English

This bit in The Paris Review’s interview with Hernan Diaz is really interesting:

Interviewer: How did you balance that freedom from referential anchorage with the need to accurately represent the setting? Diaz: My effort at all moments was to be inconspicuously accurate. I would always take believable over precise. And I tried very hard to make the novel not feel researched, a word I distrust when applied to literature. It’s awful when a novel feels googled—I didn’t want to know the exact name of the exact spur someone would have worn in Nevada in 1869. My intention was to convey a sense of pastness without fetishizing that past. I didn’t want to use props as magical objects that by merely being mentioned would summon the past into the present.

Hernan Diaz wrote a western novel about a Swedish immigrant in nineteenth-century Nevada heading east who does not speak English called In the Distance. While he purposely did not research certain aspects of his novel and relied more on feeling, he does have thoughts and reasons on subverting the western genre and it’s fascinating.

This recent episode of Reply All from Gimlet Media highlights so much of the power imbalance between multinational corporations, especially tech giants, and local communities that are desperate to find new opportunities for employment.

Reporter/producer Sruthi Pinnamaneni with the math:

Wisconsin will give Foxconn almost three billion dollars in incentives, and then, Mount Pleasant itself will chip in another 760 million dollars. …Foxconn says that they’re gonna create jobs that pay an average of 50k a year, but the state is paying them $200,000 for each one of those jobs.

There is also an interview with Sruthi on the Verge about everything.

The deal was made behind closed doors with the village council and Foxconn representatives, and many locals are livid. In the face of rising inequality, why do we let capital run roughshod over us?

In my milieu growing up, politics was something private and for election day. But politics, with the cognizance that real consequences and benefits are at stake, is the solution. A politics that doesn’t devolve into profit or growth but rather a system that elevates us all.