If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This … Today Barnes & Noble reported that December 23, 2010 was the largest retail sales day ever in the company’s nearly 40-year history. FORTY YEAR history
BUSINESS and politics are full of surprises—and a near certainty. Whether they are politicians, bankers or trade-union leaders, men nearly always meet other men in suits. The uniform of capitalism has conquered more of the globe than capitalism itself. When Barack Obama first visited Hu Jintao, paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China, the men were clad in near-identical dark blue suits, white shirts and red spotted ties dRESS Rolling Stone's July 8 Lady Gaga cover was the top-selling issue of the year for the magazine - Lady Gaga was a newsstand hit in 2010, while Central and eastern Europe Bombed
A Little Good, a Little Evil, a Lot of Ritual Still on the Road
Jesse Baker says Nick Denton's observation -- made on "Morning Edition" (audio and transcript available) -- shows that even the bad boy of online snark is starting to sound suspiciously grown up. The Gawker Media founder wants his sites to show the full range of content, from scurrilous and sensationalist through to beautiful and uplifting.
British Journalist Nick Denton is giving his Gawker media empire a facelift and unveiling it later this month. His family of websites has helped make snark a defining feature of the blogosphere. Denton says there will still be plenty of "nasty" left on his blog but he says readers want more than just brief caustic postings
• Gawker boss: ‘People can’t live on snark and vicious gossip alone’ ; We've only had photographs for about 170 years and we're more reliant upon the camera to confirm our existence than at any other time in human history. We must have our memory in the raw with an intermediary Memory in the Raw [Books we love: Like many bookworms, once or twice a year I am struck down with reading doldrums. Then the stash of paperbacks on my bedside table seems less a collection of future delights than a useless repository of dust. Nothing pleases. ; Boredom Enthusiasts Discover the Pleasures of Understimulation
Brace yourself for five piping-hot minutes of inertia: learning the true meaning of farce]
• · 10 Ways to Get the Most Out of Technology Technology; Some areas of the brain, if not stimulated, will atrophy and die This Year, Change Your Mind
• · · Every day, Norman Mailer wrote in his small, stifling attic. Amy Rowland tried to write in the same place, but failed. It’s hard to write in another writer’s house... Attic; Resentment is not a zero-sum game because there is an infinite supply of it. A billionaire can resent just as well as a pauper: and, of course, vice versa... Pauper
• · · · Does he admire his characters or pity them? It’s never obvious. And that dark irony, that pitiless gaze that make him truly our contemporary Anton Chekhov is a mystery; There aren't an infinite number of ways a 19-year-old Brown University student can get a book contract. Going undercover as a student at the largest evangelical college in America is one. Roose spent a full semester at Liberty University in Virginia, founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, making friends with Bible-toting students, singing in the choir and getting an evangelical education — foreign territory indeed for a representative from one of the most fastidiously liberal schools in the nation. He even had an opportunity to interview Falwell himself, shortly before the pastor's death. Roose brought a secular perspective to the experience, which he said he undertook to help understand the evangelical movement. Of course, Becoming a published author before you graduate college is nice too
• · · · · X erotic interest was not lurid, voyeuristic, or morbid, but human: alert to desire, joy, longing, torment, and despair... Ruben is six foot three, 225 pounds, neck like a waist. You can hire him: $1,000 for every bone he breaks in his victim’s face ; A city compounds many worlds in one place. Rebecca Solnit’s poetic atlas of San Francisco isn’t a guide, so much as it’s a provocation Infinite City
• · · · · · Is this the year of the small press or what? The Pulitzer Prize went to Paul Harding’s Tinkers, published by Bellevue Literary Press (yes, as in the Bellevue Hospital), which also publishes one of my favorite journals, Bellevue Hill 2023 Literary Review ; To me, the sign of a good book is one that you want to give to everyone you like! Someone Knows My Rich Name
• · · · · · · Whether a person can escape Iron Curtain, even after crossing it, is arguable … Yes, what can a book review do for a book? ; I’m tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I’m hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I am dead. I can feel the surface trembling—it seems ready to give but it never does. I am uninterested in current events. How can I justify this? How can I explain it? I don’t want to have the same vocabulary I’ve always had. I want something richer, broader, more penetrating and powerful. If I could only forget myself and work! That’s how things are. More Saltier Cold River Bits