Books
Local governments have gone online with alacrity. What have their consitutents gained—or lost—as a result?
The only thing more common than bad sex? Bad writing about sex. A novelist describes the dangers of the smitten word.
In a new book, Jonathan Last argues that low fertility rates spell economic doom. Not quite.
Future Perfect author Steven Johnson takes Evgeny Morozov to task for his critical book review.
In his new short story collection, Sam Lipsyte explores his father's fiction.
Groups like Occupy Wall Street embraced the open-source logic of the Internet as an organizing principle. It explains a lot about why movements fail.
Greg Smith’s tell-all about Goldman Sachs tells us little about Goldman Sachs except for Smith’s frustration with it.
Allow me a moment to sing the praises of Waldenbooks—yes, Waldenbooks, the Borders subsidiary that privileged grab-and-go buying ahead of casual browsing. It was the kind of place you went when you needed to buy a book but didn’t particularly care for bookstores.
Edward Muybridge: Grandfather of the GIF
How an eccentric photographer invented modern visual culture
The coin of the realm in today’s techno-visual culture is the GIF, a file that supports brief animations repeating endlessly. GIFs had a moment of particular resonance last summer, when extraordinary displays of athleticism from the Olympics were converted from full video into short loops, recurring endlessly, devoid of meaning aside from the aesthetic.
The Problem with Tweeting a Revolution
Andy Carvin tweeted the Arab Spring. He still missed something by not being there.
Andy Carvin, "the man who tweets revolutions," logged 1,000 tweets a day about the uprisings of the Arab Spring. He says social media helped him understand events better than he would have if he'd been there. His triumphalist online-journalism memoir makes it clear that he missed a lot along the way.
