"Essay: The digital death of collecting: How platforms mess with our tastes" by Kyle Chayka

Snip:

The shifting sands of digital technology have robbed these collections of their meaning; the context in which they originally existed can no longer be experienced and they only appear as nostalgic ruins, the remains of once-inhabited metropolises gone ( Read more... )

 
Roxane Gay Says "Cancel Culture" Does Not Exist

snip:

[on the term "culture wars"] It doesn’t mean a whole lot to me. I think it’s the kind of thing that people say when they’re too lazy to engage with the world as it is, and they want to dismiss the very material realities of most people’s lives. I get really frustrated when people are like, “Oh, ( Read more... )

Reviewing the Book Review


As the publication celebrates its 125th anniversary, Parul Sehgal, a staff critic and former editor at the Book Review, delves into the archives to critically examine its legacy in full.
Journalist goes through 125 years of book reviews looking for women, people of color, queerness.

Revisiting the midcentury: "I’d innocently ( Read more... )

 BLACK, LATINX, AND MILLENNIAL READERS ARE THE BACKBONE OF THE BOOK WORLD by Kelly Jensen

Snip:

The research, undertaken amid the COVID-19 pandemic, involved surveying over 4,300 qualified individuals across an array of age groups, races, and locales in the United States. To qualify, individuals have to have indicated engaging with one book over the ( Read more... )

 Y'all I loved the Bridgerton series SO MUCH and so I picked up the first book and it is SO BAD. I knew going in that the book was going to be whitey mcstraightspace but dear lord. Turns out all of the characters are in different books so if I want to check in on my favorite, Penelope, Imma have to skip to like the third or fourth book. I don't ( Read more... )

 "The New National American Elite" by Michael Lind

A fairly long piece on class in America, which says a lot of interesting things, some of which I doubt. For one thing, towards the end there's a section on "woke speech" as "a ruling-class dialect" which I think is almost but by no means entirely true. (Look, I've spent the better part of a year ( Read more... )

 Warning for unedited and unpolished word vomit.

Last week I started reading Janine Barchas's The Lost Books of Jane Austen, a study on popular editions of Austen that are largely "lost" because they were read to bits with few survivors. Eg. there was an edition in the late 1800s that was printed as a promotional by a soap company, and if you sent ( Read more... )

Leah Price's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading" (2019), p. 23:

"Perhaps print is to digital as Madonna is to whore: we worship one but use the other."

( Read more... )

The Dangers of Reading in Bed by Nika Mavrody

In his history of masturbation, Solitary Sex, the historian Thomas Laqueur draws a direct link between 18th-century distress over solitary, silent novel reading and masturbation’s new status as a public menace: “Novels, like masturbation, created for women alternative ‘companions of their pillow.’” ( Read more... )