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Review: ‘The Lowland,’ by Jhumpa Lahiri
Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri, the Indian American author, strikes again with a new novel, The Lowland. This Washington Post review features her ability in “steadily building one of the most powerful body of work on immigrants and their children”, an important aspect of her writings.
“Her first collection, “Interpreter of Maladies,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, when she was only 33. Her first novel, “The Namesake,” was made into a film directed by Mira Nair. And now her somber new novel, “The Lowland,” arrives in the United States already shortlisted for Britain’s Man Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award, an extraordinary double boost it hardly needs to find an eager audience here in her adopted country. Her first collection, “Interpreter of Maladies,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, when she was only 33. Her first novel, “The Namesake,” was made into a film directed by Mira Nair. And now her somber new novel, “The Lowland,” arrives in the United States already shortlisted for Britain’s Man Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award, an extraordinary double boost it hardly needs to find an eager audience here in her adopted country.”
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Why is Albert Camus Still a Stranger in His Native Algeria?
On the 100th anniversary of the birth of the famed novelist Albert Camus, the Smithsonian reporter returns to his birthplace, Algeria, in search for signs of his legacy. In this well-written article, he shares his findings, among which is a striking forgetfulness of one of the greatest writers of his time.
“Camus is regarded as a giant of French literature, but it was his North African birthplace that most shaped his life and his art. In a 1936 essay, composed during a bout of homesickness in Prague, he wrote of pining for “my own town on the shores of the Mediterranean…the summer evenings that I love so much, so gentle in the green light and full of young and beautiful women.” Camus set his two most famous works, the novels The Stranger and The Plague, in Algeria, and his perception of existence, a joyful sensuality combined with a recognition of man’s loneliness in an indifferent universe, was formed here.”
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TALK: Khaled Hosseini on How the Iraq War Hurt Afghanistan
The famous author of The Kite Runner speaks about his life as an author and his luck. This is a good, short interview that speaks volume. Worth reading.
“Incredible. Even publishing was banking on an Iraq invasion?
You expect to be rejected, but what upset me about it was what it meant for Afghanistan. That was a foreshadowing of what happened — that Iraq would overshadow the campaign and absorb military resources. I landed in Kabul the day before Shock and Awe in Iraq, and you could all but hear the collective groan.”
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Letter from Damascus (2006): Captured on Film
An important feature in the New Yorker written in 2006. Lawerence Wright goes off into the secret world of filmmaking in Syria to discover more about the society that at the time had limited press freedoms. It is fascinating to read it and assess that with events taking place there now.
“Although many foreign critics have portrayed Mohammed and other Syrian directors as symbols of artistic victimization, he defiantly rejects that role. “Do you want me to play the hero?” he asked. “Do you want me to repeat two hundred times each day that my films are forbidden? This is my society. I belong to this world. I am not a victim.”
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A Score or More of Languages in Your Pocket
Apps so far or even google translate does not do an accurate job in translating from Arabic to English or vice versa. Will there be something more accurate that can be created on the horizon?
“The more a translation app is used, the more it learns to statistically make correct associations with sounds, text and meaning. The latest translation apps incorporate voice-recognition software so you can speak as well as type in the word or phrase you want translated and then get both a text and audio response.”
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Ted Blog
Further reading on ideas worth spreading. The TED Blog shares interesting news about TED, TED Talks video, the TED Prize and more.
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Read Any Good Web Sites Lately? Book Lovers Talk Online
It’s about time. Book lovers recommend, suggest, discuss and talk about books online. Here’s a website attempting to do just that.
“The social media site goodreads.com is exploding in popularity as a platform for finding and sharing and, yes, marketing books.”
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TEN MOST POPULAR JOURNALISM BLOGGERS IN AMERICA?
Some of the popular journalism bloggers in America but there is a UK version as well. A great resource for journalists and those looking for information on the profession as well.
“I’ve grabbed the baton and produced a chart of the top ten American journo-bloggers, based on combined subscriptions via Google Reader and Bloglines”
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How Many Teachers Use Technology in the Classroom?
Great infograph on how the use of technology has given us the opportunity to do so much more in the classrooms.
