Music Notes: Neil Young, Woods, Health and Crushed Butler

1. The question isn’t if Woods have put out the best album of the summer, it’s whether At Echo Lake is the best album to bubble up out of the Brooklyn underground this year.  It’s really hard to say, and to be honest, I shouldn’t even make a statement like that — it’s barely June! 2009’s Songs of Shame has stayed on my turntable since I made the proclamation that it was one of the best albums of the year, […]

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Bites: Hemingway’s African Snows, Colson Whitehead on Your Next Novel, The Virtuousness of Swiss Prisons, and more

Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjara” may make a resurgence in the coming years, as the African snows, once “as wide as all the world…and unbelievably white,” of the sky-high peak could be completely obsolete within as little as 12 years. Lit. Is the Internet making you illiterate? Colson Whitehead on choosing What to Write Next: play darts! The Millions has compiled a descriptive list of Difficult Books.  I like this.  Let’s read them. Somerset Maugham broke all the […]

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Weekend Bites, The Frightening Edition: Keats Misdiagnosed?, the Penis as Literary Device, ScarJo to Rape Arthur Miller’s Work, Truths in Ghostbusters, and Why M&M’s Might As Well Be Crack

Happy Halloween!  In honor of the spooky holiday, Vol.1 has collected some particularly frightening Bites, ranging from the traditionally fun-filled, the absolutely outraging, and the sadly serious. Lit. Did medical malpractice lead to the death of John Keats, leaving the poet starving and anguished?  Wait, isn’t that what poets are definitively? After losing his own book deal, South Carolina governor Mark Sanford praises Ayn Rand. In a review of Alistair Morgan’s Sleeper’s Wake, The Rumpus expostulates on the penis as […]

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