Recommended Reading: “The Loneliness of Certain American States” by Catherine Lacey.
“Godfather? Me?”
Have a Seat
“If I’ve sat on my arse all day—and it’s definitely my English arse I sit on, not an American ass—then what I most want to do come evening is sit on it some more,” Geoff Dyer loves to sit. He and other authors discussed why the standing desk is overrated at The New Republic. Here’s where our writers work.
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Bamboozled
Minstrelsy lives: At Reuters’ Oddly Enough, blackface in Belgium.
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Animals!
Today in things you might like to read about animals: Some birds, apparently, not only mourn their dead but even hold funeral services. And while it’s widely known that the internet is made of cats, Wired dug a little deeper and tried to uncover the root of our collective feline fixation.
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Financing Cloud Atlas
The multinational production of the (Millions favorite) Cloud Atlas movie, “in all its glorious confusion, also serves as a guidepost to the future of the film business.”
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Tuesday Links: Power, ReCaptcha, Junot Diaz
Experience “THE POWER OF BOOKS“You know those annoying puzzles where you type in the letters so the computer knows you’re not a computer creating a fake account or sending spam? A group from Carnegie Mellon is using these “Captchas” to help digitize books. ReCaptcha is a special type of Captcha that displays words that book digitization software is having trouble deciphering. So, by letting the computer know you’re not a computer, you can help some other computers digitize our books.I missed Junot Diaz’s appearance at the Free Library of Philadelphia where he read from his new novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but Season Evans was there.
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Will to No Power
Freudians know that Eros and Thanatos are opposites in the human psyche. The former, the love instinct, pushes us to survive, while the latter, the death instinct, pushes us to destruction. In an essay for Bookslut, Jelena Markovic explores the importance of Thanatos in daily life, using as an example a man she knew with an “instinct for nonexistence.”
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