March 23, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Another Another Country By Sadie Stein It goes without saying that James Baldwin was a legendary speaker—a preacher turned orator turned public intellectual who knew the power of words. But hearing him never ceases to shock. Very little can be added to this mesmerizing recording of Baldwin reading from his 1962 novel, Another Country. Answering a prompt for The New York Times Book Review about why his book had become so popular, Baldwin wrote, Read More
March 22, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent But Is It Reading? By Sadie Stein Photo: Herman Turnip. Via Flickr. Yesterday morning, the New York Times reported that the prolific James Patterson is starting a new venture: a series of exciting, novella-length books called BookShots. Says the story: Mr. Patterson said the books would be aimed at readers who might not want to invest their time in a 300- or 400-page novel. And he hopes they might even appeal to people who do not normally read at all. If it works, it could open up a big new market: According to a Pew Research Center survey released last fall, 27 percent of American adults said they had not read a book in the past year. “You can race through these—they’re like reading movies,” he said during a recent interview in New York. “It gives people some alternative ways to read.” Read More
March 21, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Character Limit By Sadie Stein From an Olivetti ad by Studio 44 Advertising, 1956. There’s an expression called “using too many points.” It refers to those moments when a novelist (or any storyteller, really) strains credulity by using too many coincidences or easy plot twists or intersecting plotlines. It’s when the reader, or viewer, loses faith—the jump-the-shark moment, in essence. In some ways, it seems like God is using too many points, making Twitter’s tenth anniversary coincide with World Poetry Day. In some ways, indeed, we have not seen such a luridly obvious contrast since SantaCon coincided with New York’s massive Millions March demonstration. Read More
March 18, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Automaton By Sadie Stein Paris’s Musée des Arts and Métiers, which reopened in 2000, is an age-of-reason triumph—it’s even on the site of an old priory. Devoted to inventions of all kinds, it’s divided into sections like Materials, Energy, Mechanics, Construction, and Scientific Instruments. It’s an interesting place, but it is not the best place to see the famed automaton of Marie Antoinette, playing the dulcimer. Read More
March 17, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Security By Sadie Stein Alexey Kuzmich, Old Age, 1986. When I lived in France, I volunteered a couple of times a week at a major expat cultural center. I’d intended just to help out at the soup kitchen and maybe with a little tutoring, but this somehow also turned into working the security desk, too, under the direction of a fiercely proprietary octogenarian Englishwoman, Nancy, who was despised by everyone else, but performed her volunteer tasks with such zeal that removing her seemed out of the question. Read More
March 16, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Protection By Sadie Stein Louis-Robert Carrier-Belleuse, Porteurs de farine. Scène parisienne, 1885. Before I traveled to France this week, I made myself go back and read my diaries from the time I’d lived there, years ago. I had avoided rereading them ever since, and I was relieved to find, in my actual words, very little of the sadness I knew lurked between the lines. I’d said plenty about all the different jobs I did, about the people I taught and the children I nannied and the soup kitchen at the local church. There were details about deals I’d gotten late in the day from the vegetable vendors and stuff I’d found discarded by the side of the street. Well, I was never very good at being young. Read More