“In another experiment, people who went through this ‘experience-taking’ process while reading about a character who was revealed to be of a different race or sexual orientation showed more favorable attitudes toward the other group and were less likely to stereotype.”
You Are What You Read
Comedians Talk Writing Books
It may feel like you’ve been saying more and more books lately written by comedians. And your initial hunch would be correct, publishers are increasingly buying books written by comedians. Nylon explores why this is the case.
Donald J. Sobol Passed Away
Donald J. Sobol, author of the Encyclopedia Brown series, passed away last week at age 87.
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After the last word
This weekend–at 2:30 am on Saturday, to be precise–Twitter bot @everyword was set to complete its 7-year run with the final word in the English language: “zymurgy.” Unexpectedly, the bot tweeted again half an hour later–with a nontraditional character it had surreptitiously glossed on the first run: éclair. Since @everyword, like Lazarus, probably won’t get the same fuss after its second death, check out The Guardian’s interview with creator Adam Parrish now.
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Garcia Marquez Movie Protested
Production of a film based on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores is being met with opposition from anti-prostitution groups in Mexico. HuffPo has the story. (Thanks Buzz)
Electric Literature’s Latest Project
Electric Literature just launched a new experiment with Israeli writer Alex Epstein. Epstein published his latest collection of “micro-fiction” for free on Facebook, and he wrote about the experiment on the Electric Literature blog. For the next week, Electric Literature will be publishing a sample of translations from his collection on their Facebook page.
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Archiving the Internet
“Our contemporary analogues to the personal notebook now live on the web — communal, crowdsourced and shared online in real time.” Jenna Wortham writes on how archiving the Internet would change history. We’ve written about the implications of the Internet more than once.
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