Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
n my continued assault on my summer reading list, a few weeks ago I settled onto my balcony with David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. To appreciate what I’m about to disclose, you need to understand something about the layout of the condo my wife and I have chosen as our temporary residence…
Yesterday, I tweeted: “BBC reports a woman was ”gang-raped” in India. What, pray tell, do the quotation marks mean?” I was responding to a BBC headline concerning a Swedish tourist whose husband was beaten and tied, then forced to watch as a group of men raped her.
The Gutenberg Galaxy is remarkable as an academic work both because it has wormed its way into popular consciousness and because it has persisted there for half a century. The reason for its popularity is that Marshall McLuhan knew not only how to think about media, but also how to exploit them.
Marshall McLuhan summarizes his book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, with: “The theme of this book is not that there is anything good or bad about print but that unconsciousness of the effect of any force is a disaster, especially a force that we have made ourselves.” The paradox of this statement (or its Catch-22) is that a medium functions by carving off and emphasizing one sense over all the others and this has a hypnotic effect that makes it impossible for us to see the effect it produces.
Mad Pride Week finished more than a week ago. I had intended to write a piece on it but couldn’t find a hook. Until yesterday, that is, when two very different stories trended all over the social media universe. One story from the UK: soul singer, Amy Winehouse, had died at the age of 27.
To those who insist that there is such a thing as a literal reading of text, I offer a headline posted today by the BBC: Virgin Alerts Infected Customers.
It’s fascinating to observe what counts as news. Posts on the Gay Girl in Damascus blog counted as news when they were sensational. When they sold papers. Amina’s posts ceased to count as news when they ceased to be factual.
It isn’t exactly news to point out that publishing is in crisis. Now that digital text can be delivered in a format which offers a viable substitute for the physical book, there are fears that the publishing industry will experience an upheaval of biblical proportions.
I saw this ad on Queen Street: Experience Survival, a Discovery Channel advertisement that shows a young bushman creeping through the grass with a bow and arrow.
Today we learn from the associated press (via the Toronto Star) that “The FBI and Homeland Security Department say they have no indication that terrorists are targeting the U.S. or its citizens as part of a new threat against Europe.” Come again?
The Moby Awards are the creature of the MobyLives book blog by the Hoboken-based Melville House Publishing. They celebrate the best (and worst) in a growing book-publishing trend — the book trailer. If movies can have them, then why can’t books?
I have now officially removed The Huffington Post from my news feed and have stopped following it on Twitter. Not because it’s too left or too right. But because it’s too vapid.
More than a year ago, in a post titled “The Nipple Exposed,” I wondered why our public morality has grown increasingly prurient in its fascination with open displays of nipples.
Barry Schwartz suggests that we should not teach ethics courses because that puts ethical lessons into a box and divorces them from the practical context in which ethical problems arise.
The twitterverse has been abuzz with talk of Amazon’s decision to delete Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from its proprietary e-reader, Kindle. As a consequence, Kindle owners woke up on Friday to discover that those two titles had disappeared and the purchase price had been credited to their accounts.