Last Call: Watch Surfer Dan Catch Icy Waves In The Upper Peninsula
My favorite film of last weekend's Backcountry Film Festival was Surfer Dan, a short about a surfer named Dan (stay with me, people) whose stomping grounds are the frigid, ice-covered waters of Michigan's Lake Superior. "To most, it's quite possibly the most unattractive surfing destination in the entire world," the film's description reads. But to Dan, below-zero air temperatures, icebergs, and a frozen beard are just par for the course. He's surfed Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, and even northern Michigan's Teal Lake. The documentary is visually beautiful, and worth your time. [Kate Bernot]
Another Dan makes for a fascinating, disturbing story about the book industry
"Something crazy is going on": How the publishing industry lived with the strange and elaborate deceits of Dan Mallory, the author of the hit thriller "The Woman in the Window." https://t.co/nf8qpttygd pic.twitter.com/3vxzGVsJ3x
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) February 5, 2019
Today's must-read is in The New Yorker (I foolishly started reading it off of Twitter soon after I woke up, almost making me late for work): "The Suspense Novelist's Trail Of Deceptions" by Ian Parker, about The Woman In The Window author Dan Mallory (pen name: A.J. Finn). That debut novel was an immediate best-seller and is being made into a movie, the kind of deal every writer dreams of. But years before TWITW, Dan Mallory had studied Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley novels and skated his way from high-end publishing job to high-end publishing job, all the while unfurling conflicting stories about his family history, his education, even his own health. It's a fascinating tale about how easy it is for a privileged white male to fall upward, even in a super-competitive industry like publishing (in a way, Mallory reminds me of Fyre Festival organizer Billy McFarland). But it's also a difficult-to-fathom actual true tale about the huge gray area between reality and fiction in real life. Definitely check it out—just make sure you've got the time to read it all. [Gwen Ihnat]
My favorite thing about this New Yorker expose on Dan Mallory is the coworker who is trying to describe what it felt like to work with him using the plot of The Faculty. pic.twitter.com/5TXL34VorX
— Emmet Asher-Perrin @use-theforce-em.bsky.social (@use_theforce_em) February 4, 2019