One could call Alex’s situation a journalistic cautionary tale, but it is also a prime example of what happens when place and character collide to create drama unique to a specific historical moment. By situating the novel in the internet and portraying it as an actual place (rather than just a portal to email and Google) Grose accurately depicts how one’s online existence can come to feel more authentic and important than life in the “real” world.
Alizah Salario on Sad Desk Salad / Is the Internet the Novel’s Saving Grace? / Los Angeles Review of Books
just wait …
![Your interwebz IRL
Austin Kleon (Steal Like an Artist), Maria Papova (Brainpickings), Maris Kreizman (Slaughterhouse 90210), and Maud Newton (herself) at McNally Jackson talking about creativity in the digital age. [May 30, 2012]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4w0p7lbSb1qjsf5ho1_500.jpg)
Your interwebz IRL
Austin Kleon (Steal Like an Artist), Maria Papova (Brainpickings), Maris Kreizman (Slaughterhouse 90210), and Maud Newton (herself) at McNally Jackson talking about creativity in the digital age. [May 30, 2012]
Here are four books by four writers featured in the latest issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. This is a companion post to my review of “Means of Communication” (Spring 2012)
House of Holes by Nicholson Baker
Shandee finds a friendly arm at a granite quarry. Ned drops down a hole in a golf course. So begins Nicholson Baker’s fuse-blowing sexual escapade—a modern-day Hieronymus Boschian bacchanal set in a pleasure resort where normal rules don’t apply. House of Holes, one of the most talked-about books in recent memory, is a gleefully provocative novel sure to surprise, amuse, and arouse.
You are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier
A programmer, musician, and father of virtual reality technology, Jaron Lanier was a pioneer in digital media, and among the first to predict the revolutionary changes it would bring to our commerce and culture. Now, with the Web influencing virtually every aspect of our lives, he offers this provocative critique of how digital design is shaping society, for better and for worse.
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin’s writings represent a long career of literary, scientific, and political efforts over a lifetime which extended nearly the entire eighteenth century. Franklin’s achievements range from inventing the lightning rod to publishing Poor Richard’s Almanack to signing the Declaration of Independence. In his own lifetime he knew prominence not only in America but in Britain and France as well. This volume includes Franklin’s reflections on such diverse questions as philosophy and religion, social status, electricity, American national characteristics, war, and the status of women. Nearly sixty years separate the earliest writings from the latest, an interval during which Franklin was continually balancing between the puritan values of his upbringing and the modern American world to which his career served as prologue.
The Professor and the Madman, masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary — and literary history. The compilation of the OED began in 1857, it was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.
50 Creative MacBook Decals and Stickers
more at Twisted Sifter
“All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.” —Marshall Mcluhan
On the Shelf: Mediums and Messages, Generation Xers, and Senior Mavericks
The Three Laws of Robotics:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
0. A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity
to come to harm.
—Isaac Asimov
