By now everyone knows that the Obama cartoon on the cover of the current New Yorker has ignited a firestorm. I’ve tended to write the thing off as failed satire of the kind that proliferates nowadays: unfocused, simultaneously predictable and overreaching, ultimately resulting in no point being made — except, of course, that the creator is terribly knowing and clever . . .
The Cartoon Lounge interviews Emily Flake. Previously: a talk with Achewood creator Chris Onstad. (Via.)
Between praise from Jessa & Carrie, and now this interview with Sarah Hall herself, I’m ashamed not to have read Daughters of the North yet.
New Yorker writer Jill Lepore investigates the powerful children’s librarian who tried to scuttle E.B. White’s Stuart Little. (See also.)
Margaret Guroff’s handsome online edition of Moby-Dick offers pithy explanations of terms and references you might stumble over, and lays them in the margin alongside the text. No doubt scholars will quibble over the annotations, but at first blush, to this lay reader, they seem both more navigable and less obtrusive than print edition footnotes. I haven’t revisited Moby-Dick in . . .