“The average American three-year-old can recognize 100 brands,” says prominent advertising and marketing guru Martin Lindstrom. Are we being Brandwashed? For The New York Times, Steven Heller tracks the history of corporate symbols and branding.
Brandwashed
Fictional Characters Read Fiction
Dan Humphrey, a character on Gossip Girl, names his top 10 books of 2009.
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Identical Halves
“By running two lives that started from the same point off along divergent tracks, they throw up questions about our uniqueness, and the chances and choices that make us who we are.” On identical twins in literature, from Stephen King to Shakespeare. Also check out Ramona Ausubel’s essay on first children and first novels.
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“Young at Heart”
A new YA series spun off from The X-Files explores Fox Mulder’s teen years, and you can read the first chapter here. You may also be forgiven for feeling like the entire premise is a bit fraught. Not only is the mental image of Spooky Mulder with acne a tad jarring, but on a more existential level, as Zan Romanoff has written for our site, “there is no such thing as the young adult novel.”
Librarians on the Front Lines
“There are times it’s happening multiple times a day. Not too long ago, we had two in the same restroom at the same time. We call security, security calls paramedics. Of course they always find somebody lying there.” Samantha Sanders writes for Catapult about the epidemic of opioid overdoses in public libraries, and what some librarians are doing to respond. And ICYMI, here is Corinne Purtill in our own pages about British libraries under austerity cuts.
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‘The Last Library’
A conference on the implications of Google’s proposed settlement with publishers will highlight the massive role Google’s scanning project will play in the future of books. “‘This is the last library.’ It’s going to be extremely difficult for anyone else to create a similar digital library in the future, at least under the current laws.”
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Goodreads Choice Awards
The results of this year’s Goodreads Choice Awards are in, and a debut novelist took home Favorite Book of 2011 honors. Veronica Roth, author of Divergent, thanks her fans in this video. Other notable winners include Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 and Tina Fey’s Bossypants, which won the Best Fiction and Best Humor categories, respectively. (They were also reviewed on The Millions here and here, respectively.)