Noteworthy reads from the last week:
"Thomas Struth: Style Without Style," Jana Prikryl
"Perhaps what’s missing from Struth’s image is a traditional point of view, quite literally. The cathedral’s façade is seen from an almost unrealistically frontal perspective, every detail appearing to be equidistant from the camera’s lens, as if its eye were everywhere at once."
"I Would Do This for You: The Narrative Possibilities of Leaked Emails," Lydia Kiesling
"The joy of reading other people’s mail is a well-known, well-documented phenomenon. Anyone who has spent time in an archive has found themselves wandering through the hedge maze of correspondence, which can lead either to fruitful new projects or simply leave the reader floundering in some voyeur’s backwater, pointlessly obsessing over the sheer novelty of the way that people communicate with one another."
"Wolflandia," Elliott D. Woods
"As often as I see bumper stickers in Northern Rockies towns that say things like Save an Elk, Shoot a Wolf and Smoke a Pack a Day, I was surprised to learn that wolf reintroduction actually had significant public support across the region."
"How SkyMall Captured a Moment of Technological and American History," Bess Lovejoy
"As the diversity of these products points out, no matter where your plane was heading, perusing SkyMall often seemed like a journey inside the American mind—with its productivity obsession, its meat infatuations, its ultimate quest to be perfectly in shape without expending any effort whatsoever (hello, slimming shirts!)."
"The New Gin Craze," Oliver Bullough
"If you’d asked me to word associate for gin, I’d have started with the Queen Mother, moved through retired colonels in the days of the Raj, and ended with Mother’s Ruin, a common British term for gin dating back to the 18th century, when it occupied the cultural niche later filled by crack cocaine."
"Ask Not For Whom The Bell Trolls; It Trolls for Thee," Lindy West (This American Life transcript)
"If I could get through to one troll, the meanest one I ever had, couldn't I feasibly get through to any of them, all of them?" (Audio.)