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If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t ‘is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘is this character alive?

In responding to a possibly sexist interview question, Claire Messud offers a beautiful definition of great literature.

Pair with Virginia Woolf on how to read a book and Margaret Atwood on literature’s “women problem.”

history and literature lit interviews thought and opinion media and communication Salman Rushdie censorship

I’d say that, in general, [it’s] gotten worse. But one of the things our report highlights is that people have more tools to resist censorship using new media. For instance, in China, while there’s increased repression in the form of arbitrary arrests, artists held incommunicado and put under house arrest, and increasing hostility towards literature and free expression, there is at the same time a growing willingness of Chinese citizens to find ways to express themselves. In spite of all the repression, there’s been a growth of independent, non-state publishers to print things that wouldn’t be approved by state houses, and people have shown the willingness to post things online even if they’re not to the liking of the state.

Salman Rushdie on the state of censorship in the world. Essential addition to literary icons’ sentiments on censorship.

(↬ The Dish)

thought and opinion culture and society media and communication Dan Pink interviews advertising branding psychology

If a brand is making a promise that you’re going to feel better about yourself if you buy it, they’re making a false promise. Human beings metabolize their purchases very quickly. … This is an element of what social psychologists call “the hedonic treadmill”: If you’re always looking to validate yourself and get satisfaction from buying stuff or having a bigger house, then you’re on an endless, addictive treadmill. There’s no enduring satisfaction to this. If a brand’s only purpose is to get you on that hedonic treadmill, it might be good for business in the short run, but in the long run, you’re doomed. If you look at the components of long-term well-being, it has nothing to do with material goods. Once you’re past a certain level of material well-being, people’s long-term happiness and wellbeing is about having deep personal relationships, believing in something larger than themselves, and doing something meaningful that they enjoy.

Dan Pink on the psychology of consumer culture and how marketers manipulate it. Pair with the science of whether money can buy you happiness.

thought and opinion love interviews Wendy MacNaughton Caroline Paul culture and society

You cannot know everything about the creature that you love, and you also can’t control that relationship. And maybe that’s okay — because we can’t control relationships. In fact, if we did control them to the degree that we want, it would probably provide us with nothing. Relationships are probably our greatest learning experiences.

Love and Art – wisdom from creative duo Caroline Paul and Wendy MacNaughton.

Ian McEwan thought and opinion history and literature lit creativity and innovation interviews

I was making a strength out of a kind of ignorance. I had no roots in anything and it was almost as if I had to invent a literature.

Ian McEwan echoes Orson Welles on the gift of ignorance in The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers.

Also see how ignorance fuels science.

Seth Godin cutlure and society thought and opinion interviews media and communication branding psychology

Seth Godin and other cultural mavens on the psychology and sociology of branding.

Dorothy Parker history and literature lit thought and opinion culture and society interviews women

I’m a feminist, and God knows I’m loyal to my sex, and you must remember that from my very early days, when this city was scarcely safe from buffaloes, I was in the struggle for equal rights for women. But when we paraded through the catcalls of men and when we chained ourselves to lampposts to try to get our equality — dear child, we didn’t foresee those female writers.

Dorothy Parker on “the women problem” of literature.

history and literature music art and design design interviews history culture and society Pink Floyd

Legendary album designer Storm Thorgerson, whom we lost at the age of 69, on what it was like to work with Pink Floyd and create some of history’s most iconic vinyl covers. Find his era-defining work in For the Love of Vinyl: The Album Art of Hipgnosis.

culture and society history and literature media and communication comics superman interviews

A lot of people have an idea of [the Superman] character as boring, as the ultimate boy scout, as goody-goody, as not relatable, as too powerful. So when I took a look at this character the course of the 75 years, you see that everything about this character changes except for one thing, and that’s his motivation. His motivation is at once the simplest of all motivations. He’s a hero, which means, A, he puts the needs of others over those of himself and, B, he never gives up. Simple but it’s the hardest to unpack because it’s an unquestioned kind of heroism that has driven him for years and years.

Comic book geek Glen Weldon talks to NPR about his new unauthorized biography of Superman.

A lot of people have an idea of [the Superman] character as boring, as the ultimate boy scout, as goody-goody, as not relatable, as too powerful. So when I took a look at this character the course of the 75 years, you see that everything about this character changes except for one thing, and that’s his motivation. His motivation is at once the simplest of all motivations. He’s a hero, which means, A, he puts the needs of others over those of himself and, B, he never gives up. Simple but it’s the hardest to unpack because it’s an unquestioned kind of heroism that has driven him for years and years.

