Flattr is a three-year-old Swedish company. Its goal is to enable people to pay for things that they might not ordinarily pay for: YouTube videos, Flickr photos, GitHubs, Instagrams. The idea is for you to fund a monthly balance for your Flattr account and use it to monetize your own patterns of Web-based approval. At the end of every month, your Flattr balance gets distributed among the things that you had “favorited.”

A number of us took this experiment to Twitter. Flattr had been baked into the Twitter platform, so that the very act of “favoriting” a tweet was later accompanied by some

Once in a while a book appears that’s so bad you want it to be a satire. If you set out to produce a parody of postfeminist mumbo jumbo, adolescent narcissism, excruciating erotic overshares, pseudopoetry, pretentious academic jargon, and shopworn and unshocking “dirty talk,” you could not do better than Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell.

One wishes that Katherine Angel, a historian of female sexual dysfunction at Warwick University, had, in fact, found this tale a little more “difficult to tell.” But Angel can’t stop telling and writing about herself—or about herself

At a recent conference on media reform, I found myself talking to a professional activist and technologist. He told me about some online images—customized for sharing on Facebook—that civilians in Syria had circulated to protest Bashar al-Assad’s violent crackdown on dissent in their country. The images were both powerful and deeply moving, he told me. “It’s like we are building a giant empathy machine,” he said, referring to the Internet. The effortless sharing of memes, he explained, was a crucial step toward a more peaceful world. In fact, he went so far as to insist that the invasion of

FOR SOME SOUTH AFRICANS, apartheid infiltrated every facet of life. For others, it rarely impinged on the routine comforts of the suburbs. It all depended on which side of the bench one sat. Okwui Enwezor and Rory Bester’s exhaustive exhibition and accompanying catalogue consider the photographic response to apartheid, as well as to the immense bureaucracy that sustained the system for forty-one years. Eighty photographers spanning several generations, from Leon Levson in the 1940s to Thabiso Sekgala in 2009, track the institutionalization and legacy of apartheid across the country’s bloodied

Unheard melodies are sweeter, proposed John Keats, and Craig Dworkin, it seems, can only agree. In his new book, No Medium, Dworkin, a poet and critic who has been among the most active proponents of “conceptual poetry,” treats silent scores and mute records, books with blank pages, white canvases, erased drawings, and other such “foster-children of Silence and slow Time.” He considers, among many other works, Robert Rauschenberg’s “White Paintings” of 1951, Aram Saroyan’s untitled 1968 publication of a ream of blank typing paper, and Tom Friedman’s 1,000 Hours of Staring, 1992–97, an unmarked

In 1952, six years after publishing its first book, Farrar, Straus & Company nearly failed. Founded by Guggenheim heir Roger Straus with $360,000 from his family and friends’ interests in department stores, mining, and brewing (the former Rheingold Brewery in Brooklyn served as the warehouse for its books), the firm had printed one hundred thousand copies of Mr. President, a quasi-official selection of President Truman’s papers and photographs. As Truman’s reelection campaign began, the book looked to be a hit, but a couple weeks after its publication, Truman reversed course and announced he

Back in 2009, the New Museum organized a show of the private collection of Greek billionaire Dakis Joannou, curated not by the museum’s staff but by Jeff Koons—the superstar artist who, as it so happens, features prominently in the tycoon’s holdings. The conflict of interest didn’t end there: Koons had designed Joannou’s thirty-five-meter yacht and was even the best man at Joannou’s wedding. Among those upset by this somewhat unusual—but also somehow emblematic—arrangement was William Powhida. Then a lesser-known artist, Powhida detailed the whole back-scratchy affair in a drawing