They hipped us on Gary Shteyngart’s love of smoked meats, featured an in-depth conversation between Tao Lin and Malcolm Gladwell, and pretty much just blew our minds with their first issue. Now, the folks at Gigantic are staking their claim on the interweb with a pretty new website that has art from New York Times Magazine featured artist Thomas Doyle, Shya Scanlon’s latest installment of his internet-serialized novel Forecast and new fiction from J.A. Tyler. Go check it out here.
Bites: Books on Abraham, Chuck Klosterman on the Fab 4, bike shares, Genesis P-Orridge, and more
Lit. The New York Review of Books has a stack of books on our 16th President Daniel Steel and “That Madea Guy” both make the list of “15 Rich-Ass Authors I’ve Suddenly Decided to Like“. (Thanks HTMLGIANT) The Desk Set asks: “Why should we, librarians and friends of libraries, care about the state of the humanities?” JK Rowling getting a comic book Bikes Copenhagen Bike Share Competition. (Thanks Cool Hunting) Music – Art Chuck Klosterman reviews the recently remastered Beatles albums […]
The Millennials Will Usher in a New Age of Literacy
Over and over again are there complaints about our Twitter-obsessed minds, our over-texting tendencies, and the fact that no one actually reads books anymore. On the path to illiteracy, are we? Developing a generation of Adderall-induced, emoticon-using, pathetically apathetic individuals? Think again, please.
The powers of Alex Trebek
Mental Floss gave us this video: but we prefer this one:
New Thunderant
Hearing Carrie Brownstein yell “this is fucking AIDS, this is 9/11” is pretty much the greatest thing of the week. Here you go.
The Goodness of Art
By Laura Macomber I recently wrote a 45-page paper discussing the paradox of cultural elitism in post-war, post-fascist societies as discussed by three different works of literature: “Todesfuge” (Death Fugue) by Paul Celan, Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman, and The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek. Admittedly, the paper was my senior honors thesis in Comparative Literature and I wrote it for no one but myself and a handful of professors. And though I felt deep concern for the […]
The Address Collector
By Jason Diamond I always pictured myself in my old age some old Yid sitting by a pool in LA or Miami Beach, being old and awesome. Then I read about Jack Smalling of Ames, Iowa, who spends his golden years collecting and publishing the addresses of baseball players, and I think to myself “I’ve planned my elderly years totally wrong. I need to be like this dude.”