The scaffolding around this essay is my unshakeable belief that images matter, in real time and in retrospect, because visual media can and do shape the way we see the world, frequently more than we bargained for. Does Hersh’s account transform “Zero Dark Thirty” from half fact into whole fiction? If the cinematic treatment of a supposedly true story turns out to be a lie, does that make it propaganda? To what, exactly, can we ascribe the profusion of doubt that’s accompanied this tale of sound and fury, and what does it mean that this is a story we can’t seem to tell, much less find the moral in?

I really liked this essay (and the movie).

Bright Wall/Dark Room June 2015: A History of Violence

When we talk about the 1970s for instance, they think about ABBA as one of the icons of the decade. They don’t know that ABBA at the time was considered to be extremely bad taste – vulgar and completely unfashionable. ABBA was still wearing platform shoes when everyone else had already moved on. What I mean to say is that it’s not always the best versions of the past that live on.

CONVERSATIONS ON SLOWNESS | Vestoj

There are a lot of ways for a novelist to create suspense, but also really only two: one a trick, one an art.

The trick is to keep a secret. Or many secrets, even. In Lee Child’s books, Jack Reacher always has a big mystery to crack, but there are a series of smaller mysteries in the meantime, too, a new one appearing as soon as the last is resolved. J. K. Rowling is another master of this technique — Who gave Harry that Firebolt? How is Rita Skeeter getting her info?

The art, meanwhile, the thing that makes “Pride and Prejudice” so superbly suspenseful, more suspenseful than the slickest spy novel, is to write stories in which characters must make decisions.

Thrillers

I’m kind of exhausted with food talk these days, so I almost skipped this interview. Glad I didn’t. It’s a great change of pace.

Farm products are not food; they are the raw materials for food. Turning plants and animals into something edible is just as difficult, just as laborious as farming itself. Very few of our calories come from raw, unprocessed food. And if those calories are from fruits and vegetables, then it’s only because centuries of breeding has made them less chewy, more tasty, and easier to digest. Cooking, which is one part of processing, went hand in hand with becoming human. Human food is processed food. And there are good reasons for this. Overall, processed foods are easier to eat and digest, more nutritious, tastier, safer, and longer lasting. The idea that any change made in the raw material is detrimental is just flat wrong. […] That we can talk about “A cake made from scratch” when the butter, sugar, and flour that go into it are are highly processed shows how we have lost awareness of the energy that formerly went into food preparation.

Why Michael Pollan Is Wrong About Artisanal Food