Brain Pickings is the brain child of Maria Popova, a cultural curator and curious mind at large, who also writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and Design Observer, among others. She gets occasional help from a handful of guest contributors.

Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are.

Because creativity, after all, is a combinatorial force. It’s our ability to tap into the mental pool of resources — ideas, insights, knowledge, inspiration — that we’ve accumulated over the years just by being present and alive and awake to the world, and to combine them in extraordinary new ways. In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these ideas and build new ideas — like LEGOs. The more of these building blocks we have, and the more diverse their shapes and colors, the more interesting our creations will become.

Brain Pickings is your LEGO treasure chest, full of pieces across art, design, science, technology, philosophy, history, politics, psychology, sociology, ecology, anthropology, you-name-itology. Pieces that enrich your mental pool of resources and empower you to combine them into original concepts that are stronger, smarter, richer, deeper and more impactful — a modest, curiosity-driven exercise in vision- and mind-expansion. Please enjoy.

Why impostor syndrome afflicts academics but not athletes, even when the failure rates are equal. This explains SO MUCH.

"...running, and sports in general, LOVE underdogs. We love to hear heroic tales of people who overcame great odds, who suffered staggering defeat, and then who worked hard, pushed themselves, and made it. You never read a profile of a great runner without reading about the hard times in their lives, the difficulties they had in training, the mental blocks, the personal troubles, whatever it was. The glory is in watching them overcome, and come back, and win, against the odds. Seeing people succeed after having worked so hard and dealt with so much is inspiring. We can believe that we can do it, too. We can come back, fight another day.

We love to hear about underdogs in sports, in media, in literature. But one place you'll never hear about them? Science. Academia. No one ever introduces a great speaker with "I've known so and so for a really long time, and they've always been a great scientist. Even in the dark days when the grants kept getting rejected and we had to play poker in the lab because we were out of money, they never lost their love of science!". No one ever eulogizes a scientist with stories of scientific hardship, unless they are the rare misunderstood genius. Instead we head nothing but success after success "Why yes, Dr. Jane Doe here has always been a wonderful scientist. Having received the Wellcome Trust Prize for "Scientific Tots" at the age of 3, she graduated with a bachelors in Chemistry and Physics from Cornell while simultaneously curing cancer, and obtained her PhD from Harvard when she was 17. Since then she has worked hard and discovered great things, publishing 50 times in Science, Nature, or Cell while serving as the ambassador to the United Nations, and is generally the most wonderous, most perfect person the world has ever seen. We can all worship her godlike splendor and admire the way she has brought us all world peace while she gives us this talk on atomic structure". Obviously I'm exaggerating, but I've certainly many heard introductions that leave the entire audience sitting in awe. It's stuff like this that makes us young'uns think we can never achieve what they have, very few of us are egotistical enough to believe we are the next Dr. Jane Doe."

"I am an independent social historian of food culture and also a professional chef and confectioner. I run practical courses on all aspects of British and Italian food history at my home in the English Lake District. I am also the author of a number of books and many papers on the history of food and have curated many major exhibitions on food history in the UK, US and Europe."

[THIS IS THE LIFE I WANT. Or one of them, anyway.]

A response to Jonathan Franzen's ridiculous "Edith Wharton wasn't pretty and that had a huge effect on her novels" essay in the New Yorker.

Gorgeous book-illustration blog.

"I do share one of Morrison's concerns. How will writers find leisure to write? But this is part of something larger: and it's not a literary issue, it's a labor issue. How will painters find time to paint? How will dancers find time to dance? How will anyone find leisure to do the things that make life worth living?

But this has nothing to do with the breakdown of the “professional author” system, which never employed more than a small fraction of literary writers. It has to do with wages dropping to levels at which one has to work most of one's waking hours just to sustain oneself. Having to work twenty hours a week at some crummy job never kept anyone from writing a great book or painting great paintings. But having to work fifty or sixty hours a week, or being unable to find any work, certainly will. That's the real disaster for the arts, and for all of us. In the Thatcher-and-Reagan world, we 99 percenters are either frantically busy or anxiously poor: swollen with economic desire or paralyzed by economic fear. That is something to worry about."

