“We’re seeing a year-on-year decline of text … If I was having a bet I’d say: video, video, video.” Nicola Mendelsohn, head of Facebook’s European, Middle Eastern, and African regions, believes that the written word is going the way of the dodo.
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Keeping Up with the Librarians
Something you didn't know you needed in your life: a squad of librarians recreating the “iconic” Vanity Fair Kardashian family photo shoot (via The Digital Reader). Also relevant: Alizah Salario‘s piece about the naming of North West.
Jon Cotner’s Island Night
How’s this sound: an eight-mile midnight stroll through Fire Island, replete with Socratic dialogue and references to Sappho, Pythagoras, Diogenes and Hippocrates? Such is exactly what you get from Island Night, the latest project of poet Jon Cotner (previously mentioned for his We’re Floating and Poem Forest projects). As the poet explains to the NY Times, his mission with the walks was to revive “the ancient and endangered practices of walking and talking.”
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“A life spent at one’s desk is a life spent alone.”
Recommended Viewing: Charlie Rose sits down with Donna Tartt for the author's only American television interview since releasing her latest novel, The Goldfinch. (Related: Adam Dalva fears that Tartt may have been "following me around with her notebook in hand for the last 14 years.”)
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New Katherine Mansfield Story Found
While thumbing through the archives at King’s College, a graduate student uncovered four previously unknown stories by Katherine Mansfield.
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A Campus Novel Classic
University Of Chicago Press has come out with a new edition of a somewhat forgotten classic in the campus novel genre. Randall Jarrell was a National Book Award-winning poet who wrote only one novel, Pictures from an Institution, about the fictional Benton College. The Kenyon Review published the opening of the novel in its Winter 1953 issue. It begins: "Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; Benton had been endowed with one to begin with, and had smiled and sweated and spoken for the other."
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Poet Laureate (Again)
"Her exchanges with Americans in small towns and rural communities are inspiring an appreciation of poetry and history – and remind us that poetry has value for all of our lives." The Library of Congress appointed Tracy K. Smith to a second term as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2018-2019. For her second term, Smith edited an anthology called American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, which will be published by Graywolf Press in association with the Library of Congress. Pair with: our review of Smith's memoir, Ordinary Light.
Dispatch from South Asia
The summer issue of 91st Meridian is out, featuring new translations from Hindi, Bangla, Urdu, Tamil, Punjabi and Malayalam. For more literature in translation, check out with this Millions essay about translators at work.
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Does The Millions really think that Facebook actually believes this? You realize Facebook is a media company, correct? That they are deeply invested in media? Obviously they believe they can monetize video better than “text”, so they’re pushing video. Marketing copy does not equal news.