“According to a press release, close to 74% of all teachers surveyed said they use digital resources — tablets, computers — to expand and reinforce on content in their classrooms. Among the other highlights: 69% of those surveyed said educational technology helps them “do much more than ever before” for their students, with the most commonly used resources being online lesson plans, interactive web games and online articles.”
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Journalists are heroes in latest TV dramas
Journalists are usually vilified by some, but more recently Journalists have been playing the heroes in the latest TV dramas, including one of my favorite show “The Newsroom”. But with budget problems and some print newspapers closing down, is this at odds with what we are seeing on TV?
“…Yet if Hollywood still sees journalists as viable heroes, this image-boosting vote of confidence comes as actual jobs have disappeared faster than guest stars in many of these programs. Moreover, the profession’s esteem in the public’s eyes remains under siege.”
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GRAY MATTER: Learning From Failure
People love to read only about success stories it seems. NGO’s, institutions, schools and others always highlight success but what isn’t it worth learning from failures? Since many success stories most probably faced failure somewhere along the road. And this is what this article speaks about.
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9 Rules for Success by British Novelist Amelia E. Barr
The secret of success and tips for writers by British novelist Amelia Barr. She speaks of inspiration, work ethics and more. Brain Pickings happens to be one of my favorite websites because it’s creative and fresh. It’s content is always fun to read.
“It was after at least forty-five years of conscious labor that I reached the object of my hope. Many a time my head failed me, my hands failed me, my feet failed me, but, thank God, my heart never failed me.”
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Major papers’ longform meltdown
Despite the creation of an App that lets you read all the long form stories from various news and magazine sources, this article in the Columbia Journalism Review talks about the decline of long form articles in the most prominent newspapers.
“When it comes to stories longer than 3,000 words, the three papers showed even sharper declines. The WSJ’s total is down 70 percent to 25 stories, from 87 a decade ago, and the LA Times down fully 90 percent to 34 from 368. The New York Times’s record was more mixed. It published 25 percent fewer stories over 2,000 words from a decade ago, but 32 percent more stories over 3,000 words.”
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What to See in 2013
Winter is a great time to visit museums – this is a list of countries and museums around the world. “This time of year, museums around the world herald their major exhibitions.”
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A Writer Revisits the Ancient Laptop He Used in College
This is a light story on our relationship with our laptops and writing.
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“Laptop is dusty these days. His shell is slightly scratched. But he’s still bright on the inside—even polished—thanks to the years of oiling by fingertips and palms. He bears the marks of his experience. The A, S, E, D, C, O, L, N, and M keys are worn down to a point of near-illegibility. There’s evidence of lots of activity on the BACKSPACE key—though, having just sifted through a bunch of writing from those years, I think maybe not quite enough. Crumbs were, and continue to be, a problem.” -
50 blogs by journalists, for journalists
This is a great list of blogs by Journalists who are blogging and also journalism academics. This list includes 50 blogs, including journalists who share some tips and expertise. This is a treasure.
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“We invited people to nominate blogs via Twitter and received a good number of responses, many of which we have included here.” -
Fresh Air: Ben Affleck & Dustin Hoffman
Ben Affleck is interviewed by Fresh Air’s host Terry Gross. The movie has won awards at the Golden Globes. “The film, which Affleck produced and in which he also stars, is the mostly true story of the CIA operative who helmed the rescue of six U.S. diplomats who managed to escape at the outset of the 1979 Iran crisis that held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days after militants took over the American Embassy in Tehran. Affleck, a Middle Eastern studies major in college, was a child when the crisis happened and does not remember the news coverage.”
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Amos Oz, The Art of Fiction No. 148
This is an interview with liberal Israeli writer Amos Oz. I enjoyed reading the answer to “Does it ever snow in the desert?” Take a moment to also read his answer on finding time to work on journalism as well.
“I write articles not because I’m asked to, but because I’m filled with rage. I feel I have to tell my government what to do and, sometimes, where to go. Not that they listen. Then I drop everything and write an essay, which is always published here first, then picked up by The New York Times, or England’s Guardian or another publication. You see, I’m not a political analyst or commentator. I write from a sense of injustice and my revolt against it. But I can write an article only when I agree with myself one hundred percent, which is not my normal condition—normally I’m in partial disagreement with myself and can identify with three or five different views and different feelings about the same issue.”
