Neal Stephenson has a new post-book.

The Mongoliad is a sort of serialized story, created by Neal Stephenson, and written by Neal, Greg Bear, Nicole Galland, Mark Teppo, and a number of other great authors. It will be told via custom apps on iPad, iPhone, Kindle, and Android, and will be something of an experiment in post-book publishing and storytelling.

Neal Stephenson:

Hey, wait a minute, the hacker tourist says to himself, I thought AT&T was the enemy.

From The Diamond Age:

Hackworth was a forger, Dr. X was a honer. The distinction was at least as old as the digital computer. Forgers created a new technology and then forged on to the next project, having explored only the outlines of its potential. Honers got less respect because they appeared to sit still technologically, playing around with systems that were no longer start, hacking them for all they were worth, getting them to do things the forgers had never envisioned.

David Foster Wallace:

After the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank.

Neal Stephenson:

There's a gap emerging between the kind of thinking that requires long, uninterrupted, serious concentration on something and superficial surfing behaviour.

Winifred Gallagher:

You can't be happy all the time, but you can pretty much focus all the time. That's about as good as it gets.

The Mongoliad

Cory Doctorow has a new book.

In the virtual future, you must organize to survive.

Mala is a brilliant 15-year-old from rural India whose leadership skills in virtual combat have earned her the title of "General Robotwalla." In Shenzen, heart of China's industrial boom, Matthew is defying his former bosses to build his own successful gold-farming team. Leonard, who calls himself Wei-Dong, lives in Southern California, but spends his nights fighting virtual battles alongside his buddies in Asia, a world away. All of these young people, and more, will become entangled with the mysterious young woman called Big Sister Nor, who will use her experience, her knowledge of history, and her connections with real-world organizers to build them into a movement that can challenge the status quo.

The ruthless forces arrayed against them are willing to use any means to protect their power -- including blackmail, extortion, infiltration, violence, and even murder. To survive, Big Sister's people must out-think the system. This will lead them to devise a plan to crash the economy of every virtual world at once -- a Ponzi scheme combined with a brilliant hack that ends up being the biggest, funnest game of all.

John Seely Brown:

Gaming tends to be regarded as a harmless diversion at best, a vile corruptor of youth at worst. But the usual critiques fail to recognize its potential for experiential learning.

It's learning to be -- a natural byproduct of adjusting to a new culture -- as opposed to learning about.

For The Win

Financial Times:

Natalie Merchant's seven-year sleep has blossomed into this double album of poems set to music that traverses the whole range of American vernacular, from Bluegrass to Cajun to miniature chamber music, and beyond.

See also Carla Bruni's No Promises, from 2008.

From the deep archive, circa 2003, long before OK Go:

Natalie Merchant has stepped off the pop treadmill.

Natalie Merchant | Leave Your Sleep

David Lynch and Marion Cotillard in Shanghai a la Wong Kar Wai.

From the archive, Lynch:

Ideas are like fish. Originality is just the ideas you caught.

Louis Menand:

Ideas are not "out there" waiting to be discovered, but are tools -- like forks and knives and microchips -- that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves. Ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals -- ideas are social.

Chapter 3 of the Lady Dior saga : Lady Blue Shanghai

Trent Reznor:

Rebecca Brock:

She tells me she's ready. She may be small, she says, but she's mean. She outlines her plans for fending off terrorists. She says, "I kind of hope something happens, you know?"

She wears an American flag pin on the lapel of her blazer. She sits on the jump seat, waiting for her life to change.

How To Destroy Angels

Participants may draw their own portrait of Johnny Cash to be integrated into the collective whole.

As people all over the world contribute, the project will continue to evolve and grow, one frame at a time.

See also:

You and 472 other people have the chance to recreate Star Wars: A New Hope.

Always remember:

There are 260 million people in America, and you are one of them.

The Johnny Cash Project

Aditya Dev Sood:

The lights go brighter for a moment before dimming, the music starts thumping, a thrill ripples through us all, and four models appear on the far end of the catwalk. Your correspondent has never been so aware of the dramatic tension between camera, focal length, object and field. The contemporary, globalizing fashion show, of course, is a media practice, which requires the collaboration and participation of so many players to create this sense of the new, the now, the it, which one can either be with, or else clueless about.

