By Willa A. Cmiel
Lee Seigel for the Washington Post on the End of the Episode. It’s a greatly informed, well-put essay on changes in American fiction. (Finally a good essay on contemporary fiction. Seigel is critical but not raging, constructive but unassuming): “Are you a Narrative or Episodic personality?… Or do you think that you live, like Huck Finn and every other picaresque hero, from isolated minute to isolated minute – episode to episode – and that far from adding up to a coherent tale, your life is ‘a tale told by an idiot… signifying nothing’?”
- Famed food critic Frank Bruni’s replacement has been chosen.
- A writer at The Millions reacts to Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece on To Kill a Mockingbird. I hope we keep talking about this book forever and ever.
- The films Stanley Kubrick didn’t make are “a wonderful and, in one case, plain weird footnote to his long and industrious career.” (via The Rumpus)
- Although most people usually dismiss it as a “necessary evil,” finally, here’s someone who agrees that the unpaid internship thing (policy? culture? standard?) is out of control. John Elledge at The Week sees it for what it is: a really big fucking problem. He cites specifically the media, but I see it raging all over New York, in many fields.