A while back, I mentioned the prescient timing of Walter Isaacson’s forthcoming biography Steve Jobs. As you await its publication, content yourself with Forbes and JESS3’s graphic novel The Zen of Steve Jobs.
The Zen of Steve Jobs
Tastes Like Nostalgia
“Titles hitting shelves in the coming months are both updating heirloom recipes for a modern age, and modern kitchens, and bringing untouched dishes back into the spotlight.” Publishers Weekly highlights the resurgence of retro cookbooks as well as upcoming titles that put contemporary spins on vintage recipes. From our archives: Hannah Gersen‘s list of literature masquerading as cookbook.
Google Books. Literally.
“What would be the consequences,” asks Charlie Stross, “if a large internet corporation such as Google were to buy the entire publishing industry?” Would such a buyout “amount to a wholesale shift to a promotion-supported model for book publishing?”
The Bronte Adventures
13-year-old Charlotte Brontë and her brother Branwell wrote adventure books in 2-inch books they sewed themselves. The results are exactly as adorable as you imagine. (Pair with our own essay on the sisters’ beginnings.)
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The Dynamism of Duos
Is “the two-person collaboration… the essential creative act”? Joshua Wolf Shenk thinks so, and he’s written a book defending his position, aptly titled The Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs. While John Lennon and Paul McCartney are his primary examples and the root of his argument, famous author duos are also referenced – C.S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, for one. Shenk even “works to transform even famously lonely figures — Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King Jr. — into one side of a duet.” Consider us skeptical but intrigued.
Digital Publishing and Changes to Copy
“Just as the written word changed the spoken word and the printed word changed the written word, so too will the digital word change the printed word, supplementing but not replacing the earlier forms of information technology.”
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Uber Nichts
George Bernard Shaw had a strange relationship with Nietzsche. Alternately envious and dismissive of the German philosopher, Shaw once said he wanted to be an intellectual in Nietzsche’s mold, though he also felt Nietzsche’s thinking was addled and self-absorbed. In an essay for The New Statesman, Michael Holroyd tries to make sense of Shaw’s views.
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