Books
Turning to fiction
Oprah Shamed Him. He’s Back Anyway. | The New York Times | Read article
James Frey’s New Cancelled-Guy Sex Novel Is as Bad as It Sounds The New Yorker Read review
The New York Times has a story about the controversial so called “misery memoir” author James Frey, one of the first and most successful of the genre, prior to exposure for exaggerations and falsehoods, culminating in a showdown with Oprah on her show.
Frey is now making a return with a new novel, and the story acts as a sort of strange litmus test for how attitudes to lying in public have evolved in the intervening twenty odd years, something the author seems well aware of:
As Frey sees it, the public has gotten increasingly comfortable with falsehoods, without getting fully comfortable with him. He finds it all a bit absurd. “I just sit in my castle and giggle,” he said.
This month, he attempts a comeback of sorts: He’s publishing a novel that centers on a swingers party and a murder. It features energetic sex scenes, rich-people shenanigans and eccentric punctuation. (Frey believes quotation marks are inauthentic.)
The New Yorker’s review and the excerpts it contains paint quite a picture of his comeback work:
I have wrestled with a Frey-like dread through the writing of this review—I’m afraid that I’ll describe his book and no one will believe me. The two main characters, Devon and her husband, Billy, are a swarm of status signifiers stuffed ungrammatically into a Burberry trench coat. Billy “had gone to Exeter on a full ride and graduated at sixteen. From there he went to the Wharton joint undergrad/MBA program on a full ride and graduated at twenty. He immediately went to work at Goldman, who had started recruiting him when he was seventeen, and became the second-youngest partner in the bank’s history at twenty-four.
At twenty-five, he was making twenty million dollars a year. He left Goldman at twenty-eight and started his own hedge fund. It was a spectacular success. . . .” Meanwhile, Devon “had grown up in Greenwich on an estate called Willowvale. . . . Devon’s ancestors had come to America on the Mayflower. . . . She had gone to Greenwich Academy, one of the best girls’ schools in the country, for nursery, elementary, and middle school. After GA, she went to boarding school at Miss Porter’s, whose notable alumnae include Laura Rockefeller, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Lilly Pulitzer, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Agnes Gund. After Porter’s, she went to Princeton and was a member of The Ivy, its most prestigious dining club. . . .” The whole book is like this.
Industry
Why the world cannot quit coal | Financial Times | Read data story
Great data storytelling from the Financial Times visual journalism team.
Today the world burns nearly double the amount of coal that it did in 2000 — and four times the amount it did in 1950. Every minute of every day, 16,700 tonnes of coal are excavated from the ground — enough to fill seven Olympic swimming pools.
Design
Art Nouveau
‘Forgotten’ designer of art nouveau Métro entrances to get Paris museum | The Guardian | Read article
A story about the designer Hector Guimard being recognised today highlights works of his across Paris, as well as the occasionally ambivalent attitude of his compatriots towards him, and Art Nouveau as a whole.
