Sunday Coffee and Company

Sunday Coffee and Company

I've always thought of Sunday as the very end of the week, rather than the beginning, despite what the calendar makers would have us believe. 

Sundays I like to spend the morning curled up with a cup of coffee going over all of those links I've saved during the week to "read later." 

Sometimes we all need a little mental break from the novels we're reading to exercise our brains with something shorter, fun, or new. Here is a collection of my favorite reads, books, news articles, essays and discussions from around the web this week.

Online Reads:

The Ghost Writes Back, A 'Sweet Valley High' Ghostwriter on Living a Double Life by Amy Boesky via The Kenyon Review. In her twenties, Amy Boesky lived a double life. By day, she was a Harvard graduate studying English at Oxford. By night, she was a ghostwriter for the popular teen book series Sweet Valley High. Over the course of six years, Boesky wrote more than 50 books for the series under the pseudonym Kate William.

The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble by Maxine Swann via NYT Magazine. A world-renowned physicist meets a gorgeous model online. They plan their perfect life together. But first, she asks, would he be so kind as to deliver a special package to her?

Serial Thriller by Megan Garber via The Atlantic Magazine. From literature to appointment television, episodic storytelling is flourishing.

Podcasts:

This American Life: Harper High School - Part I and Part II -  Chicago Public Media and NPR - By far one of the best This American Life's in a while... heavy and fantastic. A must-listen.

Part I - We spent five months at Harper High School in Chicago, where last year alone 29 current and recent students were shot. 29. We went to get a sense of what it means to live in the midst of all this gun violence, how teens and adults navigate a world of funerals and Homecoming dances. 

Part II - We pick up where we left off last week in our second hour from Harper High School in Chicago. We find out if a shooting in the neighborhood will derail the school's Homecoming game and dance. We hear the origin story of one of Harper's gangs. And we ask a group of teenagers: where do you get your guns?

How Coffee Works - (link to the .mp3) Stuff You Should Know podcast - There’s a 98 percent chance you’re drinking coffee right now. Maybe not, sure, but coffee is ubiquitous – about 80 percent of Americans consume coffee and Brazil alone has 3 billion coffee plants. Learn all about the great black brew in this episode.

Articles:

Women in Their 20s Shouldn't Feel Bad About Wanting a Boyfriend by Leslie C. Bell via The Atlantic. But a lot of them experience ambivalence about being in a relationship. A therapist asks why.

The Papal Conclave 2013 (The Search for Benedict XVI's Successor) a collection of articles via The New York Times concerning the upcoming Papal conclave and information about Pope Benedict XVI and his possible successors.

Wired's SXSW Liveblog - Couldn't make it to Austin this year but still want to know what's going on? Wired has you covered with a minute by minute liveblog every day of the festival. Tune in for the good stuff, tune out for the bad. It's practically like being there.

That's all I've got for you this week, share your thoughts if you've read or listened to any of them.

Any great articles I missed? Let me know!