blodget interviews Jeff Bezos.

An interview with my high-school classmate (and scriptwriter for The Interview) Dan Sterling about the response the film provoked from North Korea (and the Washington Post on the Sony hack).

What are MOOCs good for?

Closing tabs

I have been remiss in the matter of closing tabs! Partly because I have a draft blog post open that I haven't gotten around to finishing - this is unusual for me, mostly I just whip 'em off, but I am due a correction for a missing chapter's worth of endnotes that vanished from the style book, I pasted in the notes but need to add numbers and check carefully so that I am not piling error upon error. Partly because I am having what is basically an amazing writing and exercise retreat in Cayman, with many posts at my other blog and much typing of quota (it's not draft as such, more notes and thoughts, but it is accumulating at a fine rate - I am at about 18K and if I keep working steadily I should have gone through the whole novel before school starts, which is the idea - sometimes I can keep writing quota for some weeks into the semester, but this September I have two major triathlons and a brand new lecture course with a clutch of seminar leaders to work with, and it is not going to be sensible even to try!).

So:

Rebecca Mead on why it's silly to distinguish rigidly between reading for pleasure and reading for self-improvement, especially in adolescence.

A great interview with Coach Dave and his fiancee Megan, who have been burning up the trails this summer! It's the first time I've worked with a coach for quite a while, and I am thoroughly enjoying it.

Twin novelists: an interview with Lev and Austin Grossman.

David Gerrard on the badness of Geoff Dyer's most recent book.

"Crocodile"

"We'd expect the collection, including denture moulds, to sell for £2,000 to £3,000."

Extra, extra

Amy Davidson is blogging at the New Yorker!

(Amy and I met the first week of our freshman year of college, when we were seated next to each other at all of the placement tests you have to take in that sort of situation; we soon became known as the Davidson Twins, we have been best friends now for more than half our lives, and it is also the case that certain other friends still introduce us in a sort of string: "Jenny-Davidson-and-Amy-Davidson-no-relation"!)

(I have also made a tiny private joke in the punctuation of the previous sentence which only Amy will appreciate!)

Twinned

At the Guardian, John Mullan lists 10 of the best identical twins in literature.

(Hmmmm, this would not be my list - I am not a fan of the Comedy of Errors! - and both the Cheerybles and Cor and Corin seem to me more along the lines of some of the few identical twins in literature that one can think of offhand rather than being in any more substantive sense the best! A book that should be on this list and isn't: Angela Carter's Wise Children. And I have a soft spot for Barbara Trapido's twins, too. It is not surprising that Mullan hasn't read Gina Frangello or Marcy Dermansky, but he would find both of those novels well worth his time also!)