All is expectation while the model is still walking towards you, but nothing prepares you for the odd way in which she walks right on past, going on vogue the cameras, which crackle like crickets in the darkness. Notwithstanding a couple of thousand years since the natyashastra defined abhinaya, the art of communicating emotion through facial expressions, the model is a blank slate and cipher. Perhaps it all makes sense, for the point is the clothes she is wearing, not the character she is playing. If her expression means anything at all it means I have something very important to tell you, but it's slung from my hips.

The lights come on, and just like that, we're done.

Noteworthy:

I have long held the view that when alien space explorers assess Earth (or any planet) to determine its relative level of civilization, they will study fashion.

David Luhnow:

Unlike their rough-hewn parents and uncles, today's young traffickers wear Armani suits, carry BlackBerrys and hit the gym for exercise.

Virginia Postrel:

Political figures as glamorous as Obama are rare. But glamorous policy proposals are not.

The pleasure and inspiration may be real, but glamour always contains an illusion. The image is not entirely false, but it is misleading.

Kenneth R. Harney:

Don't feel guilty about it. Don't think you're doing something morally wrong.

Michelle Gillmartin:

The world is full of things in need of embellishment.

Ezra Klein:

The implicit assumption of these arguments about strategy is that there is, somewhere out there, a workable strategy. That there is some way to navigate our political system such that you enact wise legislation solving pressing problems. But that's an increasingly uncertain assumption, I think.

Ellis:

All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.

Fashion As A Metaphor

This short film by American director Ramin Bahrani (Goodbye Solo) traces the epic, existential journey of a plastic bag (voiced by Werner Herzog) searching for its lost maker, the woman who took it home from the store and eventually discarded it. Along the way, it encounters strange creatures, experiences love in the sky, grieves the loss of its beloved maker, and tries to grasp its purpose in the world.

In the end, the wayward plastic bag wafts its way to the ocean, into the tides, and out into the Pacific Ocean trash vortex -- a promised nirvana where it will settle among its own kind and gradually let the memories of its maker slip away.

Decius:

The idea that there is a garbage patch that spans the Pacific is nearly the most disgusting thing I can imagine.

Decius:

One must assume that all garbage is monitored by the state. Anything less would be a pre-911 mentality.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Plastic Bag

Keep your cyber clean.

TRON is a 3D high-tech adventure set in a digital world that's unlike anything ever captured on the big screen.

Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), the tech-savvy 27-year-old son of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), looks into his father's disappearance and finds himself pulled into the same world of fierce programs and gladiatorial games where his father has been living for 25 years.

Along with Kevin's loyal confidant (Olivia Wilde), father and son embark on a life-and-death journey across a visually-stunning cyber universe that has become far more advanced and exceedingly dangerous.

Decius:

This looks good!

k:

This is gonna be sooo bad.

Bruce Schneier:

More is coming.

Thomas Powers:

Is more what we really need?

Tim Kreider's married friend:

It's not as if being married means you're any less alone.

Decius:

Wow, life is boring.

Tron Legacy

Philip K. Dick:

"What's wrong, dear?" my wife asked.

I couldn't tell her. Knowledge like this was too much for the ordinary run-of-the-mill person. I had to keep it to myself.

Rattle:

Paranoia about the conspiracy is always justified. It's just usually misplaced.

Cory Doctorow:

His ex-wife. He hadn't thought of her in years. Well, months. Weeks, certainly. She'd been a brilliant computer scientist, the valedictorian of her Positronic Complexity Engineering class at the UNATS Robotics school at the University of Toronto. Dumping her husband and her daughter was bad enough, but the worst of it was that she dumped her country and its way of life. Now she was ensconced in her own research lab in Beijing, making the kinds of runaway Positronics that made the loathsome robots of UNATS look categorically beneficent.

He itched to wiretap her, to read her email or listen in on her phone conversations. He could have done that when they were still together, but he never had. If he had, he would have found out what she was planning. He could have talked her out of it.

The Eyes Have It