Comic book geek Glen Weldon talks to NPR about his new unauthorized biography of Superman.

culture and society media and communication interviews Platon photography

“It’s irrelevant to me who they are,” he says. “All that matters is if it’s a good picture or a bad picture. That’s all I care about.”

A good picture for him revolves around a moment. A glance, a breath. Something that peels back the façade and reveals the personality of the subject.

“Photography is just the technique, it’s the grammar, but it’s never the content,” he says.

Legendary photographer Platon, who has taken portraits of some of the world’s greatest leaders, shares his secrets of ego-wrangling.

history and literature lit quote Vladimir Nabokov Nabokov criticism interviews culture and society

The arrows of adverse criticism cannot scratch, let alone pierce, the shield of what disappointed archers call my ‘self-assurance.’

Nabokov, born on April 23, 1899, in a rare and wonderful 1969 BBC interview.

Don DeLillo culture and society media and communication history and literature interviews thought and opinion

Film allows us to examine ourselves in ways earlier societies could not—examine ourselves, imitate ourselves, extend ourselves, reshape our reality. It permeates our lives, this double vision, and also detaches us, turns some of us into actors doing walk-throughs. In my work, film and television are often linked with disaster. Because this is one of the energies that charges the culture. TV has a sort of panting lust for bad news and calamity as long as it is visual. … This is the force of the culture and the power of the image. And this is also a story we’ve seen updated through the years. It’s the story of the disaffected young man who suspects there are sacred emanations flowing from the media heavens and who feels the only way to enter this holy vortex is through some act of violent theater.

Writing from nearby the Boston manhunt, Kirstin Butler ponders a remarkably prescient excerpt from a 1992 interview with Don DeLillo, discussing Libra, his novel about Lee Harvey Oswald.

Mary Roach science and technology science thought and opinion culture and society interviews

It’s really hard to get funding for pure science just for the sake of figuring out how things work. It’s a lot easier to get funded if you have a practical application for things. … The more you realize you don’t know very much, and there isn’t an end point. So there’s always more to be done — there’s just not as much funding for it anymore.

Mary Roach, whose latest masterpiece of provocative popular science, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, is out this month, echoes Marie Curie (“One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done…”) in this interview on The Millions.
Complement with Alexander Flexner’s indispensable 1939 meditation on the usefulness of useless knowledge.

It’s really hard to get funding for pure science just for the sake of figuring out how things work. It’s a lot easier to get funded if you have a practical application for things. … The more you realize you don’t know very much, and there isn’t an end point. So there’s always more to be done — there’s just not as much funding for it anymore.

Mary Roach, whose latest masterpiece of provocative popular science, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, is out this month, echoes Marie Curie (“One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done…”) in this interview on The Millions.

Complement with Alexander Flexner’s indispensable 1939 meditation on the usefulness of useless knowledge.

love interviews Amy Webb Debbie Millman though and opinion culture and society psychology

Amy Webb, author of the fascinating Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating to Meet My Match, talks to Debbie Millman about how the very design of online dating profile questionnaires sabotages your odds of finding your soulmate.

Listen to the full interview here and subscribe to Design Matters on iTunes for more stimulating conversations with designers, artists, and writers.

Louis C. K. advice culture and society interviews thought and opinion humor

Does it matter that what you’ve achieved, with your online special and your tour can’t be replicated by other performers who don’t have the visibility or fan base that you do?

Why do you think those people don’t have the same resources that I have, the same visibility or relationship? What’s different between me and them?

You have the platform. You have the level of recognition.

So why do I have the platform and the recognition?

At this point you’ve put in the time.

There you go. There’s no way around that. There’s people that say: “It’s not fair. You have all that stuff.” I wasn’t born with it. It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life. If you’re new at this — and by “new at it,” I mean 15 years in, or even 20 — you’re just starting to get traction. Young musicians believe they should be able to throw a band together and be famous, and anything that’s in their way is unfair and evil. What are you, in your 20s, you picked up a guitar? Give it a minute.

Louis C. K. on success and hard work, echoing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous words that “nothing any good isn’t hard” and Debbie Millman’s sage advice that “things take a long time; practice patience.”