Welcome back to the weekly Yiderati! We’ve got some catching up to do, so here’s some highlights from the past week or two of some of our favorite things.
Hey, remember Simon Rich? The youngest writer ever to be hired by SNL, which at this point doesn’t necessarily equal a compliment? (Oy vey, SNL, get your act together!) Regardless of his TV writing chops, Rich has written two hilarious books of humor Ant Farm and Free Range Chickens (and a pretty funny and moving novel Elliot Allagash) and by the looks of his recent piece in the Shouts and Murmurs section of the New Yorker, he’s still got it.
Speaking of Shouts and Murmurs: Gary Shteyngart outsources his tweets. Who knew ?
Ben Marcus, one of our favorite authors dropped his new book The Flame Alphabet this week that tells the story of a world in which the sounds of children’s voice literally kills adults. He talked to Largehearted Boy about instrumental music that he listened to while writing the book.
Leon Wieseltier at The New Republic has written, in his usual dense, somewhat florid prose, a great opinion piece about the demise of record stores and indie bookshops.
I don’t know why the world doesn’t just ask Stanley Fish to just talk, forever, on anything, and we will record his speeches for posterity because anything this man thinks about, he thinks about it well, and provides endless ideas for the rest of us to chew on. Specifically, for us at Jewcy, Fish’s recent post about blogs and academia is a must read.