Ever dreamt of using a sophisticated library where robots fetch your books for you? Well, you bespectacled futurist, guess what. (h/t The Paris Review)
Reading with the Jetsons
Does this mean Will Ferrell will play Steve Eisman?
The man who directed such Will Ferrell vehicles as Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and Step Brothers is turning toward the world of finance for his next movie project. That’s right. Adam McKay is adapting Michael Lewis’s The Big Short for the big screen.
Twitter and its Relationship to Language
A group of researchers from the University of Cambridge is using Twitter to help research the rapidly disappearing Welsh language “[because] tweets don’t follow the conventions of written language” and instead “provide an authentic snapshot of spoken language.” (Bonus: Twitter’s stunning visualizations of “tweet geography.”)
Questions for Ms. Heller
Bethanne Patrick of The Book Studio interviews Zoe Heller about her latest novel The Believers.
Stiff Manners
It takes a certain skill to link Taipei by Tao Lin, My Struggle Part I and Part II by Karl Ove Knausgaard and an old book on Italian painting in a single essay, but Zadie Smith is (naturally) the writer for the job. In a new piece for The NY Review of Books, she asks the reader to “imagine [a drawing of a corpse] represents an absolute certainty about you, namely, that you will one day be a corpse.”
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“Kafka was a son of Prague to his phthisic fingertips”
“Repressed homosexual yearnings certainly would account for some of the more striking of [Franz] Kafka’s darker preoccupations,” writes John Banville in his investigation of the writer’s personal life and psychology.
eReaders Versus the Printed Page
PCWorld releases a study on whether the iPad and Kindle make for slower readers than the printed page. (via AuthorScoop)
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