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Sunday, November 24, 2013

Reality show for writers

Hold on to your monocles, friends—the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2013 is “selfie.” It’s an informal noun (plural: selfies) defined as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.” It was first used in 2002, in an Australian online forum (compare the Australian diminutives “barbie” for barbecue and “firie” for firefighter), and it first appeared as a hashtag, #selfie, on Flickr, in 2004 Word of the year media dragon was born 2002 - million Internet years agoA novelist craves solitude. Reality TV craves intrusion. So, what happens when writing becomes a broadcast spectacle? Reality show for writers 


Art became philosophical in 1964, when Andy Warhol(a) erased the line between art and reality. For Arthur Danto, it was a conversion moment... Slavic twist


J. Hoberman on Louise Steinman’s The Crooked Mirror: “As noted by Louise Steinman in “The Crooked Mirror,” her firsthand report on what remains of Jewish life in contemporary Poland, four out of five American Jews are of Polish-Jewish descent — a diaspora within the diaspora.” Bent mirror