Richard Dawkins was live-tweeting his way through Daniel Dennett’s new book last weekend. We storify’d it.
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Robert Paul Smith has a way with book titles. Be sure to check out the companion to How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself, Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing.
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Joan Silber’s new story collection, Fools, is on sale today.
“Fools is astonishing for its range, for its sweeping sense of time and place, and most especially for its deep insight into the way small choices can circle out to shape lives, and even human history.”
—DAN CHAON“Fools is a unique and fascinating collection that celebrates not so much a place or a family or a single life as it does an idea—anarchy—as it runs through three generations of loosely connected people.”
—ANTONYA NELSON“Joan Silber’s stories are like compressed novels. They are interlocking tales that fill in the history of revolutionary politics in the twentieth century.”
—EDMUND WHITE“Fools is a wonderfully winning exploration of impetuousness in all of its appalling and appealing forms, and its deftly interconnected stories are devoted to those dreamers who act rashly out of their better natures, who never quit asking the world, Can’t you do better than that?”
—JIM SHEPHARD
New Yorkers, don’t miss Joan Silber’s upcoming events at WORD, Greenlight, and Three Lives.
Your Momma reads so many books that I bet you were raised in a library.
Perhaps there would have been less drama if F. Scott Fitzgerald had been forged in the crucible of the Smooth Jazz Age.
URGENT ARCHITECTURE
How can we adequately provide housing when disaster strikes, whether that disaster is weather related, like hurricanes, floods, and droughts, happens in a matter of minutes from an earthquake or tsunami, through a slow process like rising sea levels, or is the result of civil disorder or poverty?
In Urgent Architecture, Bridgette Meinhold showcases 40 successful emergency and long-term housing projects—from repurposed shipping containers to sandbag homes. In a video interview with Inhabitat.com, Meinhold highlighted 7 of these disaster-proof, sustainable housing designs.
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An illustrated quote from Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters. Last year Palahniuk updated the novel, a fan favorite, and released it as Invisible Monsters Remix. Look for it in paperback on Monday.
What The Internet is Doing to Our Brains
Ever wonder what detrimental effect the Internet may be having on your brain? The Epipheo YouTube channel animated an interview with author Nicholas Carr, who argues that constant Internet use is harming our long term memory by over-stimulating and dividing our attention and that could be threatening our very humanity. To combat this, Epipheo recommends taking some time each day to unplug from the Internet and focus on a singular task.
A clever look inside The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. In June we’ll be publishing an updated edition of Carr’s earlier work about cloud computing, The Big Switch.
“This is a book to shake up the world, to make us put down our iPhones and head back to the bookstore.”
