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Wild Food Spring #1: A Natural Science of Cooking
The first in a spring-time series, Dylan Gordon considers cookbooks, memoirs and fictions about wild, foraged foods. Reviewed in this essay: Mugaritz: A Natural Science of Cooking by Andoni Luis Aduriz, Phaidon Press, 2012. I first ate at Mugaritz, today one of the top three restaurants in the world, in 2003. At the time there was a…
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Post-apocalyptic collaboration: A review of Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman’s The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home
Reviewed in this essay: The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home, by Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman, Wattpad, 2013. “I dabble in modernity,” Margaret Atwood joked to George Stroumboulopoulos when pressed to explain her recent foray into online self-publishing on Wattpad. Wattpad is a YouTube for digital scribblings, a free online database where writers can instantly upload and…
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Bookishness: November 5, 2012
Rock (yeah) ing (yeah) chair (yeah) Rock your way to a full battery with Micasa Lab’s (still in development) ipad charging rocking chair. Canadian Poetries Promises poet secrets. How tempting. Fraaaaamed David Kaiser on the essay he didn’t write, “The essay falls in a beguiling category: the zombie fact, claims that are shown to be untrue…
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TRB Podcast: Robert Darnton and the Digital Public Library of America
Listen here: [audio:darnton.mp3] It’s always a pleasure when a favourite author turns out to be as charismatic and compelling in person as they are in print. That was my experience recently going to see Robert Darnton, University Librarian at Harvard, deliver the Grafstein Lecture in Communications at the University of Toronto law school. I first…
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Bookishness: Week of January 30, 2012
Mister Lonelyhearts Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) recently took over the Huffington Post Books twitter feed to dole out relationship advice in support of his latest book, Why We Broke Up. As one might expect, the resulting advice is clever and wry, but it’s also, in many cases, pretty bang on. Example: Q: “How do you go from being just…
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Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows
Reviewed in this essay: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing To Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. W.W. Norton & Company, 2011. Google. Huffington. Sports scores. Twitter. Text. Blog, blog, blog. Twitt—PHONE CALL!—Email. Facebook. Twitter . . . Does this read like the score of activities that occupy just two minutes of your day? In his Pulitzer-nominated book, The Shallows: What…
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Bookishness: Week of November 28, 2011
No sleep please, we’re novelists We’ve entered the final days of National Novel Writing Month. Particpants have until Wednesday night at 11:59:59 to finish the mandated 50,000 words that will mark their works as novels according to the people at NaNoWriMo. Anyone needing inspiration for these final laps might want to try Written? Kitten! (via Huff Post Books), or, for…