"When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom."

"Just as fast fashion seeks to pressure shoppers with the urgency of now or never, social media hope to convince us that we always have something new and important to say -- as long as we say it right away. And they are designed to make us feel anxious and left out if we don’t say it, as their interfaces favor the users who update frequently and tend to make less engaged users disappear."

"VIDA's study raises questions about how seriously women writers are taken and how viable it is for them to make a living at writing. As we all know, small rewards and affirmations have a concrete but unquantifiable effect on one's writing life. So does silence."

"In making an allusion, a writer (or a filmmaker, or a painter, or a composer) is not trying to "outwit" the reader (or viewer, or listener), as Kirsch suggests. Art is not a parlor game. Nor is the artist trying to create a secret elitist code that will alienate readers or viewers. An allusion, when well made, is a profound act of generosity through which an artist shares with the audience a deep emotional attachment with an earlier work or influence. If you see an allusion merely as something to be tracked down, to be googled, you miss its point and its power. You murder to dissect."

Haruki Murakami: "To put it in different terms, we are living a world that has an even lower level of reality than the unreal world. What can we possibly call this if not 'chaos'? What kind of meaning can fiction have in an age like this? What kind of purpose can it serve? In an age when reality is insufficiently real, how much reality can a fictional story possess?"

"I have the sensation, as do my friends, that to function as a proficient human, you must both 'keep up' with the internet and pursue more serious, analog interests. I blog about real life; I talk about the internet. It’s so exhausting to exist on both registers, especially while holding down a job."

"When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned."

"But it was clear, even then, that this woman was scared of her, and scared for her daughter. You could see the potential for Betty to heal, in those few scenes. But that wasn’t the message of the scenes themselves. The message was that her chance was gone; she wasn’t a child any more, and she had to be judged by adult standards. She still needs love, so badly, but she just doesn’t deserve it any more, and giving it to her is just too risky. Help came too late. And how many stories is that, really?"

"Today he is nearing fifty. This mug shot is thirty years old. God knows what suddenly motivates me to write about it. This blog, I suppose, gives me a way to share it, and surely, if you come into possession of a never-before-seen Axl Rose mug shot, you should share it. Don’t hide that lamp under a bushel. There are fans who might enjoy it. There is rock ‘n’ roll history to think about."

"For me it tends to be more a matter of finding the links between things. I need to fill out my knowledge of Prague, 1949, or the Elizabethan prose writers, or the cross-migration between New York newspapers and Hollywood in the '20s and '30s. I buy every book I see about Gypsies, and most firsthand accounts of vaudeville, and almost everything by lesser-known New Yorker writers of the old regime. I'm always on the lookout for memoirs -- frequently by the less-than-famous -- that supply concrete details of daily life, rather than simply lists of names or dates of parties or, heaven forfend, litanies of traumas. I like books published before 1940 that are illustrated with photographs; even if those are frequently small and murky, they are rare windows into the past. Books help me construct whole worlds in my mind, and I require an army of books to complete the picture, not that it's ever truly complete."

"The key difference between the films that Mulvey dissects in her essay and the personal blogs I’m talking about is agency. The films were made by men -- men called the shots (literally) and wrote the stories that cast women in the passive roles. Obviously a personal blogger decides what to post on her blog. But while this difference is worth noting, it doesn’t seem to matter much in terms of the audience’s reaction. In fact, the blogger’s agency frequently becomes a weapon for the blogger’s critics."

"Over the course of his career, Mann has produced a taut, stylistic and often brutally impersonal filmography that seems most interested in the concept of work. His movies are preoccupied with how men (almost always men) of extraordinary skills practice their craft -- and the price they must pay for doing so."

"What I think, fundamentally, is that you can’t do anything about major societal changes. It may be regrettable that the family unit is disappearing. You could argue that it increases human suffering. But regrettable or not, there’s nothing we can do. That’s the difference between me and a reactionary. I don’t have any interest in turning back the clock because I don’t believe it can be done. You can only observe and describe. I’ve always liked Balzac’s very insulting statement that the only purpose of the novel is to show the disasters produced by the changing of values. He’s exaggerating in an amusing way. But that’s what I do: I show the disasters produced by the liberalization of values."

"The truth of the matter is, despite a racing industry that constantly cries about a lack of mainstream attention, there's an awful lot of horse racing everywhere you look." Secretariat, Luck two big opportunities for the industry.

"There is, I think, and we might call it not the problem with no name but the problem we can't define: the problem of unconscious gender bias and how it affects the ways we think about accomplishment and authority."

"I don't know what 'chick lit' is anymore, except books that are understood to be aimed at women, written by women, and not important. And I can't get behind that."

From N+1FR, issue one, on I Am Love. "The film is too much in love with beauty to be anything but pretty, and by the end it’s corrupted by the system it indicts."

Intimacy and death in the age of social media. (Also, gorgeous writing by Bolick. "It was a brave little house with a big, tumbledown barn and fields that sloped into forests beyond. The days were bright with snow, the nights forbiddingly dark.")

"The stream destroys what is most precious about a literate population: the ability to briefly stand alone outside time and social relations, to have an inner life."

"Which is to say: If my perspective and voice are the strengths of this site, they are also its limitations."

"Progress may, for a time, intersect with one's own personal ideology, and during that period one will become a gung-ho technological progressivist."

"... there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future." (The Vision 20/20 group should invite Clay Shirky to speak.)