"That's the point of Twitter, in my mind: to talk about the things you care about. (For the record, I'm just as varied on Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.) I care about my career, but it's not all I am. I think of this as the Popeye Principle, because I am what I am. And I refuse to filter what I say on social networking sites out of fear of some mythical future employer.

Let me say this again: You cannot live your life worrying about what future employers may or may not think about you based on your Twitter stream, your Facebook page, your Pinterest boards, etc."

The "bizarro annotated bibliography" assignment: "On a separate page, create an annotated bibliography for 3 sources that you feel would not be appropriate as research sources. Follow the same model as you would for your real annotated bibliography, but in your annotations, explain why this source would not be suitable. “Suitable” does not mean “off-topic.” Instead, it means there is something about the source itself that would not make it an effective piece of evidence."

Genius! I'm going to steal this idea someday.

"A problem I see in DH is the tendency to edit too much before anything can get done. People don’t want to make mistakes. They may not know how to program, feel in control of the computer, or know HTML and CSS. Instead of trying something and learning from failure, they don’t do anything at all. They have the equivalent of writer’s block.

No one has to be a professional to participate in NaNoWriMo. No one should have to be an accomplished programmer to get started in DH. They just need the crisis that forces them to turn off their judgment and start typing.

We need a NaNoWriMo-like event for digital humanities. Take a month and write a web-based project. It doesn’t have to work well. You won’t want to read my novel at the end of November, but I can take time after November to edit what I’ve written. Once a month has passed and the project is starting to take its first shaky steps, the polishing can begin."

"Getting a group of faculty members together to accomplish something has often been compared to herding cats. I disagree. When I want to get my cats all into one room to do something at the same time, all I have to do is stand in my kitchen, open a can of Friskies, and yell “Num nums!”


Not so with faculty. If you have, say, 20 professor cats, and you would like them all to arrive in the same place at the same time, you can’t just send out a general email to all 20 of them that says “Num nums will be served in the kitchen at 6 pm.” Most professor cats will just delete that email, if they see it at all. Only 2 or 3 professor cats will show up – the ones with the most interest in num nums and the most criticisms to offer. They will spend the whole time coming up with ways to improve the num num experience, and at the end of dinner time they will have come to an agreement that next time, instead of opening a can of shredded salmon flavored cat food, you go out, catch a fresh salmon, clean it and gut it, and serve the fresh raw filets on ice. And at least three of the no-shows will complain that num nums were served without them, why didn’t anyone tell them there would be num nums.

The lack of response is especially confusing because the professor cats are the ones that suggested the num nums in the first place. They like num nums. They wrote the grants that got the funding for the num nums. And you already polled them and picked a num num eating time that worked for everyone."

The "parable of the sled dog and the gecko" post. Brilliant stuff. The next time some straight white dude complains, in my hearing, that he doesn't understand what all the fuss about "privilege" is, I'm going to forward him this.

At my kitchen table the other night a friend blurted out her annoyance at a job interview experience that day.
“He kept asking, ‘What are you passionate about?’ And I just didn’t feel that was right in an interview. So intrusive. Whenever I tried to deflect it, he’d go, “No, really, what gets you out of bed in the morning? What’s your passion?“

Her complaint sparked the others. ...

“I like my work. I’m good at it. I try hard. When did that stop being enough? When did it have to be my Passion? I just got married. There are things in my life that are really important to me. But they’re not necessarily all part of my work life, and I don’t want to bring them into a job interview.”

“It’s like, you’re not allowed to have a private life any more. They want to own all of you.”

"The people who really need academic freedom are the people who are at the start of their careers. They are the ones who are seeing things with fresh eyes, who can challenge the conventional wisdom and the conventional people who enforce the status quo. These are the people who need the reassurances that tenure can grant, that they will not be dismissed simply for having revolutionary ideas or difficult personalities.

