Jackie Wullschlager | Financial Times | 24th May 2013 Gorgeous throughout. All interviews should be like this. You can hear the voice of the arts-world grandee, author of A Life of Picasso — "the greatest, most compelling biography of an artist ever written" — booming in your ears. "The chance is that I won’t be able to get to the end of the Life, not because of my health or my eyes but because, well, I know too much. I know where the bodies are buried" (Metered paywall) Brian Philips | Grantland | 24th May 2013 Saturday special. Classic, exuberant piece of sports writing, about today's European Cup Final between Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich. Even if football isn't your passion. "It's like playing Galaga. You could clear level after level, but those aliens were going to keep munching their way toward you forever. Bayern is the endless loop of aliens; Dortmund is a kid who's only got so many quarters. You can root for the kid, but be realistic" Jason Marlin | Ars Technica | 23rd May 2013 Exactly what the headline says. Description of an experience that doesn't get written up all that often, for obvious reasons. "At that moment — and this part is a little foggy — a bright arc of electricity shot through the window and directly into my chest. I hit the concrete floor and bounced back up to my feet, which were shuffling at top speed into a bookshelf ... Today, my whole body is sore — even my organs ache in a hard-to-describe way" Ta-Nehisi Coates | The Atlantic | 22nd May 2013 New Yorker studies French on a home-stay in Switzerland. "Hearing a foreign language is like seeing a postcard from some other land. I experienced my ignorance of words and grammar as a physical distance, as a longing for something that was mere inches away. In that gap, there was all the magic of childhood ... The older I get, the more I treasure the sprawling periods of incomprehension, the not knowing, the lands beyond Google" Glenn Fleishman | Economist | 22nd May 2013 You loved Chris Hadfield's Space Oddity. But should he have been arrested for intellectual piracy when he landed? How does the law work work in space? Low orbit is easy. But: "If an astronaut were to travel to the Moon, an asteroid or Mars on a privately funded spacecraft, the situation would become knottier still, because the United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967 applies to countries, not companies or private individuals" Thought for the day: "You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it"— Neil Gaiman
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