Posts by matt

Blog of a Bookslut has been posting links to the work of Shaun Tan. Pure gorgeous. Check out the wordless panels (courtesy of New York Magazine) from Tan’s The Arrival.

Remember this spring, when I was gushing about the American Stakeholder Act ($6,000 given to every child at birth for capital investments)? Apparently, no less bright a light than Hillary Clinton is all over the idea. Awesome. I wonder if the New America Foundation is working some kind of Manchurian Candidate-fu?

Today at work, I convened a tiny confab of colleagues for an inaugural, bimonthly, lunchtime essay-reading series. We kicked it off with the National Magazine Award-winning essay Russell and Mary, by Michael Donohue, a work he apparently spent five years putting together.

Kevin Drum linked this Vanity Fair piece tracing the last 50 years of the life of the two women depicted in this sad photograph, taken at the integration of a school in Little Rock, Arkansas.

I’ve been enjoying the blog Nonfiction Readers Anonymous for its choice snippets of random tomes.

All Aunt Hagar’s Children is finally out in paperback.

I realize this is 24 hours too late, but on any day of the year, the International Chamber of Commerce’s Weekly Piracy Report is the best reminder that for all our iPhones and gizmos, the world is still much the same as it was 300 years ago. An excerpt from this week’s report:

Five robbers, in two motor boats, armed with guns and knives boarded an anchored chemical tanker from the bow using ropes and hooks. Duty crew spotted the robbers and raised the alarm. The robbers broke the padlock on the forward store and stole ship’s stores and escaped. Bonny signal station was called many times but did not respond. Master requested for additional guards from agents.

Note: Armed theft is a serious crime and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, or whatever. But that somehow doesn’t mitigate the vision of a crew of peg-legged, one-eyed, ‘do-ragged blaggards scaling the side of a sailboat with knives in their teeth, threatening to make some scurvy sea dogs walk a plank. (Clearly I saw this on Read/Write Web.)

If you weren’t paying attention, Kottke’s begun excavating the archival treats freed by the demise of TimesSelect.

• Mr. Clive Thompson pointed out the addictive Bloxorz the other day.
• Priscilla just looks gorgeous (via Infocult).
• Flow in Games is both beautiful and mesmerizing (also via Infocult).

All right, Snarketeers, the gauntlet is thrown: Help me come up with a theme and some nominations for readings for my book club.

Every month, one of my fellow book-clubbers is assigned to nominate three or four books. When we meet to discuss the past month’s reading, we choose one of the nominees for the next month. Being something of an oddball, I like to organize my nominations around themes. The last time, for example, my theme was “Masters of Humankind.” The books I proposed were No god but God (God), The Year of Magical Thinking (Death), The Time-Traveler’s Wife (Time), and Moneyball (Money). (The club picked The Time-Traveler’s Wife. The actual selection doesn’t make much of a difference to me, because I plan to read all the books I propose, and I did.)

The theme can be oblique, clever, or straightforward. (In the straightforward camp, for example, I’ve been considering the four elements — Cloud Atlas (Air), Snow (Water), American Prometheus or Dante (Fire), Coal: A Human History or Salt: A World History (Earth).) They can be either a prominent theme of the book or just a play on its title. We prefer books that have been out in paperback, and a nomination almost always goes unpicked if one of us has already read it. I aim for variety in the selection — memoir, biography, journalistic non-fiction, literary fiction, magical realism, social history.

So, whaddya say? Help me out?

Whenever I think about our reflexive distrust of emerging technology, I remember Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates argues that writing is inferior to rhetoric. Socrates recounts a legend in which the Egyptian king Thamus refuses the gift of writing from the god Theuth, saying that writing will be deleterious to true wisdom. We will read, but never know, Thamus says. Writing may remind us, but it can’t educate us, the way a speaker can. The irony in this passage, of course, is that Phaedrus is itself a written work.

There’s a lot to be said about the curious intersection between technology and memory — how technology seems to allow us to both retain more and forget more — but Jenny Lyn Bader managed to leave out all the interesting parts in her NYT Week in Review essay (“Britney Spears? That’s All She Rote”) on how people can’t remember anything anymore. And along the way, she manages to fit Britney’s lip-synching, organ transplant recipients, and “The Vagina Monologues” into this tortured half-argument. it’s kind of a train wreck. I really have nothing especially profound to say about this essay, it just seemed a blogworthy exemplar of the awful our-culture’s-going-to-hell/wasn’t-it-better-when form. And she cites Phaedrus too, with no nod to the irony therein.

It doesn’t exactly look comfortable, and it’s not exactly pretty. But it’s a chair-barrow with a lamp attached to it. It’s even apparently got little shelves hidden beneath the armrests. I want one! Alas, all the text is in German, and I don’t see anything that resembles an “add-to-cart” button.

(Via my bookstore. See also: Bibliochaise.)

Firing an employee is a messy business. No small business likes to do it. There are the headaches