Instead, these energetic, excited new professionals land in tenure-track jobs where the message is that they must keep their heads down and concentrate on producing tame, elder-approved scholarship, which they must publish in established journals ... A less-obvious solution is to reverse the tenure clock. New hires have seven years of tenure, starting their first day on the job. Aside from gross negligence, they are untouchable. They can follow their ideas wherever they lead. After seven years, tenure is revoked."

"In Los Angeles...I would often set off for a walk, only to be stopped by a colleague from one research institution or another—or in a couple of instances, by complete strangers—who would either insist on giving me a lift, or tell me that I Really Shouldn’t Be Walking There. My landlady, who finally figured out that my strange habit of getting about on foot was serious and ingrained, told me that if If I would insist on walking, that I should at least try to look inconspicuous when doing so. “Don’t wear a suit,” she suggested, “try sweats instead.” What underwrote her remarks, and indeed the actions of the lift-offerers—who were all like me white and middle class, was the assumption that a woman like me should not be walking about the city. This deeply offended me on two scores: as someone who feels it is her right to move about the street on foot as and when she wishes, and on behalf of the street, which was assumed to inevitably pose some sort of a threat to someone like me."

"What men understand all to well is precisely how heterosexual men generally look at women. As disturbing as that reality might be, there tends to be some variation and range. The worst of that range knows how he can survey a whole swath of a gender and see nothing more than sentient, but soul-less, walking meat. A man of that particular stamp fears his own gaze."

Because I already got what I came for–three advanced degrees and immersion in a subject I love.

Because I want to continue to love it.

Because life is short.

Because sometimes I consider how my light is spent.

Because I don’t want to live here.

Because I am prevented from doing the work I was trained and prepared to do.

Because there are other places where that training and preparation will be rewarded, respected, and used.

Because I am capable of more than I can do here.

Because leaving the system is a reclamation of the dignity and agency it has attempted to take from me…

I am leaving the academy.

"There is, in the practice of an art & in the study of an art, a reservoir of stability, even peace. All those crazy poets are not crazy because they are poets—no, poetry has given them a living center when everything else, even their own souls, has turned to shit. Poets are not so much masters of language as poor bastards for whom the world is a blur & a swirl, but who have found some techniques for slowing things down. ...speaking for myself only, I feel hard-wired to the aesthetic. I suppose there are geniuses who move freely among perspectives, but most of us, I think, are either born or early-trained to a particular way of looking at the world. This strikes me as a fortunate result of human evolution: each individual ideally can specialize in one way of looking at the world, but at the same time is capable of recognizing the legitimacy of other perspectives."

"[T]he whole discussion ... got me thinking about the pervasive idea that women owe it to onlookers to maintain a certain standard of decorativeness.

Now, this may seem strange from someone who writes about pretty dresses (mostly) every day, but: You Don't Have to Be Pretty. You don't owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don't owe it to your mother, you don't owe it to your children, you don't owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked 'female'."

[A]t my first rails job, I worked at a company with a mostly-lesbian customer base. It turns out, in that context, knowing if someone is “male” or “female” gives you almost no useful information. The lesbian community has other widely-accepted categories of gender, but the company’s internal order tracking software — a well-known package from a national vendor — offered only male or female. As a result, the company didn’t even bother to ask for gender when users created accounts.

That was my first real-life experience with the limitations of the gender binary. It was certainly interesting, but it was essentially academic. Not long after I left that job, though, one of my closest family members told me that he’s transgender. That made the whole subject way more immediate....

I made this change to Diaspora so that I won’t alienate anyone I love before they finish signing up. I made this change because gender is a beautiful and multifaceted thing that can’t be contained by a list.

Straight male geek guy throws massive hissyfit over the very idea that a social networking site might not want to force everyone into gendered boxes, whines about how it's the end of the world that "absurd identity politics" enters into decisions. Sigh. Your privilege is showing, sir.

