“I am not aware of a time after the rise of mass literacy when reading did not compete with other forms of leisure: dance halls, theater, and religious revivals, plus cinema, art galleries, and, more recently, video games. It may feel as though we read less now than we did before the advent of smartphones and social media, but statistics do not bear that out. In January of last year, Gallup found that Americans were consuming books at roughly the same rates as in 2002.”
Category: words
The Russian Politician Using His Country’s Politics As Satire
Plenty of politicos write novels; but not many write eviscerating self-satires. It was as though Karl Rove had taken the knife to his and George W. Bush’s America in, say, 2005. Surkov, however, wasn’t, and isn’t, simply a Rove. The documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis calls him “a hero of our time” (in praise and opprobrium) for turning Russia’s political reality into “a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater.”
A Science Fiction Genre That’s Not Dystopian (Or Even Depressing!)
“Imagine a scene, set in the future, where a child in Burning Man-style punk clothing is standing in front of a yurt powered by solar panels. … Welcome to solarpunk, a new genre within science fiction that is a reaction against the perceived pessimism of present-day sci-fi and hopes to bring optimistic stories about the future with the aim of encouraging people to change the present.”
UK’s Costa Book Of The Year Prize Goes To Helen Dunmore, Who Died Last June
“Inside the Wave considers [Dunmore’s] terminal cancer diagnosis and impending death. … [She] is only the second posthumous winner of the book of the year category in the prize’s history, after her fellow poet Ted Hughes won for Birthday Letters in 1998.”
Did Telling Stories Help Us To Evolve As Humans?
Anthropologists have long theorized that humans developed “moralistic high-gods” as a way of promoting shared norms and prosocial behaviors. What is religion, after all, but a patchwork quilt of stories reminding humans how to behave—and, more importantly, how not to behave? But religion is thought to have emerged only with the advent of agriculture and large-scale, politically complex human settlements.
This Journalist Asked Chimananda Ngozi Adichie The *Wrong* Question
“Caroline Broué, the French journalist conducting the interview, initially asked Adichie if people in Nigeria read her work, to which the writer replied, ‘They do, shockingly.’ From there, she decided to ask ‘Are there bookshops in Nigeria?’ When the audience responded with audible shock, she doubled down on her question.” (includes video)
Remember When The iPad Was Going To Transform Publishing?
“I’m not saying News Corp. or Conde Nast, publisher of Vogue and GQ, would have been worth as much as Google if they hadn’t bought into the iPad hype. But they did lose precious time and money following Apple down the iPad rabbit hole when they could have focused on Facebook, internet video, smartphone apps, mobile websites, their own subscription products or other promising areas. Newspaper and magazine publishers no longer treat the iPad as a priority, if they devote resources to it at all.”
As Local News Outlets Disappear, Libraries Step Into The Breach
“In some cities, libraries are partnering with established news sources, teaming up in Dallas to train high schoolers in news gathering or hosting a satellite studio in Boston for the public radio station WGBH. In San Antonio, the main library offers space to an independent video news site … In smaller communities starved for local coverage, some libraries are playing a hands-on role, even if it is an expansion of traditional duties.”
Why Did Instagram Censor This 26-Year-Old Poem?
“‘I want a dyke for president,’ artist Zoe Leonard writes in her 1992 poem. Inspired by the author Eileen Myles’ run for president, and written at the height of the AIDS epidemic, the poem, ‘I want a president,’ has since been shown in museums, galleries, and outdoor installations around the world. More than a quarter-century after it was written, the poem made its way to Instagram – and became the center of a controversy over censorship on social media.”
Is A ‘Takedown’ Of Young Women Poets Really So Brave?
The poetry world has been rent asunder by fierce arguments, in the past several weeks, over who deserves to be called a poet. Is it young women on Instagram and YouTube reading spoken word pieces? Is it Rupi Kaur, who came to fame with her “period photo” being banned from Instagram (and who has now sold a startlingly large number, inching toward a million, of copies of her poetry books)? Or is it the “serious poetry establishment” that takes them down? Says a publisher, “Poetry is most definitely not a broad church, but nor does it consist of 40 mutually exclusive sects. … One can worship at more than one altar.”