Curiosities
May 28, 2013
On “Buzzwordophilia” 0
by Thomas Beckwith
In the latest Baffler, Evgeny Morozov argues that Silicon Valley, in typical fashion, has taken to “hacking” our language. Old, trusted words don’t mean what they used to mean, and complex ideas have been stripped of subversive implications. “Complexity,” he writes, “is not particularly viral.”
May 28, 2013
Tuesday New Release Day: White, Holt, Meyer 0
by C. Max Magee
New this week: Nobel Laureate Patrick White’s posthumously discovered novel, The Hanging Garden; Elliott Holt’s debut You Are One of Them; and The Son by Philipp Meyer. Bonus Links: You can now subscribe to listings of literary new releases in your feed reader with this RSS feed. Plus, check out more new release RSS feeds [...]
May 26, 2013
Duke to Publish Transgender Studies Journal 0
by Nick Moran
Duke University Press is set to begin publishing a transgender studies journal in 2014. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly will be “the first nonmedical journal dedicated to transgender studies.”
May 26, 2013
Huh. Who Knew? 1
by Nick Moran
“The Mariko Aoki phenomenon is a phenomenon consisting of the urge to defecate while visiting a bookstore. Originating in Japan, it is named for the woman who first publicized such an urge.”
May 26, 2013
Storytelling in the Age of Twitter 0
by Nick Moran
Rita J. King investigates the ways storytelling is being influenced by Twitter. Indeed, she writes that “every five days, a billion tiny stories are generated by people around the world … [and] the tweets are being archived by the Library of Congress as part of the organization’s mission to tell the story of America.”
May 26, 2013
The Lonely Island has a new hit; Semicolon. 0
by Nick Moran
Kurt Vonnegut famously wrote that all semicolons do is “show you’ve been to college.” What to make, then of The Lonely Island’s raunchy new song about their favorite punctuation mark? (For the record: Jorma Taccone attended UCLA; Akiva Schaffer attended UC-Santa Cruz; and Andy Samberg attended UC-Santa Cruz and NYU.)