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A Long Engagement
The image that comes to my mind is a foot hovering above a stair. Marriage is the fabled next step, but engagement implies a kind of limbo, an almost-not-quite-there yet—the zero that comes before the one.
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Lydia Davis: A Prolific Tweeter
For The Millions, Adam Boffa compares Lydia Davis’s short stories to social media. He argues that Davis’s compressed language, as well as her emphasis on routine and tragedy, works to “recreate a phenomenon that occurs daily on social media”: Davis’s work, and…
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Weekly Geekery
Trauma haunts your DNA. Robots at CVS. Erik Larson’s favorite gadgets. Drones do good? Shrooms, science, and Beatrix Potter.
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Weekly Geekery
Go, to bed. Now. Facebook begrudgingly cedes that they might not have a PhD in You. Literary non-fiction on the edge of technology… old technology that is. No technology can replace reading out loud. Technology to help you with your addiction to technology.…
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Weekly Geekery
Virtual reality is the final frontier. How to talk to aliens. Do livestreaming apps change the news? Ellen Pao and the media and Silicon Valley and Twitter and sexism and everything. Is virtual medicine real medicine? Facebook is hungry. So.…
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Weekly Geekery
Shame. The Internet. Monica Lewinsky. You spend hours killing people, but you don’t feel guilty. So much data. So few uses. All your stories in one little app. Reimagining incarceration. Your annoying Facebook friends have something to tell you.
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Weekly Geekery
Google wants to rank searches on fact. But who decides what is a fact? Marissa Mayer is winning. Your dog ruined everything. You did too. For the last time, take those baby pictures down. It is time to log off…
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The (Online) Stories We Tell
Sometimes you want to dream about the life you didn’t get to have. Sometimes you want to see the life you were lucky to escape.
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Writing in the Age of Social Networks
[W]anting to make a career in letters and not being on Twitter and Facebook — that is, not wanting to share your work constantly with the strangers you met on airplanes and in restaurants and people you hadn’t seen since…
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Zuckerberg is No Oprah
The first meeting of the Facebook book club was a little like Fight Club: nobody talked about it. Perhaps it was Zuckerberg’s choice of book—The End of Power by Moisés Naím—or maybe he simply doesn’t have the cultural cachet of…
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Facebook: New Platform for Extremist Death Threats
Shortly after Kamel Daoud’s Counter-Investigation fell short of winning the Goncourt Prize, the Algerian author received a Facebook death threat from an Islamist preacher calling the author “an enemy of religion.” Now, Daoud fights to defend his work as extremists attempt to force him…
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The Mark Zuckerberg Book Club
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has launched a new book club, and it already has 80,000 members. Some people are hoping Facebook’s reach will make this a powerful tool akin to Oprah’s book club, once known for driving tens of thousands in…
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