Nancy Jo Sales, author of The Bling Ring, talks about her latest book, American Girls, at NPR. “In the 2 1/2 years she spent researching her book, Sales interviewed more than 200 teenage girls around the country about their social media and Internet usage. She says girls face enormous pressures to post ‘hot’ or sexualized photos of themselves online, and she adds that this pressure can make the Internet an unwelcoming environment.” You could also read Sarah Labrie’s essay on social (media) anxiety.
Social Media Anxiety
Tuesday New Release Day: Sheck; Yoshimoto; Manning; Axat; Norton
New this week: Island of the Mad by Laurie Sheck; Moshi-Moshi by Banana Yoshimoto; One Man's Dark by Maurice Manning; Kill the Next One by Federico Axat; and Loveland by Graham Norton. For more on these and other new titles, go read our latest fiction and nonfiction book previews.
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Life After Boobie
Grantland's got a nice excerpt from Buzz Bissinger's Friday Night Lights follow-up, After Friday Night Lights. The book was released last week by Byliner.
On “Reading to Impress Yourself”
Rebecca Mead writes for The New Yorker about "The Pleasure of Reading to Impress Yourself" and the false divide between books "we read because we want to and those we read because we have to."
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The Steamin’ Demon
“Every atom of my blood, form’d in the soil of this earth, runs hot / As I wheel through this snaked monster of steel, The Steamin’ Demon.” Ride The Steamin’ Demon at Six Flags with Walt Whitman. Pair with our own Michael Bourne’s piece on how Whitman saved his life.
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iDentity
"Up until very recently, I'd recount my online experiences with some degree of shame or sheepishness, but in this apocalyptic year of 2012, that embarrassment is beginning to fall by the wayside. I've been having more and more conversations with people grappling with what is gained and lost by how some of our most meaningful musical discoveries-- not to mention life experiences-- have happened in front of, or facilitated by, screens." Over at Pitchfork, a new column dedicated to the intersections between digital and ordinary life - and the art these interactions can produce.
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“Signs and Symbols” For Teh Internets
"If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not!... Still farther away, great mountains of data mining sum up, in zeroes and ones, the ultimate truth of his being." KA Semënova updates Nabokov's short story "Signs and Sumbols" (and works by other famous Russian authors) for McSweeney's, "teh internets" and the digital world.
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R.I.P J.D. Salinger
Catcher in the Rye author J.D. Salinger has died at 91. Update: The New Yorker has linked to twelve of Salinger's stories available to subscribers online.
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