"Lessons For Building A Tablet Magazine That's Actually Worth Using"

Friday, September 21, 2012

From Co.Design:

The New Yorker has seen success with its relatively straightforward digital edition, but there’s nothing that really differentiates it from the print version, except maybe that it’ll save you the embarrassment of having a tower of unread issues on your nightstand.

Aside from poet-spoken poems? Videos? Supplemental documents? Slideshows of artworks? Movie clips?

This suggestion (even made in slight jest) — that only futuristic interactive material counts as worthwhile tablet content — gives me the blues. 

Zadie Smith Profiles Jay-Z

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Two of my favorites.

At one point, Smith introduces another lyrical gem (“I got watches I ain’t seen in months / Apartment at the Trump I only slept in once”), then rebuts a likely critique:

But asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies. Because boasting is a formal condition of the epic form. And those taught that they deserve nothing rightly enjoy it when they succeed in terms the culture understands.

Popping Up in the New York Times

Friday, August 17, 2012

Hey, there’s The New York Times covering Abstractions Arrive! The piece, written by David Streitfeld, includes a new interview with Gass about books and technology. Thanks for the nod, Paper of Record!

The Pussy Riot Closing Statements

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Remarkable and brave.

And here’s David Remnick, who spent years living in and covering Russia, on the scandal. His post includes video of Tolokonnikova reading her statement.

Reporting on NMPS 2012

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

At the TOKY Blog, I offer five key take-aways from attending the National Museum Publishing Seminar last June.

MATCHBOOK. bikinis meet their match

Monday, July 30, 2012

“Clever matches between bathing suits and books." 

Great idea.

“The Gass Sentences: A Top 50”

Monday, July 30, 2012

Today is William Gass’ 88th birthday. For the Big Other website, John Madera asked some writers, readers, and publishers to name their own “literary pillars,” as a tribute to Gass and his “50 Literary Pillars” project from the early 1990s. After being invited to contribute, I went in a slightly different direction.

"First of all, we don't publish slideshows"

Friday, July 27, 2012

Great email from BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti to his troops about why the site’s succeeding right now.

@KimKierkegaard

Sunday, July 22, 2012

KimKierkegaardashian: The philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard mashed with the tweets and observations of Kim Kardashian.

Genius. 

Saturday, July 21, 2012 →

Sunday, July 15, 2012 →

[vimeo 45784128 w=500 h=281]

Reblogging myself from a new microsite for Abstractions Arrive:

On a Saturday morning in July 2012, the esteemed writer and internationally collected artist spoke about the release of Abstractions Arrive: Having Been There All the Time. The video was made by Stephen Schenkenberg and recorded in Gass’ St. Louis home (which holds 15,000 books). 

Friday, July 6, 2012 →

n+1: Euro Cup 2012

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Dushko Petrovich, both wrapping up the tournament so far and previewing today’s final, offers this sketch of Mario Balotelli:

As a civilian, he is outlandish. Last year, his white Maserati was impounded twenty-seven times, accumulating £10,000 worth of parking tickets. He also accidentally set his house on fire with firecrackers, was fined a week’s wages for throwing darts at a teammate, and kept turning up unannounced in strange places, including a women’s prison in Brescia (“just fancied having a look”) and Xavarian College in Manchester, where he apparently came for the bathroom but stayed for a while.

On the pitch, he is always a threat. But to whom? He scores amazing goals, many of them invented out of nothing, but he often falls out of games and regularly gets kicked out. Several times this tournament, he has gone clear on goal and entered a kind of daze, as if he has forgotten where he is.

Atul Gawande on the ACA Ruling

Thursday, June 28, 2012

From the surgeon/writer’s impressive Daily Comment for The New Yorker:

The major social advances of the past three centuries have required widening our sphere of moral inclusion.

"Study Reveals Dolphins Lack Capacity To Mock Celebrity Culture"

Monday, June 18, 2012

This gem could have been a headline-only piece, but The Onion goes the full nine:

Even when presented with softballs like production stills from The Proposal, the marine animals exhibited no discernable reaction.

Saturday, June 16, 2012 →

"Triple Canopy Launches Sarajevo Residency"

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Art in America reports on this very interesting project:

On June 21, Brooklyn-based online magazine Triple Canopy will begin a two-week residency called Perfect Strangers, in Sarajevo. While in the Bosnian capital, where several of the country’s national cultural institutions were closed earlier this year due to inadequate government support, Triple Canopy will initiate a program of workshops, site-specific visual and textual works, lectures, and publishing. Artworks and other project components will examine Bosnia and Herzegovina’s fraught history and national identity.

The lack of funding, as well as tensions between Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs, has thwarted the development of cultural infrastructure since the Bosnian War. Triple Canopy deputy editor Molly Kleiman spoke to A.i.A. about the residency as an opportunity to share Triple Canopy’s resources and practices with artists in Sarajevo: “I wanted to bring the working method that we’ve used in New York to Sarajevo.”

Continue reading.

Len Gutkin on "J R"

Saturday, June 9, 2012

I love seeing meaty new pieces on William Gaddis’ J R, which has just been released by Dalkey and remains one of the best novels I’ve ever read. Describing the book in one paragraph is tough, but Gutkin, [writing for Bookforum](https://www.bookforum.com/culture/-9277), does pretty well:

J R follows the rise and fall of JR Vansant, an eleven-year-old sixth-grader in Long Island who builds a massive financial operation by telephone. Gaddis assembles an enormous cast of characters around JR, all of whose lives come to intersect in some way with the sixth-grader’s paper empire. There’s his teacher Amy Joubert, who unwittingly introduces JR to the power of finance when she takes her students on a field trip to Wall Street, where her uncle runs the powerful Diamond Cable corporation. There’s Jack Gibbs, the manic, drunken physics teacher, in love with Amy and his own thwarted ambition. There’s Edward Bast, an aspiring composer hired with an arts-foundation grant to teach at JR’s school, where, hilariously, he is expected to direct a sixth-grade production of Das Rheingold (JR, of course, in the role of Alberich). Naïve and easily bullied, Bast finds himself coerced into acting as the JR Corp.’s public face, and throughout the novel he remains the only character aware that the new corporate mastermind is just a kid. The book’s comic invention is huge, complete with such vivid secondary characters as Crawley, a hunting-obsessed stockbroker who commissions Bast to write “zebra music” for the soundtrack to a film lobbying Congress to transport African big game to US national parklands, or Mr. Whiteback, the middle school principal who also runs the local bank from his office. Gaddis excels at serious farce, like Nathanael West on a massive canvas.

Sugimoto on Light

Friday, June 8, 2012