Robin Sloan:

This is a short but heartfelt manifesto about the difference between liking something on the internet and loving something on the internet.

(I tried to write this list like a haiku—one swift stroke, top to bot tom, no revi sion. I’m sure that, upon reflec tion, there will be other books I want to include here. But aren’t the truly impor tant books the ones that don’t require reflec tion to sum mon up?—the ones that are sim ply… there?)

A short story about recession, attraction and data visualisation.

This is what @robinsloan uses to snag tweets for blog posts.

Back story: Bonobos is an innovative, independent internet haberdashery. Dave Eisen berg once worked there, and he men tioned on Twit ter that he’d enjoyed Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-​​Four-​​Hour Book Store. I’m a Bono bos fan and cus tomer, so I wrote back and said, well hey, how about a short story? We decided on a sim ple pants-​​for-​​prose arrange ment: Bono bos sent me a pair of their khakis; I wore those pants, and con tem plated their very essence, while com pos ing the wee slip of a story you’ll find below.

“Can we not devise a system of liberal education which shall find its foundations in the best things of the here and now? Literature and art are all about us; science and faith offer their daily contributions; history is in the making to-day; industry pours forth its wares; and children, no less than adults, are sharing in the dynamic activities of contemporary social life . Not in the things of the past, but in those of the present, should liberal education find its beginnings as well as its results.”

— David Snedden, “What Of Liberal Education?” The Atlantic Monthly, 1912

@rogre I can't overstate just how fantastic this post is: http://bit.ly/9r0tQa I've been reading each link over last few days. Thank you.

The web makes it rather hard not to have opinions. The constant rush of new information, media and art means that the way we situate ourselves in life – which is to say, the way we position ourselves in relation to the culture around us – is constantly undergoing change, in part because it is constantly under attack.

On his blog, Robin Sloan describes himself as a "writer and media inventer." I'm not entirely sure what a "media inventor" is, but I assume it has something to do with how he manages to break just about every rule of publishing I can think of and make it work.