Sorry I haven’t done much non-Unrequired Reading posting lately. I’ve been kinda busy with work, but also back to thinking about writing and other projects. Anyway, enjoy this week’s links. I’m off to New Orleans for a conference tomorrow, but maybe I’ll come back with a crazy travelogue or something!
I like to think this is another Required Reading kickoff, but maybe this piece — a review of a book about the campaign to free Soviet Jews — is of limited interest to my gentile readers. I think it’s important/required, but then I was one of the people in the crowd in the 1987 rally in D.C. (thanks, Mom!).
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Hey! It turns out that there’s a piece of writing by Jonathan Franzen that I actually like!
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Speaking of writers and suicide, this appreciation of Stefan Zweig by Andre Aciman reminds me that I gotta get back to reading Cultural Amnesia
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I’m fascinated by the business of building and selling airplanes, and you should be, too.
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No, really! Even when it gets as ugly as the story about U.S. military’s refueling tanker contract, it’s still fascinating!
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Isiah Thomas is utterly delusional. (I once gave this book
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To make up for that last link, here’s The Dunk:
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Blind Man, Hare Krishnas and Woman – NYC Photographs 1968–1978 by Paul McDonough.
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Ordinarily, I wouldn’t make fun of someone’s speech impediment. HOWEVER: you need to go to the Wilson Quarterly’s podcast page and listen to the introduction to the Winter 2010 edition. The lisping editor’s attempts at saying “Thucydides” are even funnier than the impression I used to do of Tom Brokaw trying to call a baseball game pitched by Ted Lilly. (Also, bad podcast. Don’t listen to the rest of it.)
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Last week, I did one of those Facebook memes, naming 15 movies that made a lifelong impression on me (in 15 minutes). Somehow, I neglected to add The Night of the Hunter.
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The lower Hudson Valley sure is beautiful in the autumn.