• “Is the goal so far away? / Far, how far no tongue can say, / Let us dream our dream today.” The worst poems by canonical writers. (Those lines are Tennyson’s—not his finest hour.)
• On the commercialization of nostalgia: “The memorial-industrial complex ensures that our past—our collective past—permeates our present.”
• How did Jeopardy! get its strange the-question-is-the-answer format? It was Merv Griffin’s doing.
• Aspiring writers: better to toil in obscurity. Studies show that literary prizes make books less popular. “Winning a prestigious prize in the literary world seems to go hand-in-hand with a particularly sharp reduction in ratings of perceived quality.”
• New behind-the-scenes footage from Full Metal Jacket shows Kubrick’s perfectionism in full force; “He labors to get just the right spacing between lime-covered actors playing corpses in an open grave.”
• Blunders—they’re a good thing!