Sunday, April 02, 2023

If Twitter finally dies, where do we find the smart people?

Never underestimate workers as former Twitter employees are spouting at Spoutible new ideas …serving  cold revenge on white South African who tried to screw American workers… 

For a decade, Twitter was the premier watering hole for the chattering classes. But where does everybody go if it dries up?

 Commentary: If Twitter finally dies, where do we find the smart people?




CARROT JUICE CONSTITUTES MURDER. Plants Really Do ‘Scream’ Out Loud. We Just Never Heard It Until Now

I’ve heard the screams of the vegetables


BookTok is Good, Actually: On the Undersung Joys of a Vast and Multifarious Platform


Lit Hub – Leigh Stein Wonders Why More Book People Don’t Embrace the Publishing Juggernaut. “Shallow, fake, showy, and performative—these are a few of the adjectives used to describe BookTok, the corner of TikTok where young women share and discuss books on camera, by drive-by tourists to a culture they don’t understand. I’m no BookTok tourist. I’ve lived here for nine months

As a chronically online millennial, I’ve become a translator between the readers on BookTok and the literary community that looks down upon them. On TikTok, I post a video about Mary Ruefle that gets forty thousand views and yields comments like: “this just gave a whole new perspective on my entire existence.” In a banquet room in South Carolina, I’m giving the keynote speech at a writing conference.

 To inspire the audience, I tell the Cinderella story of Colleen Hoover, the bestselling author in America. Three days before my speech, her novel It Starts with Us sold 800,000 copies on release day. There are 120 writers in the room; only one has heard of Hoover. For every bestselling BookTok title, you can find a hundred videos from creators telling you it’s overhyped—and recommending something else to read instead. 

It’s a little lonely over here. I’ve been baffled by why my esteemed colleagues, who gather in the thousands at AWP to kvetch about how hard it is to make a living as a writer, are so incurious about the place on the internet where readers are buying a metric fuckton of books…”