Book Bench
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How Do We Spend Our Time?
Last week the government released a survey detailing the time-consuming activities of Americans, broken down in terms of gender, race and age. Time spent working is down due to the lack of jobs and alas, an increase in reading is…
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Burning Books
The contemporary burning of books is taking on a new significance. Burning books is an act historically associated with censorship and limited freedoms, a symptom of an overpowering and centralized government or religion. However, these days, the burning of books…
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Let’s Take a Walk Together
James Yeh writes on the Spontaneous Society for Faster Times, Jon Cotner’s ambulatory, real-life interaction/art installation, inciting strangers to interact positively with one another. The project was created in hopes of reigniting a certain kind of social spontaneity that is…
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Summer Reading Fun
Want to be on the same literary wavelength as a Pulitzer prize winning author this summer? Consciously planning your summer reading synchronicity with Jeffrey Eugenides is fun. So is hiking in the Alps, but there are more barriers to accomplishing…
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French Faux Pas
A twenty year-old French law that sought to keep the news media from promoting commercial enterprises is being newly reinforced. This means that using “Facebook” and “Twitter” on air is strictly forbidden. This seems like a good way to stave…
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A History Of Emoticons
“In 1887, Ambrose Bierce wrote an essay, ‘For Brevity and Clarity,’ suggesting ways to alter punctuation to better represent tone. He proposed a single bracket flipped horizontally for wry smiles, ‘to be appended, with the full stop, to every jocular…
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My salmon day started when I quash squashed through his fornicorium
The Book Bench pointed me in the direction of this phenomenal time waster of a site called Unwords, which is “a dictionary devoted to made-up words.” Thanks a lot, Book Bench. I decided immediately upon finding the word “toilet toupee”…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
At Maud, how much should philosophy and fiction have anything to do with each other? If you liked Julie Klausner’s interview here at The Rumpus and want more, she has another interview over at The New Yorker Book Bench. (Spoiler…