…is that all authors google themselves. Hi, Sarah Manguso! I liked your book a great deal! I am sorry I read it in the bookstore! Alas, Keith Gessen, I have not read yours yet, but would be happy to accept any review copies you might like to provide in gestures of [...]

[Read more →]

Two things, variations on a theme with other variations, to confront and subsequently integrate:
Emily Gould: edits interesting but problematic blog, writes interesting but problematic blog, writes interesting but problematic Times Magazine article, throughout airs personal insecurities, makes mistakes in public, gets flayed in the media, gets book deal to write about more of same?
This post: [...]

[Read more →]

I frequently disparage New York Magazine, but there is one thing it does better than any print publication I can think of: It gets the internet. The internet as tastemaker, the internet as cocktail party, the internet as career move and procrastination tool and social obligation, the internet as a force in the lives [...]

[Read more →]

Okay, I’m going to earn my “semiotics of the mundane” badge right off the bat, because I don’t think it gets much more mundane than a close reading of a comment on a blog post about focaccia, sardines, and Williams-Sonoma.
Food, I think, is one of the biggest battlegrounds for our collective aesthetics right now (see: [...]

[Read more →]