"After the experiment I see artificial light as something like sugar. We’re drawn to it, but too much is bad for us. In fact, it seems to be bad for us in many of the same ways — sleep deprivation reduces insulin sensitivity in the same way excessive sugar intake does. I can function with as little as five or six hours of sleep as night. But with that little sleep (especially for more than one night), I’m not at my best, or my happiest, or my most creative; I’m just grinding through life. Since the only thing we have in life is quality of our consciousness, and sleep deprivation so obviously and negatively affects the quality of our consciousness, it makes sense to prioritize sleep. Most people would agree, but almost nobody does dedicate enough time to sleep. Why? The ubiquity of artificial light. It’s like going to a cake store, buying every delicious-looking cake, coming home and arranging them on your dinner table, and then resolving not to eat any sugar."

"Only time will tell.  But what makes me as blue as my state are that the spaces between us have come to characterize politics.  Here in the People's Republic of Connecticut, where we are free to gay marry and split the family farm into as many ticky-tacky houses as we like until each incoherent development merges into the next, we seem to be bluer than ever.  But that doesn't mean that democracy is working as it should. There is too much space between us, and if you ask me, both parties prefer it that way."

Report on the "Playing with Technology in History" unconference (April 2010).

Mapping how easily one's daily errands would be disrupted by a spike in gas prices.

"John Stuart Mill argued that eccentricity – that is, the freedom of individuals to be eccentric, to express themselves eccentrically, to hold and propound eccentric ideas and to do eccentric things – was not only a hallmark of a free society, but a necessary feature of any progressive society: new ideas, after all, can only be borne from innovation and experimentation, and old ideas (or values or habits) that are not or are no longer good (however defined) can only be revealed as such when some are willing to reject the old in favor of the new, and this is the province of eccentricity. He also argued, however, that there is a tendency in the mass of any population to recoil against eccentricity – regarding expressions or demonstrations of eccentricity as ‘weird’ or ’strange’ or ‘dangerous’ – and to actively or (more insidiously) passively discourage eccentric behavior or action or speech."

"One-click digital commonplacing. Digital text is manipulable; it can be copied and pasted elsewhere with a few clicks. Printed words on paper can also be copied elsewhere. For centuries in the west, readers maintained "commonplace books," in which they would copy and categorize interesting quotes or sententiae they came across while reading. Bibliographic software like Zotero allow us to manage and manipulate documents or files (an entire article, an entire webpage) but do not, to my knowledge, allow for scrapbooking chunks from within documents. What if you could highlight text, hit (e.g.) SHIFT-S, and the highlighted text pops into a digital scrapbook, complete with citation, link and date saved? This could be done as an applet for the web, so you no longer have to sift through entire bookmarked websites to find the one quote/bit of information. This way, your research points to quotes, to words, rather than to files."

New London Patch is a hub of local news and information for and about New London — and we're launching soon! We're a new business in town and you'll be seeing a lot of us: our editor and contributors will be all over New London with their laptops, cell phones and cameras, listening to people and covering what they care about. Our mission is simple: to make people's lives better by providing quick and easy access to the local news and information that is most relevant to them. Once we're open you'll be able to find us right here at newlondon.patch.com.

The grocery list: scribbled on the back of last month’s electricity bill, or stored on the Droid, where it’s conveniently organized by supermarket aisle number. That minor epiphany that struck on the subway: transcribed to a Moleskin, or translated into a Voice Memo on the iPhone.

This cluster examines how different processes of and platforms for note-taking shape the everyday ways we think, record, and remember.

"Most of my closest friends have been lesbians, and if there's one gender/orientation group I feel I belong to -- I'm not sure there is, really -- that's it. I encounter "ordinary" heterosexual culture with bafflement. The sexual primping and suspicion, the weird mix of idolatry and contempt, the simultaneous exaltation of sex as sublime and its denigration as repulsive -- it all leaves me with the feeling that I'm visiting a superstitious, unpredictable, and very dangerous alien tribe. Whatever I am, I'm not one of them."

"I get to educate people in low-tension situations, partially just by being myself and demonstrating that not all freaky people are, well, freaky. But I am so fucking tired of having to come out again and again and again. I’m so fucking tired of having to do work where most people just exist. I’m so fucking tired of having to be the one who explains, who collects funny responses, who shocks people.

