Time-lapse video of European cities by Dominic Boudreault. Watch it full-screen.
Blog
Hemingway, 1945
Ernest Hemingway’s 1945 passport, recently added to the Hemingway Collection at the JFK Library in Boston. Hemingway is 46 years old in this photo. Compare.
Library in the Cloud
The Digital Public Library of America is now open. An incredible resource.
Above: “Close Play at First, Fenway Park, 1934.” Leslie Jones Collection, Boston Public Library Print Department. Via DPLA. (Click image to see full-size.)
Award season
In the last few weeks Defending Jacob has been nominated for three remarkable awards: the Massachusetts Book Award, the ITW Thriller Award for Best Novel, and the Strand Magazine Critics Award, also for best novel. I am deeply flattered and grateful for all three nominations.
Creatures
A beautiful web site from photographer Andrew Zuckerman with a gallery of remarkable photographs of animals. The concept: “Substituting his minimalist visual language for the conventions of traditional nature photography, Zuckerman extracted his subjects from their environments and recontextualized them in the clarifying white space to distill each animal to its most essential qualities.”
A Little Facelift
Over the last few weeks this site has been updated. Nothing major — improved typography, simplified layout. But a few changes might affect visitors:
- RSS Feed. The RSS feed has been shifted from the dying FeedBurner to this site’s own native WordPress RSS feed. If you subscribe to the blog via RSS, you will need to update that address to the new RSS feed.
- Blog posts via email. I have removed the option of receiving blog posts via email. The trouble with having a blog-by-email service — which auto-generated an email to subscribers every time I added a post to the blog — was that it inhibited me from using the blog as I often like to: for short, occasional, unimportant posts that are more like scrapbook entries than essays. Those quick posts do not justify bothering hundreds of people with an email, which made me shy about posting anything at all to my own blog. Former blog-by-email subscribers will continue to receive the once- or twice-yearly email newsletter, and can of course subscribe to the blog via any RSS reader.
- Comments. The moribund comment sections of the blog also have been eliminated. There just weren’t enough people commenting to justify the cost in space and clutter. Eliminating comments allowed for a cleaner, lighter design. Most visitors who wanted to comment about something just emailed me anyway, which I encourage readers to do.
- Tumblr. I have abandoned my Tumblr blog and merged the contents back into this blog. For the last couple of years I used Tumblr as a scrapbook for things I found around the web — images, video clips, links — while the main blog was reserved for longer, essay-style blog posts. Alas, those long posts have become rare, especially in the tumult of publicizing Defending Jacob. Also, maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I like having everything in one place, here on the main blog.
Tweet of the Day
1984 recovered
New cover treatment for Orwell’s 1984 by David Pearson. See all five of Pearson’s designs for Penguin’s George Orwell series here. (A bit more information is here.) The last image, with the title entirely cut out, was Pearson’s initial concept, rejected by Penguin for cost reasons.
