In 2006, Jessie Sholl’s mother was diagnosed with cancer. But before Sholl could deal with the illness, she had to first confront a sickness of a different sort: her mother’s compulsive hoarding, which rendered everything—her home, her car, and her life—completely unmanageable. In her memoir “Dirty Secret,” Sholl documents a disease that affects millions of Americans and recounts a life spent parenting a mother who, despite her best intentions, was unable to provide stability—and who slipped from mere disorganization into something far more dangerous. Read more at newyorker.com…
Biased
Well hello, Charles Baxter. What’s that? Your new book is carried along by an undercurrent of quiet Midwestern drama?
Whether surveying a loving but prickly mother-son relationship strained by a night-school classroom visit or a drunken grad student’s hapless journey to pick up his stranded fiancée on a snowy night, Baxter is a melancholy expert craftsman.
On it.
Mappow
At the 2009 New Yorker Festival, Ariel Levy interviewed the MSNBC host Rachel Maddow about her career, her sexuality (she’s America’s first openly gay television anchor), and her ambition. “I like to win a lot,” she told Levy. Maddow is now leading the charge on the iPad: MSNBC has released a free app for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” which includes video clips, keyworded episode transcripts, Twitter functionality, and an archive of past shows. Read more at newyorker.com…
Staff Meeting
Last week, the Metropolitan Museum of Art launched “Connections,” a weekly multimedia series featuring museum staffers—curators, conservators, librarians, designers—discussing works in the museum’s collection. Each episode has a theme: “Small Things,” “Virtuosity,” “Tennessee,” “Maps.” “I wonder why it is that we love maps so much,” muses the medieval art curator Melanie Holcomb. “I think, in part, it has to do with the fact that it allows us to be God for a minute.” Read more at newyorker.com…
Literary Fantasy
I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but seriously, how badass is the cover of “Destiny and Desire”? Furthermore, how badass is that title? I’ll be reading it on the subway, and someone will be all, “Tsk tsk–how can you look at such lowbrow smut?” and I’ll be like, “Actually, its tribulations are interrupted by dizzying tangents on Piranesi, Nietzsche, and Spinoza, but beneath these often didactic layers is a compelling mystery, SUCKA!” And then I’ll breakdance off the train to the applause of the entire car.
Tin Star
Earlier this week, the literary quarterly and publisher Tin House relaunched its website, which had remained largely unchanged since it launched, in 1999. “Our web concerns were primarily concentrated on whether or not we’d have enough munitions to fight off the post-apocalyptic hordes of cannibals that would inevitably follow the Y2K bug,” wrote associate editor Tony Perez, in an announcement made Tuesday. Read more at newyorker.com…
A Small Bag
This week’s Brieflier Noted is looking a little grim.
There’s “pessimism tempered by dark humor,” “a grim collection of contemporary maladies,” and “little insight.” Thank goodness for the “spirited history” provided by Philipp Blom.
Tu Vuo’ Fa L’Italiano
Last week, my New Yorker Digital Pick was the New Year’s Resolution Generator, a nifty li’l site that spits out fun resolution ideas with a click. I suppose you could cycle through it for hours, finding the one that suits you best, but I got mine on the first try:
And I had already intended to de-rustify my Italian this winter. Prescient, no?
Wish You Were Here
The great American photographer Ansel Adams, who once said, “A photograph is usually looked at—seldom looked into,” would no doubt be happy to learn that the Ansel Adams Trust has partnered with Little, Brown and Company to release an app for the iPad. Read more at newyorker.com…
Juke Joint
YouTube has become a go-to music player, but its one-song-at-a-time format doesn’t make for a seamless listening experience. Tomas Isdal, a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington, has changed that with Tubeify, a mashup of YouTube, last.fm, and Billboard that acts like a jukebox. Read more at newyorker.com…