Infinite Summer - "The Challenge: Read Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009" [more inside]
posted by mattbucher on May 21, 2009 - 118 comments

Year of the Chicken Pot Pie, anyone? We're getting closer to David Foster Wallace's Year of the Whopper.
posted by jwakawaka on Apr 7, 2009 - 27 comments

Consider the Philosopher. The early metaphysical investigations of David Foster Wallace.
posted by homunculus on Dec 14, 2008 - 83 comments

You may have heard of John Ziegler. A former right-wing talk radio host turned right-wing documentarian, he was once the subject of a well-known David Foster Wallace essay about conservative talk radio. Ziegler later gained some notoriety by slamming Wallace heartlessly after the author committed suicide, calling him an overrated writer and criticizing the press for its coverage of his death. Now, Ziegler has once again made waves by going nuclear in an interview with pollster-watcher Nate Silver over the legitimacy of a commissioned Zogby poll. Silver questions the value of the poll, which contains leading questions, and which Ziegler plans on using in his upcoming documentary to "numerically prove" that Obama supporters are grossly misinformed idiots. [more inside]
posted by billysumday on Nov 19, 2008 - 70 comments

The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace, Rolling Stone (warning: long article; could make you cry)
posted by Baldons on Nov 1, 2008 - 70 comments

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about. First reported by an anonymous tip to a blog, the Los Angeles Times has confirmed that David Foster Wallace has hung himself.
posted by gerryblog on Sep 13, 2008 - 483 comments

Le Conversazioni: Last summer a group of writers including David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, and Jeffrey Eugenides gathered on the Isle of Capri to discuss language and identity. This year's lineup includes Ethan Coen, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Claire Messud, and Chuck Palahniuk.
posted by mattbucher on May 31, 2007 - 8 comments

The David Foster Wallace Bibliography (in BibTex format) is ridiculously complete. The site also includes a zip file of DFW's essays and mp3s of a round table discussion. [via]
posted by painquale on Jan 10, 2006 - 55 comments

iTunes Gets NBC Shows. And not just this season's: like a page out of Infinite Jest, iTunes and NBC are serving up classic NBC programs, including Knight Rider and Hitchcock Presents. (note: sorry - first link goes to iTunes Music Store -- no press releases available yet to link to.)
posted by eustacescrubb on Dec 6, 2005 - 32 comments

Seeing The Matrix yesterday (and just before it, the preview for the third Terminator movie) reminded me of this old David Foster Wallace essay"F/X Porn", in which he points out how Hollywood blockbusters have become the equivalent of your average "2 for $10.99!!" XXX rentals. [Google cached version here.]
posted by slipperywhenwet on Jun 13, 2003 - 36 comments

A blistering dissection of David Foster Wallace and Simon Winchester's previously published essays on English usage, by Mark Halpern. Though I like some of Wallace's writing, I admit it's nice to see the scalpel taken to Wallace's "style for style's sake".
posted by Big Fat Tycoon on Oct 19, 2001 - 29 comments

Talking the talk: An interview with John McWhorter Speaking of linguistics and whatnot, I've been thumbing through the new-look East Bay Express. I read this, and I feel like McWhorter's never gotten over some black people wrongly labeling him as an Oreo cookie (never had someone assure him, in response to epithets like those, that there are 35 million ways of being African-American -- and that many of them involve fluency in "totally ass-kicking SWE," to reference David Foster Wallace's essay on Bryan Garner's new usage book in Harper's a couple of months ago).

I appreciate his iconoclasm (hell, like myself, he voted for Nader) and I'm willing to concede points of his basic argument and that I agree with him on some (the whole "niggardly" thing; the Ebonics controversy) points.

But after reading this, I wound up feeling irritated with him -- and especially put off by allowing himself to be misrespresented marketed as a conservative and, despite his vaunted speaking ability and academic credentials, his inability to get his points across in the media.
posted by allaboutgeorge on Jul 6, 2001 - 13 comments