Sometimes I want to exist in a context where my life and my choices are assumed, not explained."

[Amen. On all kinds of different levels.]

Sad but true.

Best response to homophobic religious nutjobs EVER. “If you do not cease and desist fouling the air with homophobia, I must sing…SHOW TUNES.”

The language of commerce has been engineered to describe the overt purpose of a thing, but cannot encompass fringe benefits or peripheral pleasures....When I drive from here to there, speed, privacy, control, and safety are easy to claim. When I walk, what happens is more vague, more ambiguous—and in many circumstances much richer. I am out in the world. It’s exercise, though not so quantifiably as on a treadmill in a gym with a digital readout. It’s myriad little epiphanies and encounters that knit me more tightly into my place and maybe enhance the place overall. The carbon emissions are essentially nil. Many more benefits are more subjective, more ethereal—and more wordy. You can’t describe them in a few familiar phrases...Since someone makes money every time you buy a car or fill it up, there’s a whole commercial language built around getting us to drive; there’s little or no language promoting the free act of walking.

I <3 tiny house designs.

"Beach reading" only bugs me because it makes reading in general sound like a chore, and because it drapes a fake aura of naughtiness over mass market books, which sell millions of copies anyway and don't need the bad publicity. It's like calling a hot fudge sundae "decadent."

It's not decadent: it's a sundae.

"[L]et’s say that the author wants to use the theoretical system developed by one thinker to read through the oeuvre of this one particular band. Let’s pretend it’s Marxism (it’s not) and Bow Wow Wow (it’s not). So we sit down to get a Marxist reading of Bow Wow Wow (oh boy!), and the essay falls into two-and-one-half parts. The first, tiny part—one short paragraph, actually—sets up the argument, and ends with a sentence that says, in effect: 'We’ll return to Bow Wow Wow, but first, we’ve got to look at Marx.' The essay then spends fully half of its pages in a fairly perfunctory and, as it turns out, entirely unnecessary explication of Marx...

But here’s the thing: what the writer has to say about 'Bow Wow Wow' doesn’t require Marx. Not. In. The. Least. At least, no more than the Marx that anyone with a high-school education already knows. The 'Marx'...is really there as the writer’s big brother, as in, 'You’d better shut up, or my big brother will beat the snot out of you.'”

If we can build a world-view-surfer for Chicago on Flickr, we can build it for French and English explorers with the Newberry library maps & guidebooks on Google Earth. The old historical chestnut was that the French went by river; the English by land, and their cities, landscapes, and language developed accordingly. What other patterns are out there?

Overlapping world views, transposed onto the same space: synthesizing and averaging images to give an overview of how different cultures use landscape -- this is the horizon of a vast and little-known frontier.

There's room for much building yonder. Neither the Googles of the world, nor the visual analysts of computer science departments, nor scholars of the visual humanities have come up with tools sufficient to differentiate World View. But the material is vast.

How to talk to faculty about why they should care about the state of academic journal publishing.

"The final model I wish to consider is the opposite, rooted in physical space, requiring actual—not virtual—bodies. This is not the unconference, but the underconference. The prerequisite of the underconference is the conference. There is the official conference—say, the MLA—and at the very same time there is an entirely parallel conference, running alongside—no, under—the official conference. Think of it as the Trystero of academia. Inspired by the Situationists, Happenings, flash mobs, Bakhtin, ARGs, and the absurdist political theater of the Yippies, the underconference is the carnival in the churchyard. Transgressive play at the very doorstep of institutional order. And like most manifestations of the carnivalesque, the underconference is at its heart very serious business." (I love this idea.)

Songs and verses upon several occasions, [ca. 1680?]. Manuscript on paper, in a single hand, of about 59 satirical poems and songs by John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, John Oldham, John Dryden, Aphra Behn, and others. Poems include Rochester’s Satyr Against Man, Upon Nothing, and Tunbridge Wells; Dryden’s MacFlecknoe; Shadwell’s Upon A Late Fallen Poet; and George Etherege’s Ephelia to Bajazet. Beinecke call number: Osborn b105.

