The memorial service for internet activist and wunderkind programmer Aaron Swartz will take place this weekend in New York. Swartz took his own life last week after months of being aggressively targeted by federal prosecutors for downloading millions of JSTOR articles. (Which he never distributed.) More about the case is available here, and those unfamiliar with Swartz should check out remembrances by Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig.
We’re psyched about Apology, the new magazine by former Vice magazine editor Jesse Pearson. Inspired “in equal measure by the golden ages of The New Yorker and...by 1980s punk zines like Sick Teen,” the inaugural issue contains writing and art by John Ashbery, Bill Callahan, Johanna Fateman, Rivka Galchen, Paul Maliszewski, Sam McPheeters, Ryan McGinley, and Terry Richardson, among others.
Philip Roth names Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral the best of his thirty-one books, even though he admits that “a lot of people” hate the former.
Exciting news: The Onion has taken the liberty of ghostwriting an autobiography of Joe Biden. The President of Vice was released this morning as a Kindle Single. If you haven’t been following the paper’s excellent—and extensive—coverage of the charismatic veep, we recommend starting here.
T.S. Eliot was very good at being a banker, and didn’t seem to have any problem with holding down a rather mundane 9-5. So why is it, asks Robert Fay at Full Stop, that most contemporary writers and poets are so embarrassed about their non-literary day jobs?
Apple is looking for a writer to give Siri more “personality.”
