Hypochondriacs rejoice! A team of scientists from the University of Rochester is working on a “machine-based algorithm” in the same vein as Google Flu Trends—but this time based on Twitter and smart phone data—to predict, with about 90% accuracy, when you’ll next get sick.
Twitter Bird Flu
Honesty Trumps Good Manners
“Our children, at least in this country, with no tales of war to tell; only music and clothes. Infuriating and a blessing for our parents, who had experienced the abyss staring back at them. I suppose their memories must have hung around their necks like stinking albatrosses, only for their children to turn out themselves to be an abyss gazing back at the next generation. Is it catching? Whose 1950s was I living?” This installment of Jenny Diski’s memoir from the London Review of Books is not to be missed.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Winterson, Lerner, Díaz, Walbert, and More
New Ben Lerner, August Burroughs's latest memoir, and a reimagination of Frankenstein that puts Mary Shelley’s creative process front and center.
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China’s Censorship Army
Not only does China employ some two million censors to monitor microblogs and the internet, but the nation also has a formidable staff – both official and unofficial – to monitor literature and print publications. Indeed, reports Andrew Jacobs for The New York Times, “It is the editors at Chinese publishing houses themselves who often turn out to have the heaviest hands. ‘Self-censorship has become the most effective weapon,’ said the editor in chief of a prominent publishing house in Beijing … ‘If you let something slip through that catches the attention of a higher-up, it can be a career killer.’”
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“Gundersonia, land of the really free.”
Recommended Reading: Return to Oakpine author Ron Carlson’s short story, “How Things Have Actually Changed Since We Did Secede from the United States.”
The Marriage Plot Problem
Have novels about love lost their gravitas as women’s liberation and divorce culture have taken over? Adelle Waldman doesn’t think so. In The New Yorker, she defends the timelessness of the marriage plot. “As long as marriage and love and relationships have high stakes for us emotionally, they have the potential to offer rich subject material for novelists, no matter how flimsy or comparatively uninteresting contemporary relationships seem on their surface.” Pair with: Our Jeffrey Eugenides essay on writing The Marriage Plot, which is referenced several times in Waldman’s essay.
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Iceland is so hot right now
Some videos just make you want to write. Joe Capra‘s stunning timelapse video of Iceland’s “midnight sun” is one of them.
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