Some great reads from around the internet today:
- Journalist Joan Juliet Buck tells the story behind her infamous Vogue puff piece on Asma al-Assad (above), saying that the First Lady of Syria “duped” her. Buck now writes of al-Assad’s husband, “I didn’t know I was going to meet a murderer. There was no way of knowing that Assad, the meek ophthalmologist and computer-loving nerd, would kill more of his own people than his father had and torture tens of thousands more, many of them children.” [The Daily Beast]
. - The New Yorker has published a lost story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which was rejected by the magazine in 1936 before the writer became a literary star. [New Yorker]
. - Anyone interested in a road trip to Westport, Connecticut? The library there has christened a “maker space” in its center, complete with a 3-D printer — a technology Lisa Harouni explains in the TEDTalk, “A primer on 3D printing.” [Shareable]
. - Peter Thiel, the creator of Paypal and an early investor in Facebook, gives the following advice to creative people in his class at Stanford: “Instead of being slightly better than everybody else in a crowded and established field, it’s often more valuable to create a new market and totally dominate it.” [NY Times]
. - Ever wondered what it would cost to own a baby panda? The breakdown here. [Mental Floss]