"I was the liaison to the English department among others, and one of the English professors once requested the library purchase a very expensive microfilm set to support a portion of her research. I would have liked to, because she seemed to be doing some interesting work. But it was much too expensive for our budget and I had to turn her down. Visibly frustrated, she complained that the college expected her to do research, but couldn't pay to support that research. This is an issue Jacques Barzun called the PhD octopus, the drive in academic from the 1940s on to make sure that every institution of higher education from research universities to junior colleges had PhDs teaching the courses. The PhD is a research degree, and once upon a time wasn't necessary to teach undergraduates, especially lower level undergraduates. But colleges wanted PhDs to seem more important and compete with others."

Artist Shannon Rankin does amazing things with maps. Treating them as mere pieces of decorated paper to be manipulated—clipping out spirals, folding crevassed roses of ridges and faultlines, pinning up confetti-like clouds of circles and zigzags—she creates "new geographies, suggesting the potential for a broader landscape."

Advice on getting shy students to talk, getting inattentive students to pay attention, and getting troublemakers to invest in the class. I wish I'd known all of this when I was teaching full-time.

"The metaphor of flipping pages already feels boring and forced on the iPhone. I suspect it will feel even more so on the iPad. The flow of content no longer has to be chunked into ‘page’ sized bites. One simplistic reimagining of book layout would be to place chapters on the horizontal plane with content on a fluid vertical plane."

"There was a Slow Food feel to British university life, based on a consensus that people should take the time to make an article or a book as dense and rich as it could be. Good American universities were never exactly Fast Food Nation, but we certainly felt the pressure to produce, regularly and rapidly. By contrast, Michael Baxandall spent three years at the Warburg Institute, working in the photographic collection and not completing a dissertation, and several more as a lecturer, later on, writing only a few articles. Then, in 1971 and 1972, he produced two brilliant interdisciplinary books, which transformed the study of Renaissance humanism and art, remain standard works to this day, and were only the beginning of a great career. Gertrud Bing, E.H. Gombrich, J.B. Trapp, and A.M. Meyer, who administered the Warburg in those days, knew how to be patient. Their results speak for themselves."

I love the iteration of the onion-dome shape in these buildings.

"People wonder why women don’t “fight back,” but they don’t wonder about it when women back down in arguments, are interrupted, purposefully lower and modulate their voices to express less emotion, make obvious signals that they are uninterested in conversation or being in closer physical proximity and are ignored. They don’t wonder about all those daily social interactions in which women are quieter, ignored, or invisible, because those social interactions seem normal. They seem normal to women, and they seem normal to men, because we were all raised in the same cultural pond, drinking the same Kool-Aid."

"So many scholars read anxiously, with a hope not to learn, not to be discomposed by learning. They fish in indexes looking for confirmation of not being trumped, they skim the surface hoping that no phrase catches them. The aversion to an event to which one nonetheless comes–like the vague sadism that Adam Phillips describes as a quality of intellectuals who come to the world hoping once again to be disappointed–is a frustrating part of being in this world. I am not invulnerable to this, but when I feel it I force myself to interrupt the desire to not have an encounter that is so often part of encountering’s activity."

"Though his lecture focused on reading, writing, and the history of blank space, Stallybrass also invited us to think about the
materiality of a book, the various processes of mediation at play between author and reader, as a way to help us recognize the immense collaboration that goes into assembling any book.

If we apply this template to our own work, we'll discover that all of us are already collaborative, even if we don't recognize it. The
online databases and editors we use directly impact our work, and our students and colleagues influence us in other indirect ways. The fallacy, Stallybrass contends, is to believe that we do isolated scholarship in the first place. Isolated scholarship is an
impossibility that we can't, and shouldn't want to, achieve. Maybe recognizing all the collaborative work that goes into our scholarship already is the first step toward making collaborative research count in the humanities."