Danah Boyd's SXSW keynote. Contextual integrity, control essential to users. "Just because something is publicly accessible does not mean that people want it to be publicized."

"A little grave reflection shows us that our first duty is to establish a new and abusive school of criticism. There is now no criticism in England. There is merely a chorus of weak cheers, a piping note of appreciation that is not stilled unless a book is suppressed by the police, a mild kindliness that neither heats to enthusiasm nor reverses to anger. We reviewers combine the gentleness of early Christians with a promiscuous polytheism; we reject not even the most barbarous or most fatuous gods. So great is our amiability that it might proceed from the weakness of malnutrition, were it not that it is almost impossible not to make a living as a journalist."

"I found myself drawn, this decade, in the gaps between blog reading, to a very particular kind of novel. Not to sound all techno-deterministic here, because the loops of influence are obviously complex, but many of my favorite aughts novels are those that mimic (or thematize, or rejigger, or one-up) the experience of reading online."

Also: http://thoughtcatalog.com

First installment of "The Realtime Chronicles."

As it relates to Trilling.

"But if jabbering semiotic promiscuity entails some familiar costs of social or sexual promiscuity -- shallow and ephemeral relationships supplant deeper and more lasting ones -- there can be no honest account of online and digitally interconnected life that denies the attractions of novelty, variety, excitement."

Intersection of real and virtual, private and public.

See Johnson WSJ article. Related.

"There is great promise and opportunity in the digital-books revolution. The question is: Will we recognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course?" I both fear Johnson's conclusions and suspect he is right.

"We know all that, but we’re no longer willing to cut Amazon any slack, because we don’t trust them, and we don’t trust them because we feel like they did something bad, even though we now know, intellectually, that they didn’t actually do the bad thing we’ve come to hate them for." Or, as Andy Baio said, "Outrage has its own momentum." Or, Merlin Mann, "Problem with mob justice is the ones who're more interested in the mob than the justice." Interesting parallels to Mullins incident and reaction.

Secret police photo critique: "It seems apparent that color was intentionally omitted, because only black and white reproduction stresses the supposedly gray, bleak and dismal reality of East Berlin."

A TED talk not just about newspapers, but about the power of design to shape experience and drive customer behavior in any industry. "Design can change not just your product ... it can change your company." [Shades of this belief in Stronach's redesign of Gulfstream Park? I'd like to visit the track to find out.]

"Richard Dawkins observed in The Selfish Gene that from the point of view of a gene, a living body is merely a carrier to transport it into the future. I believe we are now entering the century of the Selfish Mind." More on Twitter and being a Twit, from Roger Ebert.

"But I will never use social technologies quite as the young use them, because I do not thrill to continuous attention and I value my privacy. Thus, the Jason Pontin who occupies the social space is a constructed persona, designed to be unchallengingly personable, humorous, and thoughtful. I am none of those things very often. The preoccupations of that Jason Pontin are professional: he thinks about emerging technologies all the time. And I never broadcast the substance of my inner life, because I know it would become insubstantial the moment I did." Speaks to some of my own unease and wariness about *being* online.

Jean Baudrillard explains our time.

Another source of worry for publishers online: "Now that the Semantic Web is no longer just a research project, if someone owns the taxonomy you're using and changes it up on you, what rights do you have in the matter?"

D.T. Max's exhaustive early review of DFW's life and work.

Slate launches a new pop-policy magazine for women.

"In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues." Zadie Smith on plural selves, plural voices.

"Do whatever's best for your users. You can hold onto this like a rope in a hurricane, and it will save you if anything can. Follow it and it will take you through everything you need to do."

"Long-form journalism is, ironically, one of the easiest things to sell display ads against. So, if you can change the cost structure enough, you can actually imagine building whole businesses around that."

"I mean, really, I’m just so impatient with the argument that the world should be slowed down to help people who aren’t smart enough to understand what’s going on."

A collection of articles.

"Businesses don't survive in the long term because old people persist in old behaviors; they survive because young people renew old behaviors, and all the behaviors young people are renewing cluster around reading, while they are adopting almost none of the behaviors tied to cherishing physical containers, whether for the written word or anything else."

"The CelebCult virus is eating our culture alive, and newspapers voluntarily expose themselves to it."

Tag: Great art, $20. Really.

'However, we should be clear: this is not blogging; a blog brooks no development. That is, if development is the cultivation of a project moving toward a positive fulfillment." I've long pondered thought that blogging is about repetition, has no arc. As a medium, still has possibilities, as a form, in a rut.

"David Foster Wallace's death looks, from where I'm sitting, like a failure of communication. But his life, and his work, are an affirmation of it."

A fair appraisal of DFW and his work from Kakutani

"There’s nothing wrong with fucking shit up every single day. But you have to bring some art to it. Not just typing."

Lectures in Dumbo, hosted by Melville House

The death of postmodernism and beyond.

Andrew Sullivan agrees with Nick Carr on how the web is changing our thinking.

Nick Carr says yes, the web is making us stupid by rewiring our brains.

“To the extent that the establishment depends on the inarticulacy of the governed,” Morse wrote in 1972, “good writing is inherently subversive.”

"Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus."

Lost works restored to print

Gary Vaynerchuk thinks Calcanis is LL Cool J or something -- seriously, though, I hope some execs watch this.

"There’s a pretty simple way to place a losing bet in the technology game. Try to build an alternative to the web, or try and pretend it’s not there."

Invented, borrowed, and stolen ideas (new lit journal)

True, personal stories and original art

"Here Comes Everybody"