McSweeney’s debuts its food magazine, Lucky Peach, which features essays by chefs Anthony Bourdain and David Chang, recipes by Wylie Dufresne and Mario Carbone, and art by Tony Millionaire and Scott Teplin. The first issue is dedicated to Ramen, staple of the collegiate food pyramid.
The New York Times’s Ravi Somaiya is tweeting from Julian Assange’s trial in London: “Just got—and I am not making this up—a really strong whiff of gin in #Assangecourtroom. Unmistakeable.” For background on the case, check out Ken Silverstein's Bookforum essay on WikiLeaks as literature.
At myunfinishednovel.com, novelists are invited to share stats about their failed attempts at fiction. (Misery, after all, loves company.) Thomas Baines wrote more than twenty-nine thousands words of a sci-fi novel before running out of ideas; Farida Samerkhanova got over fifty pages in to a manuscript before switching to flash fiction. “The unfinished nature of this novel is not failure but rather a kind of catharsis,” explains one author, “at least that is what I keep telling myself.” [Via MobyLives].
The University of Iowa is offering a full, $37,000 scholarship to the prospective student who composes the best 140-character tweet.
