Over at The Believer Logger, José Teodoro talks to director Olivier Assayas about his most recent film, Something in the Air,¹ and the tension between politics and art. Assayas’s description of his own path to art—he’s compelled by the collaborative nature of movie-making—is both heartening and instructive:

To become a filmmaker, to take that giant step to make my first short film, I had to accept that I felt a little schizophrenic about all of this. What I believed in, deeply, in terms of my politics, should have made it impossible to make films. Then I made my first short film and realized that it was not alienating. There was a path towards cinema, towards art, on which you could work along with a crew, within a team, and create something that was not alienating. This was a discovery. I then had to try to make sense as to why I found in cinema something that gave me a satisfaction that work in itself could never give me.

1. The French title is Après mai. ↩

I wrote about Aleksandar Hemon’s new collection of essays, The Book of My Lives, for Maclean’s. The book covers such a diverse mix of subjects that it almost seems like Hemon is going for the literary equivalent of what he calls the “perfect” borscht: “ideally, it contains everything.” It’s an impressive piece of work—Hemon’s impulse to narrativize his experiences leads to writing that is sometimes excruciatingly sad, but often deeply funny, too.