Radar LARB

The Boxing Day Swim (courtesy fimb and flickr creative commons)

Football and foxhunts, department store sales and epic sessions in the pub: as this article points out it's a wonder Americans haven't adopted Boxing Day for themselves (never mind it's that other kind of football). O well. You still have the blips at Radar LARB (most Mondays):

The Full-Stop editors: The Situation on American Writing: Dana Spiotta: "I truly don’t think about audience at all until a book comes out. Then I wonder who will respond to it and why. I have no idea if the audience for serious fiction has grown or contracted. I don’t feel as pessimistic about it as I ought to. I just think humans want and need to read good fiction. Maybe they forget it sometimes, but I can’t imagine people will give up reading stories."

Michelle Dean: The Struggle for the Occupy Wall Street Archives: "An example of how Jez talks: The first time I asked him to explain his motives for starting the archives, he grinned and said, 'The idea came from a number of places, and I’ll try to make it as simple as possible, as succinct as possible.' He paused and then took a deep breath. 'There is an essay, or an interview with Jacques Derrida, which occurs in a book called Philosophy in a Time of Terror.'"

Alan P. Lightman: The Accidental Universe: Science's Crisis of Faith: "Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world’s premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are indeed mere accidents—a random throw of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining our universe’s features in terms of fundamental causes and principles."

Maria Russo: Is 2011 Really Just 1991?: "Kurt Andersen has really done it now. His more than three decades spent monitoring the tremolo fluctuations in urban American style, power and class distinctions appear to have ended in defeat, with a single, glum Vanity Fair essay."

Kee Hinckley: "On Pseudonymity, Privacy and Responsibility on Google+."