In conversation with New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino, Swing Time author Zadie Smith explained why she doesn’t engage in social media: “I want to have my feeling, even if it’s wrong, even if it’s inappropriate, express it to myself in the privacy of my heart and my mind. I don’t want to be bullied out of it,” according to the the Huffington Post. Read Sarah Labrie‘s essay on social media anxiety from our archives.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Neo-Luddite
Otherwise Known as a Library
Amazon is supposedly setting up a "Netflix for e-books" program for Amazon Prime subscribers.
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Frankenstein Survives
The Bodleian Library has digitized Mary Shelley’s notebooks containing Frankenstein.
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Social Media Existence Precedes Essence
Over at McSweeney’s, Sarah Solomon has undertaken the Sisyphean task of bringing existentialism into the twenty-first century. In a series of brief vignettes, Solomon gives the oft-maligned Millennial generation the existentialist makeover they never asked for. Continue your study of the absolute indifference of the universe with this essay by Zach Pontz on The Meursault Investigation, a new novel by Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud that imagines Albert Camus’s famous The Stranger from the perspective of the unnamed Arab antagonists.
Self Publishing Textbooks
A Minnesota high school is saving money on textbooks... by writing its own.
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A very colorful Queen!
Pantone has released a Queenly color wheel, made especially to mark Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee. The wheel is made up of the Pantone referents for the colors her Majesty has worn throughout her reign, and each chip bears a historical note on the particular hue's tie to her wardrobe. This is especially good news if, like Slate, you think that the Queen is the most fashionable woman in the world.
On Ruined Pianos and Literary Fêtes
The Paris Review will soon move into a new office space, and while preparing for the relocation, some staffers discovered “a batch of small, white booklets” entitled “The Paris Review: Twenty Year Index, Issues 1-56.” The lists seemed to indicate everything that had been published in the magazine during its first 23 years of existence, and they also featured an introduction from founder George Plimpton – an introduction, by the way, that really depicts the Review of old better than any photograph ever could.