If you’ve ever spoken to someone and later felt that you would have better spent your time talking to a brick wall, you’ll surely identify with the observations of Rebecca West. “There is no such thing as conversation,” the novelist and literary critic wrote in her collection of stories, The …
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Within the frame of a single image lives a lifetime of experience, emotion, and affect. Photographs trap drama and performance. TikTok videos delight us with humor and consequence. For Legacy Russell, author of the new book Black Meme: A History of the Images That Make Us, virality may be the …
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On a recent Friday afternoon, I found myself interviewing the Internet’s Boyfriend. His name is Keanu Reeves. I introduce him this way because it may be the only time the actor has been treated as a side character in a story. Reeves’ kindness given that arrangement surprised me—boyfriend material indeed—as …
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In Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History, media entrepreneur and journalist Nellie Bowles fashions herself as a dissident chafing against orthodoxies in pursuit of truth. Despite her efforts, this posturing achieves a different effect: Bowles has produced a book hewing so wholly to her own …
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I blame my right hand’s cyst on my intense Animal Crossing addiction from spring 2020. Too many days were spent lying around with my Nintendo Switch Lite without considering the unfortunate wrist angle I favored at the time, much like my disregard for how loud my headphones were in my …
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On the evening of March 24, 2024, writer K. Renee was doing what she often does: curling up on the couch and watching hockey with her husband. It was the Dallas Stars versus the Arizona Coyotes. Renee has followed the Stars her whole life. She was born the season they …
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Last October, I received an email with a hell of an opening line: “I fired a nuke at the US Copyright Office this morning.” The message was from Elisa Shupe, a 60-year-old retired US Army veteran who had just filed a copyright registration for a novel she’d recently self-published. She’d …
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Aruba has long been a special place for Stacy Argondizzo. For years, her family has vacationed on the tiny Caribbean Island every July. More recently it’s been more than just a place to take a break from her work as a digital archivist—becoming wholly a part of that work. A …
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On Wednesday, author David Brin announced that Vernor Vinge, sci-fi author, former professor, and father of the technological singularity concept, died from Parkinson's disease at age 79 on March 20, 2024, in La Jolla, California. The announcement came in a Facebook tribute where Brin wrote about Vinge's deep love for …
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Scientists keep taking their own lives, and no one knows why. That’s the central mystery at the start of 3 Body Problem, the new Netflix series based on a trilogy of sci-fi novels by Chinese author Cixin Liu. But it soon unfolds into something far grander: There’s a mysterious VR …
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