Like a time machine to the first Bush Administration, the complete archives of the late, lamented, and hugely influential Spy Magazine are now apparently available through Google Books (via). We’d offer a few keywords to get you started, but the riches are too many. Okay, fine. You twisted our collective arm. Ivana Trump. Henry Kissinger. O.J. Celebrity Pro-Am Ironman Nightlife Decathalon. Go nuts.
The Complete Spy Magazine, Now Online
And then I was like “Alas!”
For everyone who harbors a deep and mildly-embarrassed love for GIFs in the significant, non-linguistic part of their brains that finds repeated facial expressions far more memorable than words: Ploughshares’ series on classic novels (1984, The Catcher in the Rye, The Scarlet Letter, The Hobbit) will have you laughing and building your cocktail-party knowledge all at once.
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Kindle Highlights and Lowlights
Amazon is now aggregating the data from the “highlighting” feature on the Kindle to find out what text is highlighted the most across all Kindle users. Amazon is calling the feature “Most Highlighted Passages of All Time” and the results couldn’t be more boring. (via)
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Talking with Konstantin Kakaes
In the Tank, the blog of the New America Foundation, has a new interview up with Konstantin Kakaes, author of the latest e-book from The Millions. Among other things, he talks about what he would do if he ran NASA — “bring back a piece of Mars” — and mentions that the Voyager spacecrafts will keep sending signals back to Earth until at least the year 2025.
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That’s Not Leather
In horrifying book news, the binding of one of Harvard College Library’s books has been confirmed to be human skin.
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“Is it possible to overcome the horrible legacy of slavery and find decolonial love?”
Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, sits down with Paula M.L. Moya for a great interview focusing on race at The Boston Review.
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“Life, friends, is boring”
“These were not like other poems: within their consistent 16-line armature they were turbulent, mad, feverish, cryptic, an unruly union of boppy jive-talk, and thorny quasi-Elizabethan diction. It was impossible to tell who was speaking, or to whom; poems ended in mid-syllable, bristled with random phrases in foreign languages, sported menacing-looking accent marks and Shakespearean contractions, were riddled with ampersands and ellipses.” At The Rumpus, a memory of falling in love with The Dream Songs (which happens to nicely complement a piece we published back in April).
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Longreads
This January, Penguin Random House, Goodreads, Mashable and the National Book Foundation are sponsoring National Readathon Day, a holiday which encourages Americans to join together for a marathon reading session. If you’d like to take part, you can start a fundraiser to help support reading education, or else enlist your friends and family to read with you on January 24th from noon to 4 p.m.
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