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November 14, 2017

From The Guardian (Chris Ware on Nick Drnaso):
After I recommended his first, Beverly, to Zadie Smith, she wrote back a one-word review: “wow,” and she’s just called Sabrina “the best book – in any medium – I have read about our current moment”.

From The Guardian (Chris Ware on Max Richter's Sleep):
[It’s] the only music I know that may capture the sensation of death: that ultimate, freeing apathy towards all things worldly, personal and meaningful – making it among the most personal and meaningful pieces I’ve ever heard. I would love to see it performed live before I die.

From Harper's:
Men with low resting heart rates are much likelier to be stalkers.

From Stanford Working Paper on Evaluating Digital Information (H/T: Kevin Lewis):
The Internet has democratized access to information but in so doing has opened the floodgates to misinformation, fake news, and rank propaganda masquerading as dispassionate analysis. To investigate how people determine the credibility of digital information, we sampled 45 individuals: 10 Ph.D. historians, 10 professional fact checkers, and 25 Stanford University undergraduates. We observed them as they evaluated live websites and searched for information on social and political issues. Historians and students often fell victim to easily manipulated features of websites, such as official-looking logos and domain names. They read vertically, staying within a website to evaluate its reliability. In contrast, fact checkers read laterally, leaving a site after a quick scan and opening up new browser tabs in order to judge the credibility of the original site. Compared to the other groups, fact checkers arrived at more warranted conclusions in a fraction of the time.

From The New York Times (Roz Chast on "Whose writing today most inspires you?"):
Graphic memoirs/novels are very inspiring to me. It feels like a very supple and new form. There are too many nongraphic memoir/novel writers whose work I love to name them all. George Saunders, Elif Batuman, Rachel Cusk, Matthew Klam, Rivka Galchen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jennifer Egan, Emma Donoghue, Kazuo Ishiguro … 
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