This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...morePosts Tagged: wired
The Company Tub
If you have ever enjoyed playing an early Nintendo arcade game, chances are you’ve enjoyed the brain fruit Japanese game designer Shigeru Miyamoto grew while soaking in the company bathtub, Chris Kohler reports for WIRED. “At night when nobody was around, you could hang out there for a long time. It totally saved me,” Miyamoto said of the […]
...moreI Know What You Read Last Summer
More and more, book publishers are turning to data studies and algorithms to predict which kinds of books will sell. Susanne Althof, in a piece for WIRED, interrogates the wisdom of such an approach, speaking with people in the industry who worry it will compromise the diversity of books being put out and the tech […]
...moreGoDefundMe
There’s no denying that crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have brought resources to artists and causes that wouldn’t have found support a decade ago. However, according to Emma Hoffman at WIRED, a dark side is emerging. Everything—from academic research projects, to elementary school classes, to parks and recreation departments—is seen as crowdfundable, meaning that […]
...morePhotographing Crime
It’s a paradox that many of the show’s images are strangely striking even if the crimes they represent are horrifying. Joseph Stalin had at least 750,000 executed between 1937 and 1938. A photographer made a portrait before each execution, shooting the condemned from the front and the side—something the Khmer Rouge did, too. The images […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
A song of my selfie. A year after the Sony hack. Wired: the good and the bad and the in between. A visual history of the OS we all love to hate.
...moreThe Price of Instant Gratification
In their continued quest to conquer the world, Amazon has quietly launched a new program, called Amazon Flex, which hires contract delivery drivers on demand, much like Über. Read more over at WIRED.
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The Rumpus Interview with Austin Bunn
Austin Bunn talks about his new story collection, The Brink, his latest script for a short film, In the Hollow, working in multiple mediums, and why some novels read like early drafts of screenplays.
...moreWord of the Day: Amphigory
(n.); a nonsense verse; specifically, a poem designed to look and sound good, but which has no meaning upon closer reading; from the French amphigouri. “Just imagine a typeface that could inspire empathy inherently based on the softness of a letter’s apex or by increasing or decreasing negative space in characters.” –Liz Stinson, “Can Typography […]
...moreReviewing the Absurd
Wired is launching a book review section—of absurd self-published titles. Jason Kehe will in fact be judging books by their cover, selecting the books he reviews for the regular column by browsing the blog Kindle Cover Disasters. The first title in the series is Moira, The Zorzen War, The Divided Worlds Book 3: If you’re […]
...moreThe Private Words of Newton
Do we think that the things a person says in public or the things a person writes in private say more about them? I think that’s an interesting question, especially for our moment of Twitter and Facebook. We tend to feel the private is more true somehow. But people choose what to make public, and […]
...moreCamping Out at Walmart
Because Walmart has a company policy letting people park their cars in its lots overnight, it’s possible to find travelers, long-term campers, and even small communities of people living there. Wired highlights a series of portraits of people staying in the parking lot of a Walmart in Flagstaff, Arizona, taken by photographer Nolan Conway. From […]
...moreThe Passage of Ideas
Every day, we collectively produce millions of books’ worth of writing. Globally we send 154.6 billion emails, more than 400 million tweets, and over 1 million blog posts and around 2 million blog comments on WordPress. On Facebook, we post about 16 billion words. Altogether, we compose some 3.6 trillion words every day on email […]
...moreA New Way to Read Comics
Only a small percentage of blind people commonly use Braille—and that number drops even further when it comes to reading comic books. With a new Braille-based comic book, Danish designer Phillipp Meyer may have overcome some of the limitations that prevent the visually impaired from enjoying sequential art. Instead of merely raising the lines on […]
...more250-year-old Secret Text Decoded
New technological advances have allowed researchers into an ancient world of secret texts that once seemed nearly impossible to decode. Noah Shachtman’s article in Wired, titled “They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found a Secret Society Inside,” explores how new computer generated algorithms are opening doors into secret societies. Shachtman writes:
...moreThe Silent History and the Evolution of the E-Book
At Wired, Shoshana Berger profiles designer, programmer, and Rumpus contributor Russell Quinn, whose new project, The Silent History, will begin its serial publication soon. The e-book is divided into six parts, each part then divided into smaller, ten to fifteen minute “episodes”, which will be delivered wirelessly to the readers device every weekday for a month. The […]
...moreLetters for Kids Love
Wired wrote about Letters for Kids, our newly-launched subscription service akin to Letters in the Mail — but for youngsters. We agree wholeheartedly with Wired’s endorsement: “If your child has bookish tendencies, or if you’d like to encourage the development of such tendencies, this is worth a look.” Thanks, Wired, we love you back!
