Kicking off LARB’s Didion week, here’s the author herself on Teresa Schiavo: “Yet even if we had managed to convince ourselves that this case involved the right to die, a problem remained. No one even casually exposed to religious teaching believes any such right exists.”

Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 reviewed by David Ulin: “Here’s an unorthodox suggestion: Try to read Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 in as close to a single sitting as you can.”

An interview with Julian Barnes by Susha Guppy: “In Britain I’m sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence. But if you try that line in Europe, especially in France, they say, Oh, no! You’re so English! I think I’m probably anchored somewhere in the Channel.”

Zach Baron chases Hunter S. Thompson: “In late July, I flew to Las Vegas with a woman I will call Fleur, in service of a story idea so doomed and ill-conceived I hesitate to even tell you what it was. You will have your suspicions. Writers only go to Las Vegas for one reason, really. It is our World Series of Poker, except more pretentious.”

“E. O. Wilson’s Theory of Everything” by Howard W. French: “Wilson’s head was cocked sharply downward as he walked, as if he suffered a neck condition. (Later he would tell me this habit grew from a lifetime of scanning the ground for insect life.) In his right hand, he carried a flowing white net, like what Vladimir Nabokov might have used to pursue butterflies by Lake Geneva.”

“Science Publishing: The Problem with Retractions” by Richard Van Noorden: “This week, some 27,000 freshly published research articles will pour into the Web of Science, Thomson Reuters’ vast online database of scientific publications. Almost all of these papers will stay there forever, a fixed contribution to the research literature. But 200 or so will eventually be flagged with a note of alteration such as a correction. And a handful — maybe five or six — will one day receive science’s ultimate post-publication punishment: retraction…”

“Just Kids” - Evan Hughes on Jeffrey Eugenides and friends: “The crowd was overwhelmingly male, very close in age, largely from the Midwest, and engaged in a kind of generational struggle to make sense of the postmodern literary legacy — of Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and others — that they found both consuming and unsatisfactory, especially as a guide to writing about the new, weird America of the eighties and nineties.”

Michelle Dean on “A Supposedly True Thing Jonathan Franzen Said About David Foster Wallace”: “There’s really no delicate way to put this: at this year’s New Yorker Festival, Jonathan Franzen said that David Foster Wallace fabricated at least part of—and potentially a large part of—his nonfiction pieces.”

In the print or otherwise unobtainable for free online category:

“American Juggalo” by Kent Russell in n+1 Number Twelve (available for purchase as a Kindle single).