A group of “female nonfiction storytellers” took a crack at boosting the number of female bylines last week by holding a story-pitching clinic for lady journalists. The event, titled “Throw Like a Girl,” attracted hundreds of people to a bar in Brooklyn, where the panel—featuring an editor for the New York Times, the founder of the Atavist, a writer for New York Magazine, and the founder of the Op-Ed Project— addressed topics ranging from building up the nerve to pitch, developing a tolerance to rejection, and counteracting the male clubbiness of the magazine world.
The recently laid-off editors of GOOD are in surprisingly high spirits in the wake of last week’s news: “Mostly, we’re disappointed that this editorial team won’t get to continue working together,” they wrote in a group dispatch on Tumblr. “We think we were pretty good at it. And we know we didn’t get a chance to realize the full potential of our collaboration... So we’d like to make at least one more magazine together.”
Science fiction author Ray Bradbury died in Los Angeles on Tuesday at the age of 91. The author of novels Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes, and short story collections The Martian Chronicles and The Golden Apples of the Sun, among others, Bradbury was credited with bringing sci-fi to mainstream readers, and most recently contributed an autobiographical essay to the latest issue of the New Yorker. Danny Karapetian, Bradbury’s grandson, first broke the news of his death in a statement to to the website i09. Karapetian then shared one of his favorite of his grandfather’s lines, taken from the book The Illustrated Man: "My tunes and numbers are here. They have filled my years, the years when I refused to die. And in order to do that I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, at noon or 3:00 A.M. So as not to be dead." For the uninitiated, The Los Angeles Times has a helpful roundup of which Bradbury books one should read first.
Driving around New Orleans in a Mustang, reading Westerns and listening to Louisiana jazz are three highlights of George Pelecanos’s week in culture.
In a graduation speech to Princeton’s class of 2012, alum Michael Lewis discussed how he went from being an undergrad who had never published anything ever, to being a sought-after economics writer who gets paid ten dollars a word. According to Lewis, it wasn’t a clear trajectory. After submitting his thesis in art history, Lewis asked his advisor what he thought of the writing, and got this response: "Put it this way" the professor told him, "Never try to make a living at it."
The summer issue of the Paris Review is out, and while the magazine doesn’t do themed issues, the editors note that between interviews with Wallace Shawn and Tony Kushner and pieces on pirates and cannibalism, there is a decidedly dramatic note to this season’s contents.
Via Lapham’s Quarterly, a podcast about Klingon, Esperanto, Dothraki, and other invented languages.
