Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Arne Svenson, “Neighbors #15″ (image courtesy Julie Saul Gallery NYC) Last week, a New York State appeals court upheld a lower court ruling that exonerated photographer Arne Svenson against claims of privacy invasion, Photo District News reported. Svenson was sued by his Tribeca neighbors in 2013 after they discovered he’d photographed them inside their New York…
If ignorance is bliss, does a high IQ equal misery? Popular opinion would have it so. We tend to think of geniuses as being plagued by existential angst, frustration, and loneliness. Think of Virginia Woolf, Alan Turing, or Lisa Simpson – lone stars, isolated even as they burn their brightest. As Ernest Hemingway wrote: “Happiness…
Photo As airlines pack planes tighter and charge more for certain rows, requests — or demands — to swap seats have taken on a new tenor. Credit Edgar Su/Reuters J.L. Pomeroy has flown long enough to know that there are limits to how obliging she will be to her fellow passengers, especially those who want…
Why scribes belong together My husband, Art Taylor, and I talk about a lot of things. Most are along the lines of “What’s for dinner?” or “Need to clean up the cat vomit.” However, when we’re not navigating the day-to-day chores of life, we talk about short fiction. And that’s why we’re here. To celebrate…
The true power of art is illustrated by this bust of Edward Snowden installed in a Brooklyn park by workers in uniform. If only real problems were solved as quickly as the bust was removed!But no matter. More artists came along to project the hologram, shown above, in the place where the absent bust briefly sat.And memory is…
Apple Watch and the induced demand of communication APR 08 2015 Some sort of embargo seems to have lifted because here come the Apple Watch reviews! As I’m unanointed by Apple, I haven’t experienced Apple Watch in the flesh, but I do have a few random thoughts and guesses. John Gruber notes that why Apple…
Credit ILLUSTRATION BY ELLEN SURREY Not long ago, I walked into a friend’s kitchen and found her opening one of those evil, impossible-to-breach plastic blister packages with a can opener. This worked, and struck me as brilliant, but I mention it only to illustrate a characteristic that I admire in our species: given almost any entity, we…
Earlier today, Marvel unveiled its “remastered” edition of the 1977 comic adaptation of Star Wars. Many were unhappy to see the art of Howard Chaykin redone with a modern comic’s color palette, including writer John Gholson, who took to Twitter to show how much a comic loses when it’s recolored. The thrust of Gholson’s main…
Good news: Flickr fixed that weird problem we spotted yesterday. Their Creative Commons images Explore site, a gateway to the millions of photos published under a set of CC licenses, is now functioning correctly once more. Check out those numbers, too! Attribution License: 63,307,001 photos Attribution-NoDerivs: 17,964,458 photos Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs: 85,391,471 photos Attribution-Noncommercial: 42,889,941 photos That’s…
As we increasingly outsource our memories to devices, we may be forgetting the pleasures of imperfect recall. What if Marcel Proust had kept an Instagram account? What if he’d used a smartphone to snap a photo of every evocative morsel he’d ever eaten? Would he still have written “In Search of Lost Time,” his multivolume…