If you thought Bill Gates was content donating millions of dollars to charities around the world and hiding out in his exorbitantly expensive mansion compound, think again! The Microsoft founder and tech mogul reviews books on his personal blog, Gates Notes–and those reviews actually drive sales. Move over “Colbert Bump,” the Gates Bump is here to stay.
Billionaire Book Critic
It’s Late
Recent Pulitzer laureate Adam Johnson has a new short story in Esquire, and it’s a doozy, invoking drone strikes, Obama and Kurt Cobain in the course of its tightly-knit plot. Sample quote: “I wonder if the First Lady was the one to turn off the machine.”
“An index also lays out the complexity of the book into pristine statements”
In a neat little essay for Vouched Books, Kyle Winkler advocates indexing as a means of tempering the “fuckstorm of reading.”
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The Legacy of Disaster
“Historians, I believe, are dedicated to fighting against the tide of our social amnesia. The reason they continue to write books about the Holocaust, or Appomatox, or the earthquake in Haiti, is to try to help us remember the suffering and the extent of the damage. Some try to humanize, and others turn to abstraction.” Stewart L. Sinclair writes on burying the remnants of disaster, over at Guernica. Pair with his Millions essay on technology and Apple’s operating systems.
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.
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Leigh Stein Two-Fer
Here’s double-shot of The Fallback Plan author Leigh Stein courtesy of Full-Stop and NY Daily News.
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