Archive for December 2009

How social networks influence our behavior and outlook

Blog
December 3, 2009

From City Journal: You Say Potato, I’ll Say Potato. Before Facebook, few of us asked others, explicitly, to be our friends. We didn’t monitor how many friends we had as an indication of our status or scroll through listings of friends of friends to pad our own list. Yet the history of humanity is a [...]

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An interview with Maya Angelou

Blog
December 2, 2009

From The Independent: An interview with Maya Angelou. During a trip to Senegal, Maya Angelou called Samia, a friend she had made in Paris several years before, and was invited over for dinner. Passing a room where people apparently clung to the wall to avoid standing on the rug, Angelou became incensed. “I had known [...]

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Zadie Smith on the rise of the essay

Blog
December 1, 2009

From The Guardian: Does the essay live up to its promise? Why do novelists write essays? Most publishers would rather have a novel. Bookshops don’t know where to put them. It’s a rare reader who seeks them out with any sense of urgency. Still, in recent months Jonathan Safran Foer, Margaret Drabble, Chinua Achebe and [...]

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