Amazon created an “Election Heat Map” to tally the number of “red” and “blue” books sold across the nation, and the count is updated hourly. The results are somewhat surprising to those who believe liberals read more than conservatives. (Perhaps liberals frequent more independent bookstores?) At the time of this writing, “red” books are favored by a margin of 7%.
Election Heat Map: Book Edition
Beholden Like Us
It may comfort you to know that Susan Orlean claims to have “a sad dependence” on her iPhone. The New Yorker staff writer, who published an article (paywall) on the Twitter account Horse_ebooks this week, tells Bobby Finger that she had to buy a new battery case because she ran through the charge on her phone by the middle of the day.
Navigating Past Nihilism
“Without any clear and agreed upon sense for what to be aiming at in a life, people may experience the paralyzing type of indecision depicted by T.S. Eliot in his famously vacillating character Prufrock; or they may feel, like the characters in a Samuel Beckett play, as though they are continuously waiting for something to become clear… or they may feel the kind of “stomach level sadness” that David Foster Wallace described…” Sean D. Kelly navigates past nihilism for the New York Times.
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D-I-Y #YiR12
We know you’re eagerly following our Year in Reading series, but we want you to participate, too! Our own Nick Moran has got the details up in a gif-filled Tumblr post.
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Lost Blake Etchings Uncovered
“Researchers at the University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library have stumbled upon a treasure trove of works by poet and artist William Blake.”
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Look Away
“Recently, a friend told me she didn’t like pictures of herself because she never looked the way she thought she did in her head. I think this pretty much describes the universal horror that is looking at your own photos, and that’s why I love the selfie so much. It gives you all the controls to the story you are telling.” In defense of the selfie.
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Jeff Sharlet Revisits The Fellowship
Several years ago, Jeff Sharlet closely investigated The Fellowship – a “self-described invisible network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful” – in order to write a book about “how fundamentalism came to be interwoven with American power.” Now, Sharlet has followed up his initial report with an article about Westmont College, a “feeder school” for the religious movement. This is highly recommended reading for anybody interested in the intersections of power, influence, religious fundamentalism, and American politics.
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I don’t think this means conservatives read more than liberals. I think it just means conservatives read more propaganda than liberals. Liberals like their fiction written by Zadie Smith, Junot Diaz, Michael Chabon, or other people usually found in the actual fiction and literature section, while conservatives like their fiction written by Fox News journalists and Republicans.
(That’s maybe the harshest thing I’ve ever said politically, but it’s also completely true.)
That’s interesting, Kati. I would have said liberals get their fiction from CNN.