Новости за 21.09.2015

“I remember when I began to hate Patrick Modiano…” With the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature announced today (Thursday), profile of last year’s winner. “Essentially abandoned by both his parents”, Modiano’s life is “as extraordinary and as bizarre as the situations of his fiction.” His work is “a series of incremental epiphanies on the past” — a succession of smaller novels that can be read as one extended, lifelong masterpiece”

“Teaching has killed more good writers than alcohol,” said Gore Vidal, who never went to college. A winding and namedrop-filled profile by a friend of the author. Vidal’s generation – including Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, John Updike, and Joan Didion – “earned a living by their pens,” or by journalism or business if necessary. Only later did writers get sucked into academia. “It’s a terrible distraction”

Necessity is the mother of invention. As costs of innovation plummet, allowing China and others to develop new tools speedily, the U.S. Department of Defence has turned to Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs to maintain its mojo. Can lean, agile startup methodology be imposed on the clunky, costly processes typical of Pentagon projects? An uneasy alliance of ex-military veterans and tech entrepreneurs enter is trying to find out

“In the age of Empire, the spiritual journey became a major feature of British imperial culture, attracting the interest of Queen Victoria, Winston Churchill and others – and resulting in one of the earliest Thomas Cook package tours,” who were “called in by the Government … after a scandal surrounding the near-sinking of a pilgrim ship that made the front page of The Times”