The Wayback Machine's archive of the Invisible Adjunct's invaluable, and sorely missed, blog.

"The Open Scholar, as I'm defining this person, is not simply someone who agrees to allow free access and reuse of his or her traditional scholarly articles and books; no, the Open Scholar is someone who makes their intellectual projects and processes digitally visible and who invites and encourages ongoing criticism of their work and secondary uses of any or all parts of it--at any stage of its development. ... The Open Scholar is also open in the sense that he or she is reachable and responsive--open to input from those outside of the project, the institution, or even academia. He or she is not impatient with amateurs. And I think this sort of openness does require some facility with the new tools of social media--a blog, a wiki, etc. Why not microblog one's progress via Twitter? I'd love to hear about those attempting to do this and whether they have seen a benefit from exposing and narrating their scholarly projects or research."

Excellent advice all round. I especially like the way research skills get folded into the assignment sequence.

"You want to say Hi to the cute girl on the subway. How will she react? Fortunately, I can tell you with some certainty, because she’s already sending messages to you. Looking out the window, reading a book, working on a computer, arms folded across chest, body away from you = do not disturb. So, y’know, don’t disturb her. Really. Even to say that you like her hair, shoes, or book. A compliment is not always a reason for women to smile and say thank you. You are a threat, remember? You are Schrödinger’s Rapist. Don’t assume that whatever you have to say will win her over with charm or flattery. Believe what she’s signaling, and back off.

If you speak, and she responds in a monosyllabic way without looking at you, she’s saying, 'I don’t want to be rude, but please leave me alone.' You don’t know why. It could be 'Please leave me alone because I am trying to memorize Beowulf.' It could be 'Please leave me alone because you are a scary, scary man with breath like a water buffalo.'”

I have often thought that Library of Congress Subject Headings for fiction were kind of funny in they way they can reduce a complex work of art into a few words. And the “– Fiction” part just seems funny to me, as in “Middle-aged men — Fiction.”

So here is a a little quiz: nine classic (or at least well-known) works of world literature, as described in library catalogs’ subject headings and genre terms.

Mapping Main Street is a collaborative documentary media project that creates a new map of the country through stories, photos and videos recorded on actual Main Streets. We invite you to capture the stories and images of the country today. Use our Main Street map to find streets named Main close to your home or along the paths of your own travels. Go out, look around, talk to people, and contribute to this re-mapping of the United States.

Over the next two months, we’ll be traveling across the country with one criterion — to visit as many Main Streets as possible. In the process, we’re taking photos, shooting videos, and interviewing people.

"The phrase 'a working library' is usually taken to mean a collection of texts on a given subject, for the purpose of an academic or professional work. So, people speak of a working library on Proust, for example, or on psychotherapy. This working library differs in two key regards: there is no defined subject, and the purpose is so far opaque. This is intentional.
Of the many ideas at play here, the most significant is my belief that every book is connected to many other books, such that no book can or should be considered in isolation. When you read a book, you bring to it all the other books you’ve read (and been affected by), so your reading of it is necessarily unique. Furthermore, the act of reading predates the form of the book—and will most likely outlive it; as such, this site aims to explore the ways we read, and how they are changing." [Beautifully-designed book blog by a creative director at W.W. Norton.]

Sourdough pain au levain, Chocolate & Zucchini-style. (As good an excuse as any to invest in a Le Creuset cast-iron pot.)

Dan Cohen's step-by-step tutorial on generating a map with batchgeocode.com.

Vika's summary of Libraries and Web 2.0 session.

"Citing the novels of Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and John Buchan, and referencing early Alfred Hitchcock films, Rotella demonstrates how it might be possible to foreground certain architectural forms – the train shed, or, perhaps, the multistory car park, the highway flyover, or the maximum security prison – in the process of writing cultural histories.
A short history of novels partially set inside planetariums. A spatial history of films set in shopping malls... with an introduction by Zach Snyder.
In this case, of course, it'd be a political microhistory of the European train station – and someone could very easily get a PhD out of such a scenario: The Train Shed as Depicted in Film, Games, and Literature: An Architecture of Encounter."