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New Adventures in the Newspaper Industry
An article in The Economist finally delivers positive news about the newspaper industry after several years of terrible news. The Newspaper industry has taken a real fall the past few years and the process of digitization has been tough for many – those who survived were the innovators. Many didn’t make it.
“Things have started to look a bit less grim, particularly in America. Revenues from advertising are still falling, but those from circulation have at last started to stabilise. At some papers, such as the New York Times, circulation revenues this year are forecast to offset the decline in advertising for the first time in at least five years.”
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The Arab Awakening, By Tariq Ramadan
This article reviews Tariq Ramadan’s book on the Arab Spring. Was the Arab Spring planned or staged? Was it a revolt by the people with no plan the day after?
“Half of this slim volume is spent examining whether the uprisings were staged or spontaneous. Ramadan counsels against both the naive view that outside powers are passive observers of events, and the contrary belief that Arab revolutionaries have been mere pawns in the hands of cunning foreign players. Certainly the US and its allies helped to guide events by collaborating with the military hierarchies which removed presidents in Tunisia and Egypt, and by full-scale intervention in Libya – for a variety of obvious reasons. An agreement signed by Libya’s NTC last year, for instance, guaranteed France 3 per cent of future oil exports.”
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Why Telling a Story is the Most Powerful Way to Activate Our Brains
“A story, if broken down into the simplest form, is a connection of cause and effect.”
This is a great post on the power of storytelling. The brain remembers stories and that is the main argument the author makes in this article. Stories are powerful and now there is scientific evidence to prove it.
“If we listen to a powerpoint presentation with boring bullet points, a certain part in the brain gets activated. Scientists call this Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. Overall, it hits our language processing parts in the brain, where we decode words into meaning. And that’s it, nothing else happens. When we are being told a story, things change dramatically. Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too.”
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The Art of Being Still
This is a great post – something writers are guilty of: Not finding enough time to write. “they fret about writer’s block or about never having the time to write,” writes Silas House. “Yet as they complain, they spend a whole lot of that precious time posting cartoons about writing on Facebook or putting up statuses about how if they only had more free time they just know they could get their novels written.”
I just recently saw tweets from an author who was in the process of writing a book, who was writing reflections on Twitter on the process of writing and then complaining of not being able to concentrate on writing. So take a look at this blog. So much of it rings true in this ‘digital era’.
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Slate: The 2012 Underrated books
Slate magazine has listed overlooked fiction and nonfiction books of 2012. I haven’t heard about many of these books, so it’s a nice gesture on the part of Slate to decide to run the underrated list instead of the best list which what usually runs around this time every year. Some the books mentioned include ‘Londoners’ by Craig Taylor:
“For obvious reasons, Londoners was much more of an event when it was published in the United Kingdom in 2011, though you need not be interested in the English capital to appreciate Craig Taylor’s journalistic achievement. Collecting dozens of first-person testimonies, from a fruit vendor to financiers to city officials to frustrated former residents who left for the country, Taylor paints a vast portrait of London that doubles as record of modern Western life itself. It made me wish a similar book existed for every city or town on Earth, though Taylor’s curiosity and eye for diverse characters would be hard to replicate.”
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NYT’s Best Books for 2012
The verdict is out. The New York Times has named the best books of 2012. Some the authors listed include Zadie Smith and author of Zeitoun, David Eggers. The book list includes both fiction and non-fiction. Here’s the paragraph on the Eggers new book, A Hologram For the King: “In an empty city in Saudi Arabia, a middle-aged American businessman waits day after day to close the deal he hopes will redeem his forlorn life. Eggers, continuing the worldly outlook that informed his recent books “Zeitoun” and “What Is the What,” spins this spare story — a globalized “Death of a Salesman” — into a tightly controlled parable of America’s international standing and a riff on middle-class decline that approaches Beckett in its absurdist despair.You can get snippets about the books before you decide to read them.”
The books have been selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.
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Why social media – not violence – could bring change to Oman
“The Arab Spring left the Gulf state of Oman relatively unscathed, with long-term ruler Sultan Qaboos moving to quieten discontent by introducing reforms, but how long can tradition hold back calls for change?”
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