Alex Ross writes for The New Yorker about Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and modern pop culture. Jay-Z and Kanye come up, as does Jonathan Franzen‘s The Corrections (which we’ve written about here and here) and Virginia Woolf‘s The Waves.
Kanye & The Frankfurt School
“Fujimoto would never see him apologize again.”
Recommended Reading: The Orphan Master’s Son author Adam Johnson penned a long profile of Kim Jong-Il’s “personal chef, court jester, and sidekick,” and it’s every bit as wild as you’re probably imagining.
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Maybe This Is Why They Take So Long to Finish
Robert A. Caro, who releases new installments of his Lyndon B. Johnson biography at a glacial pace, is apparently also working on another project, too. It’s “not a memoir, exactly,” he says, but it does concern “how he came to write the Johnson biography and its predecessor, The Power Broker.”
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They’re Watching
Collusion, a new add-in for Firefox browsers, "allows you to see all the third parties that are tracking your movements across the Web." Of course, who's tracking you online is one thing, but who's tracking you in retail stores is quite another.
Steve Jobs: Bestseller
Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography is Amazon's bestselling book of 2011.
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Shatoetry
There’s an app called Shatoetry and, yes, it was created by William Shatner. Its purpose? Why, as “a sort of magnetic poetry assembler where every word is read in the offbeat actor's distinctive tone,” of course.
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