Banning Junot Diaz and Calling the Cops on Jesus

By Hazlitt

New John Jeremiah Sullivan alert, y’all: in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine, “on the trail of the phantom women who changed American music and then vanished without a trace.”

If Jesus were alive today and hanging out in upscale neighbourhoods, people would probably call the cops on him.

“This really isn’t a book to celebrate, is it?” At the National Post, Mark Medley talks to Miriam Toews about her new book, All My Puny Sorrows, and the painful place from which it came.

At the New Yorker, Amy Davidson on Oscar Pistorius and the strange way guns behave in his hands.

Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert seem to really like each other.

“Put most simply, if a reader can’t deal with the book’s sexual content, a reader is definitely going to be unwilling to confront the central problem of colonial sexual violence in the novel.” Junot Diaz responds to a New Jersey teenager who wrote to tell him that her high school banned his book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

Oh shut up, Jenny McCarthy.

Passover begins at sundown, and Tablet has you covered.

Don’t touch me, bro.

“When I tell people I’m black, they find it unsatisfying. ‘That’s no fun,’ one girl jokes to me recently. ‘I thought you were going to have a story.’

The thing is that the ‘bro’ programmer didn’t exist: to be a programmer at all requires a degree of attention to detail, focus, and disregard for normative masculine pursuits that would be lost on the caricatured ‘brogrammer’ who bullies his podmates into going to the gym or the club.”

A gorgeous farewell to the TPS-L2, the world's first Walkman.

Oscillating waves of air, you say? Sure, but what does sound look like?

As the World Kerns.

Jesse Winchester died last week at the age of 69. Here he is singing “Sham-A-Ling-Dong-Ding,” bringing tears to the eyes of Neko Case, Elvis Costello, and, provided you’re not a cold and broken monster, you, too:

 

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