“Whenever Bill Vignola typed his own name in MS Word, the email to Gates explained, it was automatically changed to Bill Vaginal. Presumably Vignola caught this sometimes, but not always, and no doubt this serious man was sad to come across like a character in a Thomas Pynchon novel.”
“It’s totally reasonable to freak out over how good the essays in Consider the Lobster or Slouching Towards Bethlehem are, but for my money, the writer who has had just as much—maybe more—influence on the style and tone of many of today’s writers is Nora Ephron.”
Feminist horror? Yes please.
How Birthright encourages American Jews to embrace Israel.
“Boston’s structure, for example, looks a lot like an ‘amorphous liquid.’ Seattle is another liquid, and so is Los Angeles. Chicago, which was designed on a grid, looks like glass, he says; New York resembles a highly ordered crystal.”
“To make a song that was, essentially, an anthem for guys who are most likely to date rape somebody was the most ironic thing.”
Roger Angell is getting older—he’d be the first one to tell you—but, lucky for us, is still willing to be the subject of the occasional profile.
Well, now you know.
David Mitchell, Siri Hustvedt, Karen Joy Fowler, and several others made it onto this year’s Man Booker Prize longlist, beating out every single Canadian.
