paper trail

Jan 28, 2013 @ 12:24:00 am

Betty Friedan

Steven King has published an e-book essay on guns and the culture of gun violence in America. The issue has been a freighted one for King since 1997, when he published Rages, a novel about a high school student who holds his math class hostage at gunpoint. (The book’s tagline: “His twisted mind turned a quiet classroom into a dangerous world of terror.”) According to the New York Daily News, Rages “is seen to have been an inspiration for several school shootings up until King pulled the printing of the book in 1996, after a copy of the novel was found in school-shooter Michael Carneal’s locker.”

California readers who bought copies of Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not About the Bike and Every Second Counts have filed a class-action lawsuit against the cycler for failing to come clean about his drug use. The case contends that “Armstrong duped them into believing the books were inspirational true accounts of the cyclist's accomplishments done without performance-enhancing drugs.”

Emily Stokes interviews the New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers.

Welcome to the new New Republic: The 102-year-old magazine has unveiled its redesign.

In the era of Big Data, literary analysis is increasingly done by computers.

On the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, Gail Collins considers the impact and legacy of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, “a very specific cry of rage about the way intelligent, well-educated women were kept out of the mainstream of American professional life and regarded as little more than a set of reproductive organs in heels.”