No new Insider content this week as I was writing up free agent capsules for the annual top 50 ranking, which will appear after the World Series at some point. I did review the Game of Thrones card game, which is surprisingly good (I hated the first GoT book), for Paste, and held a Klawchat on Thursday.
- President Obama interviewed one of my favorite American novelists, Marilynne Robinson. She’s best known for the trio of novels, beginning with the Pulitzer winner Gilead, revolving around a family in Iowa, but her 1980 debut novel Housekeeping is the one on my top 100.
- “Reporters don’t just find facts; they look for narratives.” Isn’t this a big problem? And, hey, what do we really know about the death of Osama bin Laden? Mark Bowden, one of the writers whose recounting of that story is questioned in the Times piece, responded in Vanity Fair.
- ON a related note, the BBC’s Assignment radio program looks at the U.S.’s use of torture to fight terror, with some horrifying details of what we did in the name of security (with dubious benefits). The host, Hilary Andersson, undergoes some of those techniques, while an American operative is (voluntarily) waterboarded during the program as well.
- The Guardian ran a very open, honest essay on how quickly others expect us to stop grieving, in this case after the writer lost her mother to cancer.
- Van Pierszalowski, lead singer/founder of WATERS and a diehard Dodgers fan, spoke to MLB about their season and the direction under the new front office, although this was before they lost game 5 to the Mets.
- J. Kenji Lopez-Alt makes the list again this week with his ten commandments of eggs. I’m glad to see someone agree that salting eggs before you scramble them is the right move. I always did so for better flavor distribution but it turns out there’s good science behind it too.
- Vanity Fair ran a piece on the “ermahgerd” girl, an unusually neutral, non-hysterical piece on how a woman became part of a very popular meme without her consent and what effect it had on her life (spoiler: it’s not actually that bad).
- A short celebration of the short fiction of John Cheever, whose collected short stories won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1979. I haven’t read that yet, but it’s on my short-term to-do list; I did read and loved Falconer, but was a little less wowed by The Wapshot Chronicle.
- The Guardian also ran a great piece explaining this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to several scientists who discovered that neutrinos emitted from the sun could change “flavors” en route toward (and through) earth, which answered the question of where all those solar neutrinos had gone. (They were there, but not in the flavors we’d been looking for.) The footnotes are rather spectacular, too. I read and reviewed a book last March called The Neutrino Hunters that described the experiment that earned these scientists the Novel.