Wikipedia turns ten years old this weekend, and The Atlantic has assembled a line-up of “all star thinkers” including Jonathan Lethem, Clay Shirky, and the guy who started Craigslist, Craig Newmark (among others), to share their capital T thoughts about the open-source encyclopedia. There’s a lot to digest in the various pieces, but we especially like Lethem’s take: “The generation of an infinite number of bogusly 'objective' sentences in an English of agonizing patchwork mediocrity is no cause for celebration, even if it eventually amounts to a Borgesian paraphrase of our entire universe.”
A newly discovered Dashiell Hammett story is being published for the first time in Strand magazine.
The best part of waking up? Pynchon in your cup.
Jean-Luc Godard was railing against e-books before they existed, in an interview with Richard Brody in 2000. Of course, people have been worrying about this sort of thing for a long time, as this 1894 article about “The End of Books” shows (via The Literary Detective).
At the KGB bar this weekend, Sunday night fiction with Gary Lutz and Robert Lopez.
