“The way Vermeer painted this wall is consistent with a photograph. It is not consistent with human vision.” In a fascinating new documentary by Penn and Teller, a digital-graphics artist spent five years building a lens, a room, and a harpsichord to figure out how.
Vermeer was a Hacker
Library Tour
The al-Qarawiyyin library, the oldest library in the world, has just reopened after years of renovations. Take a look inside. Andrew Pippos writes about private libraries and what they reveal about their readers.
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“I Was a Study in Cubism”
"Sitting there in my thrift-store jacket and boa with my legs spread, I was a study in cubism: lips mouthing well-bred earnest truisms about postcolonial theory, hand guiding their hand up under my skirt, it was, on a deep level, hilarious." Chris Kraus writes about working New York's topless hustle bars at n+1.
The Cancer of Culture, the Culture of Cancer
Citizen author Claudia Rankine has announced that her next book will be on the culture of cancer. “I’m interested in being in a restaurant and wondering about eating a steak and if it’s hormone-injected and eating it anyway," she said.
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The Book Prisons Fear
The New York Times dives into why prisons fear the New Jim Crow certain states have gone to great efforts to allow their prisons to ban it and in other states it's fairly difficult to obtain if you're a prisoner. We're big fans of the New Jim Crow here; it was a Millions staff pick and extremely popular on Year in Reading lists back in 2013.
Perhaps They’re More Into Non-Fiction
I’m neither a therapist nor a zoologist, but maybe if we want to ward off midlife crises in great apes, we should stop reading them so much Jane Austen.
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Indies Thriving in the Age of Amazon
"While pressure from Amazon forced Borders out of business in 2011, indie bookstores staged an unexpected comeback. Between 2009 and 2015, the ABA reported a 35% growth in the number of independent booksellers, from 1,651 stores to 2,227." Professor Ryan Raffaelli read this surprising statistic and decided to study what exactly independent bookstores were doing in order to reinvent themselves and thrive. He found it has to do with indies embracing the three Cs; community, curation and convening. The full report will be released in 2018 but you can glimpse a preview here. Three cheers for indies!
Preserving Ephemera
Courtney Traub talks with Kevin Begos, Jr, publisher of Agrippa, a Book of the Dead, a 1992 book that contains an encrypted poem by William Gibson set to self-erase after a single reading. Begos explains his intentions when creating the book, and Traub recounts the difficulties Oxford recently had when deciding how to archive a work that deliberately resists preservation. Gibson's newest book, Distrust That Particular Flavor, made our list of the most anticipated releases of 2012. Also don't forget to read our review of Gibson's 2010 novel, Zero History.
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Matt Steinglass Contra Katie Roiphe
According to the title of Matt Steinglass' new essay (a qualified rebuttal of Katie Roiphe's recent piece "The Naked and the Conflicted"), "Today's Male Novelists Do Write Exuberant Sex Scenes, But Mostly Lesbian Ones"
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