At Slate, our own Mark O’Connell reports back from The Boring Conference, a riveting event that takes place each year in a nondescript hall in East London.
Not to Be Missed
For Science!
Celebrate of the recent discovery of the Higgs boson with the Astronomical Society of the Pacific’s list of science fiction stories based on “more or less accurate science” and the recently uploaded sci-fi themed New Yorker fiction podcast.
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Facebook’s Hype
The Facebook IPO was this week’s biggest story. The social media giant, which boasts 800 million members, is seeking a $75-$100 billion market valuation. But hold your horses, investors. A lot of that optimism could be empty hype. After all, look at the site’s requested valuation as a percentage of its 2011 revenue, and compare it to other tech giants like Google and Microsoft. Also, contrary to Mark Zuckerberg’s claim, most of the world does not, in fact, “have access to the internet or mobile phones.”
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It’s a Mystery
There are many possible answers to the question “where do you write?”, but one of the strangest, and most unexpected, has to be “I don’t know.” At The Rumpus, Brendan Constantine admits that he doesn’t write in any one place, and that his memory for where he’s written before is “completely unreliable.” We surveyed our own staff a couple years ago to see how they answered the question.
Chomsky on Schooling
Noam Chomsky, in conversation at the University of Arizona, derides the rising cost of university tuition. He goes on to say student fees are “a general form of indoctrination and control, which goes down to kindergarten. I mean, that’s what No Child Left Behind is about. It’s training for the Marine Corps.”
The Beating of Rodney King, Take Two
Rodney King, possibly the nation’s best-known victim of police brutality, will fight former Pennsylvania police officer Simon Aouad in a celebrity boxing match in Philadelphia on September 12. “I know some people will see the irony here,” King said. I’m not sure irony’s the word, but it’s something alright.
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“His parents were like, ‘Robert!’ / His friends were like, ‘Bob?'”
Kick off your Monday morning with this Aaron Belz poem honoring Evel Knievel, you daredevil, you.
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The Miserable Wonderfulness of M. Houellebecq
The second issue of Chicago’s crackerjack The Point, having thrown caution to the wind, tackles the prickly genius of Michel Houellebecq: “Houellebecq has published four novels, all of them bitter and miserable.”
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Tumblr Books: A Call for Submissions
Calling all Tumblr-ers! Chronicle Books, the company responsible for such web-to-paper successes as F*ck I’m In My Twenties! and Dads Are the Original Hipsters, is looking for “the next big humor book idea.” Details for submissions can be found on their introductory Tumblr post. The deadline is February 28th.
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