Instapaper, and miscellaneous essay links
If you use the internet, if you read stuff on your iphone or ipad, you should look into Instapaper (if you haven’t already). Not only is it a clutter-free, reading-friendly environment, whether you’re using the app or the site on your browser, it’s also like a curated list of essays available on the web. You end up reading pieces you might not have ordinarily (when was the last time you navigated to the New English Review?).
Some of the articles that I’ve found on there lately (I’ll link to their original pages, not the instapaper pages)…
Books after Amazon, by Onnesha Roychoudhuri (Boston Review). The switch from books to ebooks isn’t just about how we read. It’s also about what kinds of books are published and who is making the decisions. Roychoudhuri says those choices used to be made by reader-publishers and reader-booksellers - book people, and now they’re made by money people, i.e. Amazon:
“What happens when an industry concerned with the production of culture is beholden to a company with the sole goal of underselling competitors? Amazon is indisputably the king of books, but the issue remains, as Charlie Winton, CEO of the independent publisher Counterpoint Press puts it, “what kind of king they’re going to be.” A vital publishing industry must be able take chances with new authors and with books that don’t have obvious mass-market appeal. When mega-retailers have all the power in the industry, consumers benefit from low prices, but the effect on the future of literature—on what books can be published successfully—is far more in doubt.”
An article on Shigeru Miyamoto, the man who invented Mario Brothers (New Yorker). I don’t imagine there are many people that grew up when I did for whom this guy doesn’t command about eight worlds worth of gratitude. Nick Paumgarten, though complimentary to Miyamoto, doesn’t seem like the biggest fan of video games, and struggles, it seems to me, to find things to talk about here. But I thought the stuff about Nintendo and Miyamoto-san was pretty interesting.
An interview-ish article with Winona Ryder that reminds me of the stuff I used to read in Spin or Rolling Stone (GQ)
Kafka’s Last Trial, by Elif Batuman (New York Times). If you’ve already read a hundred articles about Kafka and Brod, you’ll probably be the type to read one more, even if it’s focussed mainly on legal matters, ownership battles, and things that you already knew about Kafka. There’ll always been one or two new things to make it worthwhile, e.g. this line Brod took down before Kafka had even published anything, about a classmate: “Talk comes straight out of his mouth like a walking stick.”
The Chessboard Killer, by Peter Savodnik (GQ). Serial killers nowadays can’t even count how many people they’ve killed.
These are just the ones I’ve read in the last little while, but really, I’m sure the others are all equally worth reading. And, about Instapaper itself, here’s an interview with the guy behind it, Marco Arment, in Wired…
“People love information… Right now in our society, we have an obesity epidemic. Because for the first time in history, we have access to food whenever we want, we don’t know how to control ourselves. I think we have the exact same problem with information.”
Instapaper, and miscellaneous essay links
If you use the internet, if you read stuff on your iphone or ipad, you should look into Instapaper (if you haven’t already). Not only is it a clutter-free, reading-friendly environment, whether you’re using the app or the site on your browser, it’s also like a curated list of essays available on the web. You end up reading pieces you might not have ordinarily (when was the last time you navigated to the New English Review?).
Some of the articles that I’ve found on there lately (I’ll link to their original pages, not the instapaper pages)…
Books after Amazon, by Onnesha Roychoudhuri (Boston Review). The switch from books to ebooks isn’t just about how we read. It’s also about what kinds of books are published and who is making the decisions. Roychoudhuri says those choices used to be made by reader-publishers and reader-booksellers - book people, and now they’re made by money people, i.e. Amazon:
“What happens when an industry concerned with the production of culture is beholden to a company with the sole goal of underselling competitors? Amazon is indisputably the king of books, but the issue remains, as Charlie Winton, CEO of the independent publisher Counterpoint Press puts it, “what kind of king they’re going to be.” A vital publishing industry must be able take chances with new authors and with books that don’t have obvious mass-market appeal. When mega-retailers have all the power in the industry, consumers benefit from low prices, but the effect on the future of literature—on what books can be published successfully—is far more in doubt.”
An article on Shigeru Miyamoto, the man who invented Mario Brothers (New Yorker). I don’t imagine there are many people that grew up when I did for whom this guy doesn’t command about eight worlds worth of gratitude. Nick Paumgarten, though complimentary to Miyamoto, doesn’t seem like the biggest fan of video games, and struggles, it seems to me, to find things to talk about here. But I thought the stuff about Nintendo and Miyamoto-san was pretty interesting.
An interview-ish article with Winona Ryder that reminds me of the stuff I used to read in Spin or Rolling Stone (GQ)
Kafka’s Last Trial, by Elif Batuman (New York Times). If you’ve already read a hundred articles about Kafka and Brod, you’ll probably be the type to read one more, even if it’s focussed mainly on legal matters, ownership battles, and things that you already knew about Kafka. There’ll always been one or two new things to make it worthwhile, e.g. this line Brod took down before Kafka had even published anything, about a classmate: “Talk comes straight out of his mouth like a walking stick.”
The Chessboard Killer, by Peter Savodnik (GQ). Serial killers nowadays can’t even count how many people they’ve killed.
These are just the ones I’ve read in the last little while, but really, I’m sure the others are all equally worth reading. And, about Instapaper itself, here’s an interview with the guy behind it, Marco Arment, in Wired…
“People love information… Right now in our society, we have an obesity epidemic. Because for the first time in history, we have access to food whenever we want, we don’t know how to control ourselves. I think we have the exact same problem with information.”
