Recommended Reading: On the mysterious benefactors keeping St. Mark’s bookstore alive.
Bookstore Fairy
The Lorax Mourns Another Tree
Readers across the country are mourning a fallen Monterey cypress tree, said to have inspired the classic Dr. Seuss book The Lorax.
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Our Massive, Shared, Ubiquitous Digital Brain
Michael Seidlinger writes on how consciousness occurs online. As he puts it, “We have all become Sisyphus, pushing our rocks up a hill littered with hyperlinks and tweets, perpetually, futilely, refreshing the page of existence.” Pair with this Millions piece on the best of literary Twitter.
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Imagine the Card Catalog
This is supercool: Hyperallergic reports programmer Jamie Zawinski has created a digital rendering of the library of Babel from Jorge Luis Borges’s short story of the same name, which imagines an institution intended to house all potential books. You might also enjoy our 2013 piece about a discovered set of Borges lectures from a class the author taught in Argentina in 1966.
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I’m sorry Shakespeare I am for real
Who has a bigger vocabulary: Shakespeare or André 3000? It’s actually Outkast. Data scientist Matt Daniels created an infographic that charts 85 rappers’ unique vocabulary in their first 35,000 lyrics. Outkast uses 5,212 unique words; whereas, Shakespeare only uses 5,170. But Aesop Rock beats the Bard by more than 2,000 words with a count of 7,392 unique words.
Afraid of Everyone
Recommended Reading: This moving essay for The Rumpus by Elizabeth Weinberg on depression and The National’s 2010 album High Violet. To satisfy any further musical urges, check out our Torch Ballads and Jukebox Music features section.
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