"...should you want to describe a man's walk around the city in as detailed and realistic a way as possible, capturing every minor event and instant, then you would have to include the circumstances of that walk in their often bewildering totality: every fragmentary thought process, directionless flight of fancy, and irrelevant detail noticed along the way, via a million and one dead-ends. ... That daydream you had early today? That was, Ulysses suggests, part of the infrastructure of the city you live in. The city here becomes a kind of experiential labyrinth ... how do you map the city down to its every last conceivable detail? And what if cartography is not the most appropriate tool to use? What if narrative – endlessly diverting narrative, latching onto distractions in every passing window and side-street, with no possible conversation or observation omitted – is the best way to diagram the urban world?"

"I am so very, very weary of people who pretend that the field of literature consists of a reading list—one reading list. For every writer added, another is dropped? Ah, no. That’s what the National Association of Surlycurmudgeons will try to tell you, because that’s their job: they don’t punch out and go home until they’ve written or said something to the effect of “Toni Morrison is displacing Shakespeare because of affirmative action racegenderclass OH NOES”...Quiet as it’s kept, the college literature curriculum does not consist of one course on the West’s Greatest Hits; you can read Achebe in one course and Yeats in another...But since these exasperating “debates” have started from the assumption that there is room for only one literature course in your average undergraduate’s college curriculum, the Surly Curmudgeons have been allowed to pretend that every citation of a previously neglected or underappreciated writer somehow diminishes Shakespeare."

"Again, I fail to see any clear distinction between someone's boring Twitter feed – considered only semi-literate and very much bad – and someone else's equally boring, paper-based diary – considered both pro-humanist and unquestionably good. Kafka would have had a Twitter feed! And so would have Hemingway, and so would have Virgil, and so would have Sappho. It's a tool for writing. Heraclitus would have had a f***ing Twitter feed. Finally, and perhaps most importantly of all, now that the other half writes – all the jocks and high-school girls and video store employees and D-list celebrities – it seems comparable only to a kind of police action that the people who once thought they were the chosen writers, that they were this generation's idea-smiths, are now so up in arms. Those other people – those everyday people who weren't supposed to have thoughts... – weren't supposed to become writers." [RIGHT ON.]

"We’re used to the future turning out differently than we expected; it happens all the time. When the past turns out differently, though, it can get really upsetting, and because people don’t like that kind of upset, we’re at risk of finding new reasons to believe false things, rather than revising our sense of what actually happened."

"I’d like to explain what piqued my own interest in the #amazonfail story, and what may account for some of speed with which people became angry at Amazon. For #amazonfail rehearses another, older story, and provides a contemporary instance (dressed up in metadata and twitteractivism) of a more basic lesson about judgements of obscenity." "Obscenity law, Williams suggests, has shifted. Where formerly judgements of obscenity were essentially judgements of sexual explicitness, increasingly they are judgements about what is normal, and what is deviant (judgements, we might suggest, of what should bubble to the top of search results, and what is part of the long tail)."

"I will leave nothing to chance. I will say it plain. I am a minor poet.

As a minor poet, I need not be concerned about developing a school in which to swim, let alone one to lead. What poetry by others than myself I promote, if I choose to promote any, I must promote out of sheer subjective love and awe. To do so with even the corner of an eye towards my place in literary history would be to risk an irritable grasping after greatness and majority. A minor poet must avoid at all cost framing herself as an inciting force in literary movements."

"The genetically modified poem produces its own growth hormones, easily outstripping its unmodified competitors. It’s the ration of choice at the poetry feedlots of Iowa, where so many manuscripts are fattened up for publishing.

The genetically modified poem has much higher nutritional value. Its every syllable is packed with nuance, assonance, and B vitamins. You hardly need to read anything else. ...

The genetically modified poem has been stripped of idioms and idiosyncracies to maximize its shelf-life, which more than makes up for its inability to reproduce. Light-weight and modular, smelling ever so faintly of an autumn sunrise, it will outlast us all."