Our weekly reading list

“Single Atom in an Ion Trap," shot by David Nadlinger of the University of Oxford.
  • Steve: I’ve been prepping for an interview with novelist Martin Amis, who’s obsessed (and worried?) about what happens when writers age. As he writes, “Modern literature’s dirty little secret” is that “writers die twice: once when the body dies, and once when the talent dies.” This helped me understand why some great writers, like Philip Roth and Alice Munro, felt compelled to announce publicly that they had stopped writing. The burden to keep producing great work had become overwhelming.
  • Charles: This recent “debate” between Christian Piccioliani and Richard Spencer sparked a lot of questions around the office. Mainly: what responsibility does a former skinhead have to convert current skinheads? Picciolini has spent many years considering that question, including during our conversation with him a few years ago.
  • Anne: I've been mulling over Farhad Manjoo et al's New York Times piece on our "post-text future." On one hand, I think that — to paraphrase Mark Twain — reports of the death of text are greatly exaggerated. On the other hand, there's never been a better time to be an audio producer, so I think we're all secretly enjoying just a teeny-tiny bit of schadenfreude. That said, we can't always match the jaw-dropping wonder elicited by the visual — in a noteworthy case from this week, a photo of a single atom.
  • Haleema: I’m preparing for a trip to Pakistan, where my mother was born and raised. I’m thinking about ways to tell my mother and several other people’s stories. They still identify with a distant native country, but have spent more than half their lives in the United States. As I think about what it means to have an estranged identity, I’m re-reading Edward Said’s essay on exile.
  • Mark: I've been researching the various ways that our canine friends go to work—including seeking viral fame and fortune online. This primer on trying to make your dog Instagram famous validated my own Instagram experiment in that arena (as well that of a certain gentleman corgi walked daily by one Steve Paulson.)
  • Shannon: As someone who truly loves reading books, the terrifying reality of forgetting how to read shocked me to my core.