The New York Review of Books blog is dealing in the night these days, with their series on dreams. Can you resist the sleepy logic of some of the world’s most talented writers and thinkers contending with the scenes that come unbidden to their minds at rest? Or is the point that for the mind, to dream is the opposite of rest? Pico Iyer kicks it off: “Perhaps we impute too much to dreams precisely because we cannot control them; we infer that they come to us from some larger or at least external place that knows things that we don’t.”
On this, a very sad day for literature, Chinua Achebe has died at 82. I plan on revisiting his Paris Review interview this weekend, with grief and gratitude.
Unbelievably, Marjane Satrapi’s incredible graphic memoir Persepolis has been banned from being taught in some of Chicago’s public schools due to its “graphic language and images.” As one Chicagoan high school senior put it, “they’re banning a book that’s all about freedom of speech.”
Hazlitt’s own Michelle Dean has a piece over at New York magazine's The Cut, explaining how the Steubenvile convicts will or won’t be added to the national registry of sex offenders. If you’ve been following this case—or if you clicked through the other week when I mentioned Mallory Ortberg’s Gawker essay criticizing the media’s coverage—then you’ll already be familiar with some of the rhetoric going around about these young men and the young woman who was raped by them. Bert Archer also took a look at the role of social media in both the crime and its prosecution here earlier this week.
On a significantly sweeter note: I’m really glad that Ta-Nehisi Coates is still alive.
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Image from Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis