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Jonah Lehrer
If you listened to Radiolab or read the New Yorker in the last three years, you’ve probably encountered the science journalist Jonah Lehrer.
...moreOur Brains On Art
“While Rembrandt was an astonishingly talented artist, our response to his art is conditioned by all sorts of variables that have nothing to do with oil paint. Many of these variables are capable of distorting our perceptions, so that we imagine differences that don’t actually exist; the verdict of art history warps what we see.” […]
...moreGuillermo del Toro Interview
Wired interviews Guillermo del Toro, whose co-authored vampire book trilogy concluded with last month’s publication of Night Eternal. Del Toro discusses science and religion; vampire myths and folklore; and his current projects, one of which is a video game. “I feel like science and religion are like a Möbius strip. When you dig deep enough […]
...moreNew School
Wired’s got an article on technologically-informed education—Khan Academy, an educational website in which, “Students, or anyone interested enough to surf by, can watch some 2,400 videos in which the site’s founder, Salman Khan, chattily discusses principles of math, science, and economics.” This website ostensibly aids in solving the “middle of the class teaching,” that neglects […]
...moreAlan Moore on Superheroes
Actually, there’s a lot more to this interview with Alan Moore than just his view on superheroes–it’s largely about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 1969, which should be released next month–but I really enjoyed this bit on the problem with today’s superheroes. “I do have a feeling, particularly in this last decade, that some of […]
...moreMass Extinction
“It could happen again…” There is some evidence that the onset of the end-Triassic mass extinction—which occurred 200 million years ago and wiped out at least half of all living species—may have been much more sudden that previously believed. And the culprit? Something that concerns scientists about today’s rising temperatures: the release of methane in […]
...more5 for Print
Wired has 5 reasons why E-books cannot replace print. Besides the tech-related qualms (like books being divided by app, not allowing readers to see all their books in one place), problems like “an unfinished e-book isn’t a constant reminder to finish reading it,” make the list. Because even the techy people can’t resist all the […]
...moreTHE BLURB #21: This Is Your Brain—on Books, on Screens
After just five hundred years of movable type and the Enlightenment it begat, we are blinded by how brief our dwelling in the kingdom of print turned out to be.
...moreDepressed Creativity? Sort Of.
When Martin Heidegger wrote his gargantuan Magnus opus, Being and Time, he posited that it was Angst, the fundamental human condition, that brought us into the most authentic relationship with our selves and our surroundings. Angst, for Heidegger, is caused by coming face-to-face with the inevitability of our own death and is life in the […]
...moreThe Ultimate in Recycling
It’s just a coincidence that I’ll be teaching the Wendell Berry poem “Enriching the Earth” tomorrow, a poem which ends with the lines “And so what was heaviest / and most mute is at last raised up into song,” but I couldn’t help but think of Berry’s sentiment about the body being of use after […]
...moreWhat if the Facebook privacy changes are a good thing?
Fred Vogelstein, writing for the Wired blog Epicenter, looks at Facebook’s history on privacy, and points out that we shouldn’t really be shocked at what Mark Zuckerberg is doing. “Indeed, Zuckerberg’s challenges to conventional thinking about online privacy have become so predictable, it’s starting to resemble Moore’s Law. That bet — that the number of […]
...moreScience Saturday–Oil Spill Edition
Birds are already starting to turn up covered in oil. National Geographic has some early photos. In what will come as a surprise to almost no one, it’s being reported that BP had almost no plan in place to respond to a major spill. It’s too early to tell just what kind of impact this […]
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