Over at Mental Floss–can you believe we haven’t linked to a magazine founded by Duke guys yet?–Miss Cellania offers an unorthodox but NPI-approved take on who the most influential person on the Internet is: Randall Munroe. You may not know Munroe’s name, but we hope you know his product. If not, you’re gonna have a fun next few days.
One of xkcd’s best strips was quickly immortalized into a futile but fun version of Tetris within days. Somewhat relatedly, Jacob Lambert pens his ode to the game, which he says brings “interior freedom.” We’re kind of upset he left out the Russian music. Gotta talk about the Russian music.
What we read while wondering where Mo Williams will play next year…
Nate Silver computes a simple but cool “Value Over Replacement Justice” statistic to show by one measure that Elena Kagan was the right pick over Diane Wood. We’re not totally convinced Kagan is an “Organization Kid” but David Brooks writes an excellent column arguing that she is.
Speaking of Kagan, NYT Magazine has an interesting profile of her former University of Chicago colleague Cass Sunstein, a potential albeit unlikely Supreme Court nominee himself.
Critical of Norv Turner’s clock management at the end of the Jets-Chargers game, Joe Posnanski wonders why NFL head coaches consistently make such simple time management mistakes. Speaking of the Jets-Chargers game, here is more evidence of Rex Ryan’s awesomeness.
In a time when weekly sports magazines that simply detail basic game plots and predictions have become less and less necessary, we have to wonder why it was up to GQ to dig deep into the ongoing Marvin Harrison investigation. Turns out the foil to all those diva receivers for so many years may be the worst of them all, Rae Carruth included.
In James Wood’s influential review, “Human, All Too Inhuman,” of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, he discussed what he calls “the littleness of the big novel.” His point, put somewhat crudely, was that as the ambition of novelists grows to include encompassing the entire geographical, political, and philosophical spectrum, works of fiction end up losing their humanity. As Smith herself said, “It is not the writer’s job to tell us how somebody felt about something; it’s to tell us how the world works.” As a result, Wood claims, the movement that he termed “hysterical realism” produces work that “knows a thousand things, but does not know a single human being.”
About a year after Wood’s condemnation of contemporary fiction first appeared in The New Republic, The Corrections was published. Jonathan Franzen’s novel certainly does not lack the kind of ambition Wood talks about: The Corrections spans cities, countries, and continents, covers multiple generations, deals with financial disasters and Eastern European political instability, looks at modern academia and middle-class suburbia. In short, the book does seem to know a thousand things.
And yet Franzen’s story remains wholly grounded and deeply personal. At its heart, The Corrections is a story of a Midwestern family, the Lamberts. The Lambert patriarch, Alfred, is a stubborn, straight-laced, intelligent, and principled man who is suffering from early but unmistakable signs of senility as the novel begins. As Franzen puts it: Continue reading →
We almost always recommend something from it, but consider reading this week’s NY Times Magazine cover to cover: It’s the 9th Annual Year in Ideas Issue and it features an interview with eminent University of Chicago Philosopher Martha Nussbaum.
When we read Russian lit–and you know we do–we do our best to procure the translation by the husband and wife team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The Millions recently did an interview with the pair about their methods, philosophies, and future projects.
Food is a big part of Thanksgiving. Which food that is, though, depends in part on what region of the country you’re from. Check out this “infographic” which shows where search queries for different Thanksgiving foods came from geographically.
Speaking of baseball and sabermetrics, as free agency hits, here’s an older piece from Patrick Brown of The Millions about baseball and its relationship with the Internet, including an in-depth analysis of gamecasts and the polarizing nature of J.D. Drew.
For people who like movies and graphs, it doesn’t get much better than xkcd’s breakdown of Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Jurassic Parkin graphical terms. Or does it? Vodkaster put together a subway map of the 250 best movies of all time, with different genres represented as different lines. Excellent stuff.
What we read while Google Earth-ing the rest of the Middle East:
Our friends over at The Millions got a jump start on decade-in-review countdowns, ranking the best novels of the last 10 years. For those who, like us, enjoyed Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, No. 4 on The Millions’ list, they offer a complete “Bolaño syllabus” for how to read more of the still-being-translated Chilean. And if decade-in-review countdowns are up your alley, get pumped for December, when we exercise our own love of rankings and unleash a massive retrospective on the last 10 years.
We’ve known about Tampa Bay Rays’ outfielder-cum-poet Fernando Perez for over a year now. Perez, a Jersey Guy and Columbia alum, is one of the most articulate athletes to come along in some time, a talent he showcases in an essay on poetry he wrote for the latest issue of Poetry Magazine. Perez has also written glimpses at Major League life for The New York Times‘ Bats blog and at Minor League life for MiLB.com.
This would probably rank highly on our list of “Differences between South Carolina and what we understand as normality.” Articles containing the words “crossbow,” “alligator,” and “16-year-old cheerleader” don’t normally end this happily. Something tells me she’d do fine at the Jersey school that apparently needs Tim Meadows and Tina Fey to step in to stop hazing.
No Pun Intended 
