Ants of New York | The New Yorker's Elements
The American Museum of Natural History holds 16 million insects, but until earlier this year it lacked a single ant from the sidewalks and street medians of Manhattan. [link]
Glenn Greenwald's Encryption Guru | Politico Magazine
During the last year—and, though less forcefully, over the past decade-plus since U.S. national security has been reconfigured—Bruce Schneier has been an unrelenting rationalist in what can look like an increasingly irrational world. [link]
Literature is an Operation We Perform on Reality: On Fredric Jameson | Jacobin
Jameson turns to history to demonstrate not only that different worlds are possible, but that they have already existed, and to keep alive the potential for them to exist again. [link]
The Drone Shadow Catcher | The New Yorker's Elements
James Bridle's art generally deals with the ways in which the digital, networked world reaches into the physical, offline one. At thirty-three, he’s part of what might be the last generation that makes those distinctions. [link]
Brands of the Post-Crash Economy: Bitly | New York Magazine
What Libya and Twitter have in common [link]
Inside the Riot Grrrl Archives | The Awl
The aesthetic they helped create suggests a latent influence on the style of contemporary blogging, as well as on novelists like Sheila Heti. Kathleen Hanna recognizes this, but describes her time making zines as more directly a way to share a personal, unsteady period of adolescence and find a way to her politics. [link]
Inside Manhattan's Tower of Internet | The Awl
"So if you're running electronic medical records or corporate webmail, and you're in a message box and you hit A, and it has to go to Oregon and back, twice, before the A shows up, you notice it." [link]
Digital Silence | The Paris Review's Daily
The creators of The Silent History approach digital media not as engineers or even particularly enamored with technology—Moffett, for example, has called himself a “total ignoramus” about the code that makes their new novel work. Instead, they made The Silent History as a way to think about what kind of object a digital book could be. [link]
Writing with Antonin Scalia, Grammar Nerd | The New Yorker's News Desk
The first time Bryan A. Garner, a lawyer and writer, met Antonin Scalia—over breakfast at the Washington, D.C., Four Seasons, in 2006—the Justice spent the early part of their conversation praising a magazine essay he had recently read on English grammar and usage. Garner, who has now written two books with Scalia, felt that it would be bad form to interrupt, but when the Justice had trouble remembering the essay's author, he suggested a name. [link]
Hiding in Plain Sight | The Paris Review's Daily
Why do so many American soldiers look, as one Brooklynite at the office of Cabinet magazine put it on a recent Friday, like they are trying to blend in to computer screens? The question was directed at Hanna Rose Shell, a historian, filmmaker, and professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, who had come to New York to talk about Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance. [link]
Economic Decline | A research essay from Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives
In various rural exchanges, a single chicken could equal the value of: a pair of track shoes, a bar of soap, two bars of soap, five kilograms of maize, six kilograms of maize, ten kilograms of maize, two kilograms of maize seed, five kilograms of maize seed, a call on a mobile phone, or a visit to a clinic. [pdf]
The American Museum of Natural History holds 16 million insects, but until earlier this year it lacked a single ant from the sidewalks and street medians of Manhattan. [link]
Glenn Greenwald's Encryption Guru | Politico Magazine
During the last year—and, though less forcefully, over the past decade-plus since U.S. national security has been reconfigured—Bruce Schneier has been an unrelenting rationalist in what can look like an increasingly irrational world. [link]
Literature is an Operation We Perform on Reality: On Fredric Jameson | Jacobin
Jameson turns to history to demonstrate not only that different worlds are possible, but that they have already existed, and to keep alive the potential for them to exist again. [link]
The Drone Shadow Catcher | The New Yorker's Elements
James Bridle's art generally deals with the ways in which the digital, networked world reaches into the physical, offline one. At thirty-three, he’s part of what might be the last generation that makes those distinctions. [link]
Brands of the Post-Crash Economy: Bitly | New York Magazine
What Libya and Twitter have in common [link]
Inside the Riot Grrrl Archives | The Awl
The aesthetic they helped create suggests a latent influence on the style of contemporary blogging, as well as on novelists like Sheila Heti. Kathleen Hanna recognizes this, but describes her time making zines as more directly a way to share a personal, unsteady period of adolescence and find a way to her politics. [link]
Inside Manhattan's Tower of Internet | The Awl
"So if you're running electronic medical records or corporate webmail, and you're in a message box and you hit A, and it has to go to Oregon and back, twice, before the A shows up, you notice it." [link]
Digital Silence | The Paris Review's Daily
The creators of The Silent History approach digital media not as engineers or even particularly enamored with technology—Moffett, for example, has called himself a “total ignoramus” about the code that makes their new novel work. Instead, they made The Silent History as a way to think about what kind of object a digital book could be. [link]
Writing with Antonin Scalia, Grammar Nerd | The New Yorker's News Desk
The first time Bryan A. Garner, a lawyer and writer, met Antonin Scalia—over breakfast at the Washington, D.C., Four Seasons, in 2006—the Justice spent the early part of their conversation praising a magazine essay he had recently read on English grammar and usage. Garner, who has now written two books with Scalia, felt that it would be bad form to interrupt, but when the Justice had trouble remembering the essay's author, he suggested a name. [link]
Hiding in Plain Sight | The Paris Review's Daily
Why do so many American soldiers look, as one Brooklynite at the office of Cabinet magazine put it on a recent Friday, like they are trying to blend in to computer screens? The question was directed at Hanna Rose Shell, a historian, filmmaker, and professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, who had come to New York to talk about Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance. [link]
Economic Decline | A research essay from Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives
In various rural exchanges, a single chicken could equal the value of: a pair of track shoes, a bar of soap, two bars of soap, five kilograms of maize, six kilograms of maize, ten kilograms of maize, two kilograms of maize seed, five kilograms of maize seed, a call on a mobile phone, or a visit to a clinic. [pdf]
