Longreads

 As I've said, a journalist wrote to me back in November asking if I'd reread any books that mattered to me and asking various questions about the importance of rereading to writers.  I…

DAVID SHIELDSTwo pieces, one a discussion of a novel published today by BEN LERNER and the other a review of a memoir by FRED MOODY still in manuscript (yes, thats…

Most people have already forgotten how dark and unsignposted the Internet once was. A user in 1996, when the Web comprised hundreds of thousands of “sites” with millions of “pages,” did not expect to be able to search for “Olympics” and automatically find the official site of the Atlanta games. That was too hard a problem. And what was a search supposed to produce for a word like “university”? AltaVista, then the leading search engine, offered up a seemingly unordered list of academic institutions, topped by the Oregon Center for Optics.

Print Email

It's high time people stopped kvetching about Wikipedia, which has long been the best encyclopedia available in English, and started figuring out what it portends instead. For one thing, Wikipedia is forcing us to confront the paradox inherent in the idea of learners as "doers, not recipients." If learners are indeed doers and not recipients, from whom are they learning? From one another, it appears; same as it ever was.

1.The blues, a form of music that seems as ancient as the emotions it conveys, is actually less than a hundred years old. Sometime in the mists of the late 1890s, somewhere in the South,…

Luc Sante has an eye for the forgotten, the weird, the lost, and the disappearing. The tenements where he lived on the Lower East Side in the seventies inspired him to see not just decay, but New York’s mummified past. With Low Life and other writings about the city, Sante became known as a sharp documenter of the unseen side of New York as the city raced toward development and gentrification in the eighties and nineties.