From More Intelligent Life: Facts, Errors, and the Kindle. Nietzsche famously said that there are no such things as facts, only interpretations. Be that as it may, every writer knows that there are certainly such things as factual mistakes. Errors are common in all forms of media, but it is mistakes in the printed word [...]
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From the New York Times: Facebook Exodus. The exodus is not evident from the site’s overall numbers. According to comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the United States in July. But while people are still joining Facebook and compulsively visiting the site, a small but noticeable group are fleeing – some of them [...]
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From the New York Times: A Few Dollars at a Time, Patrons Support Artists on the Web. Earl Scioneaux III is not a famous music producer like Quincy Jones. He is a simple audio engineer in New Orleans who mixes live albums of local jazz musicians by day and creates electronic music by night. He [...]
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From the New York Times Magazine: The Overextended Family. Now, I like my parents. A lot. I really do. That’s why I make the 1,500-mile trip to visit them three or four times a year. I did not, however, spend the bulk of my adult life perfecting the fine art of establishing boundaries only to [...]
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A great project: Tweenbots. In New York, we are very occupied with getting from one place to another. I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More [...]
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From The Guardian: The joy of anti-social media. Social media have undeniably changed the way many of us talk about books, and encouraged us to do it more. Whereas in the physical world there may be only certain contexts in which you’d dive into a deconstruction of Dostoevsky’s metaphors, the virtual world provides round-the-clock opportunity [...]
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From Prospect: Cut-and-paste writing. I imagine some may consider this cheating: reducing the art of writing to an elaborate game of cut-and-paste. But authors have long written quotations on index cards. My system simply makes it easier to move virtual index cards around. The old techniques of pinning cards on a cork bulletin board, or [...]
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From the Telegraph: The Internet is causing a poetry boom. Poetry reading groups – known as “series” – are becoming stronger thanks to the growth of online communities to back them up, he said. “These reading series often have Facebook groups around them. The net is helping smaller networks get together across the country so [...]
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The novel is about a suicidal, mad pursuit of knowledge – about the desire for immortality through information – and the crash that follows. It is one of those prescient books that resonates more today, with our own financial titans falling, than when it was written in 2003.
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