Daniel Rourke /stream

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Video games have come a very long way since the 1980s... As Tom Bissell, a journalist, former Salon writer and lifelong gamer, explains in his new book, "Extra Lives: Why Video…

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In the beginning was the Word. Then came Gutenberg, and it was good. But then came a giddy army of Japanese school girls, writing and “publishing" novels on cell phones. And…

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“THE point of books is to combat loneliness,” David Foster Wallace observes near the beginning of “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” David Lipsky’s recently published, book-length interview with…

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Guy Deutscher is that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics, his chosen field. In his new book, Through the Language Glass (Heinemann), he fearlessly contradicts the fashionable…

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How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends,…

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In Don DeLillo's latest novel, the weirdly exciting "Point Omega," a character is "trying to read science fiction but nothing she'd read so far could begin to match ordinary life on…

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The world’s smallest horse was born in late April on a farm in New Hampshire. Weighing in at 6 pounds at birth, Einstein appears to have beaten the previous record holder…

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The Exegesis, much anticipated by fans of the writer, will come out in autumn 2011, publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt revealed. Dick, who died in 1982 at the age of 53, had…

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Zombies are “characters” in the sense recently revived by the critic Aaron Kunin—they are a type whose existence extends beyond any one work or even medium. This is why we can…

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The posthuman worldview goes a step beyond demoting human begins in the hierarchy of value. It promotes other species, proposing that animals are more rational than we knew. We are forced…

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Animal Farm, as its author later wrote, "was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into…

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Traditionally, publishers have sold books to stores, with the wholesale price for hardcovers set at fifty per cent of the cover price. Authors are paid royalties at a rate of about…

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Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens confront the faithful head-on, but there may be another way to dispel religious beliefs. I am not so sure about this. In my experience,…

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A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History is one the most intelligent, stimulating, and rewarding books I have read in a long time - it even surpasses De Landa's previous War in…

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Buried in the middle of Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, a book digressive in exactly the right way, is an astonishing argument about writing. Lévi-Strauss considers what the invention of writing might…

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When Robinson Crusoe was stranded on a tropical island he did pretty well for himself, all things considered. But to the rest of the world he was as good as dead.…

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What prevents Bohlen-Pierce from becoming unpleasant, dissonant noise is the fact that is not merely an avant-garde musician taking a hacksaw to our current musical system for sheer destructive glee. In…

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Every age has its potential regulator, its threat to liberty. Our founders feared a newly empowered federal government; the Constitution is written against that fear. John Stuart Mill worried about the…

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Video games have come a very long way since the 1980s... As Tom Bissell, a journalist, former Salon writer and lifelong gamer, explains in his new book, "Extra Lives: Why Video…

Bookmark

In the beginning was the Word. Then came Gutenberg, and it was good. But then came a giddy army of Japanese school girls, writing and “publishing" novels on cell phones. And…

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In 2006 Stacy Snyder, a 25-year-old student at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, was denied a teaching degree just days before graduation. University officials had discovered a photo of her, captioned “Drunken…

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One of my favorite websites is the semi-obscure digital library known as AAAARG (don’t even try googling. You just get pirate-themed sites). The site is a sundry collection of critical documents…

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In Don DeLillo's latest novel, the weirdly exciting "Point Omega," a character is "trying to read science fiction but nothing she'd read so far could begin to match ordinary life on…

Bookmark

The world’s smallest horse was born in late April on a farm in New Hampshire. Weighing in at 6 pounds at birth, Einstein appears to have beaten the previous record holder…

Bookmark

The Exegesis, much anticipated by fans of the writer, will come out in autumn 2011, publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt revealed. Dick, who died in 1982 at the age of 53, had…

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The Sorted Books project began in 1993 years ago and is ongoing. The project has taken place in many different places over the years, ranging form private homes to specialized public…

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The posthuman worldview goes a step beyond demoting human begins in the hierarchy of value. It promotes other species, proposing that animals are more rational than we knew. We are forced…

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Otlet was the first to imagine all the world’s knowledge as one vast “web,” connected by “links” and accessed remotely through desktop screens, and because of this he can be seen…

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Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens confront the faithful head-on, but there may be another way to dispel religious beliefs. I am not so sure about this. In my experience,…

Bookmark

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History is one the most intelligent, stimulating, and rewarding books I have read in a long time - it even surpasses De Landa's previous War in…

Bookmark

Buried in the middle of Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, a book digressive in exactly the right way, is an astonishing argument about writing. Lévi-Strauss considers what the invention of writing might…

Bookmark

In God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens writes of Buddhism as the sleep of reason, and of Buddhists as discarding their minds as well as their sandals. His passionate diatribe appeared…

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What prevents Bohlen-Pierce from becoming unpleasant, dissonant noise is the fact that is not merely an avant-garde musician taking a hacksaw to our current musical system for sheer destructive glee. In…