This project is part of the MoMA exhibit I mentioned earlier this week.

New York Talk Exchange illustrates the global exchange of information in real time by visualizing volumes of long distance telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world.

In an information age, telecommunications such as the Internet and the telephone bind people across space by eviscerating the constraints of distance. To reveal the relationships that New Yorkers have with the rest of the world, New York Talk Exchange asks: How does the city of New York connect to other cities? With which cities does New York have the strongest ties and how do these relationships shift with time? How does the rest of the world reach into the neighborhoods of New York?

New York Talk Exchange

If you believe you are by now immune to gory novels, here’s one with enough malevolence to give even the most hardened readers nightmares. “The Seven Days of Peter Crumb,” a chronicle of the final week in a psychopath’s life by the British actor and writer Jonny Glynn, is gruesome, obscene and utterly disturbing. It is also absorbing and well written. Reading it, I fought the urge to throw up. Needless to say, I was transfixed.

Everybody Hurts

Some writers complain that semicolons are subversively ambiguous, that they vaguely imply a connection between two statements without having to specify what that connection is.

Punctuated (Pause) With a Semicolon

An awful lot of people have mentioned the documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, which came out last year. The mail usually goes along the lines of:

"Did you know about this fantastic arcade documentary that came out? I thought it was amazing, you should see it if you haven't already."

Must see -- it's pretty much about how everything everywhere actually works.

So to all my helpful compatriots, I just want the message clear: I hate that movie. I hate it on principle. I hate it on personal, selfish grounds. I hate it on ethical grounds. I dispute its content and I despise its message. That it is being considered a modern classic grinds my teeth and riles my fists.

The King of Wrong

What if fifteen years ago someone had suggested a nationwide network of gigantic bookshops, carrying about 150,000 titles each, staying open until 11:00 P.M. or midnight, and offering cafés, comfortable chairs, and public restrooms? And what if these sumptuous emporia were to be found not only in the great urban centers but also in small cities and suburbs all across the country—places like Plano, Texas; Knoxville, Tennessee; and Mesa, Arizona? Wouldn't we have thought that sounded like pure, if unattainable, heaven? Well, that is what the superstore chains—Barnes & Noble; Borders; and Books-A-Million, based in Birmingham, Alabama—have brought us. Why, then, the chorus of disapproval from the cultural elite? Why the characterization, spread by a vocal group of critics, of the chain bookstores as a sort of intellectual McDonald's, a symbol of the dumbing-down and standardization of American life?

Two—Make That Three—Cheers for the Chain Bookstores

... the male moviegoing constituency, who, more than anything else, like to think of themselves as hilarious ...

Breaking Through

A new Alice Munro story!

Free Radicals: Fiction: The New Yorker

This is a good list.

1. Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
2. General duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher, pull everything out of your fellow students.
3. General duties of a teacher: pull everything out of your students.
4. Consider everything an experiment.
5. Be self-disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
6. Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
7. THE ONLY RULE IS WORK. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.
8. Don’t try to create and analyse at the same time. They’re different processes.
9. Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
10. “We’re breaking all of the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.” - John Cage.

Helpful hints: Always be around. Come or go to everything always. Go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully often. Save everything, it might come in handy later.

From the archive:

Rumsfeld's Rules

Powell's Rules

Eleven Lessons from Robert McNamara

Benjamin Franklin's 13 Virtues

Creative thinking rules

What is this modern-day phenomenon that has spread like poison ivy through the ranks of novelists, historians, academics, scientists, students and almost anyone who uses and publishes words?

Plagiarism is a species of intellectual fraud that an author claims is original but has been copied from another source without permission or acknowledgment, thus deceiving and harming the reader.

I just committed plagiarism.

From the archive:

The Ecstasy of Influence, by Johnathan Lethem

A classic, or a fraud?

They're no less artful than full-length books, but they need less of your time. The perfect form for today's lifestyles

Can the novella save literature?