Link Roundup: Ware Animation and Happiness

1. Regular VQR contributor Chris Ware has created an animated work for This American Life, entitled “Quimby the Mouse.”

2. Artist Robert Irwin was recently named UVA’s 2009 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medalist in Architecture, and came here to give an hour-long talk about his work.

Ren Weschler profiled Robert Irwin in our Spring 2008 issue.

3. Contributing Online Editor Jacob Silverman recently wrote a response to VQR contributor Tom Bissell’s remembrance of David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech in the New York Times, taking issue with the publisher of the speech-as-book, who Bissell explained had excised a reference to suicide in the speech. In a correction, the Times clarifies that only a single sentence was omitted, one that doesn’t change the meaning of the passage.

4. Harvard researchers have made some genuine progress into determining what makes for a good life, Joshua Wolf Shenk writes in a really brilliant article in the June 2009 Atlantic. A 72-year-long longitudinal study of 268 men has found that the strength and warmth of personal relationships is strongly correlated with happiness and well-being as one ages.