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Category Archives: Books
This is one of my favorite times, the liminal space between one year and the next. For most people, this time for intense thinking and planmaking runs from Christmas through New Year’s, but at MIT this period is extended through the beginning of February. (Yet another reason I love it so much here at MIT.) […]
A few months ago, I had the honor of organizing and moderating a keynote panel for the sixth Media in Transition conference here at MIT. Our title (and topic) was “The Future of Publishing”, and MIT World has just published the video recording of it online. I’ve embedded a copy of it here (all 94 […]
This weekend is Readercon, one of my favorite conferences in the world and, although this is only my second, one I’ve all but sworn never to miss. I love the people, the panels, the bookshop (especially the bookshop) and the level of conversation that happens here, wide-ranging debates that cover everything that has to do […]
Andy Pessin, my mentor as an undergrad philosophy student back at Kenyon (English/Philosophy double major, with concentrations in creative writing and what was essentially multimedia design) has two new books out! The first, The 60-Second Philosopher: Expand Your Mind on a Minute or So a Day, is basically a collection of short thought exercises designed […]
On April 4, 2009, the New York Times ran a piece by Brad Stone called “Is This the Future of the Digital Book?“. In it, Stone writes: Bradley Inman wants to create great fiction, dramatic online video and compelling Twitter stream — and then roll them all into a multimedia hybrid that is tailored to […]
I’m still hugely pleased that Neil Gaiman has won the Newbery Medal for The Graveyard Book, which I would confidently call the best thing he’s written since American Gods. (For those of you who don’t get the title of this post, ‘Nobody’ is the name of the Mowgli-esque protagonist, so… Oh, never mind.) I’m also […]
(Note: I should preface this bit of writing with a warning: what follows is a first attempt to set down some things I’ve been struggling to articulate for the past couple of years. As such, it may be slightly less than ideally coherent, but hopefully out of it some clarity will emerge.) What is literature? […]
By geoffreylong
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Also posted in Academia, Art, Comics, Media, MIT, Movies, Music, Poetry, Publishing, Video Games, Writing
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Attempting to ease into my rededication to reading the classics, I decided to start out with a slim volume that I vaguely remember reading before, when I was in high school or perhaps junior high: Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 Winesburg, Ohio. As I read through it, I was struck by the truth of the old adage […]
The New York Times’ Freakonomics blog is weighing in on the “public library renaissance”: …If nobody seems to be out buying books, movies, and music, what are they doing with their leisure time instead? Apparently: going to the library. The Boston Globe reports that public libraries around the country are posting double-digit percentage increases in […]
I love this new post over at HarperCollins’ HarperStudio blog: Would Charles Baudelaire hate the Kindle? As they quote the man himself: “As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, […]
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