👓 Do Scholastic Book Fairs Live Up to the Nostalgia? | The Atlantic

Read The Fleeting Magic of Scholastic Book Fairs (The Atlantic)
Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.

👓 Bottleneck at Printers Has Derailed Some Holiday Book Sales | New York Times

Read Bottleneck at Printers Has Derailed Some Holiday Book Sales (New York Times)
A backlog at the printing presses, plus a surging demand for popular hardcover titles, has hurt publishers at peak sales season, with popular titles out of stock in some stores.

👓 Why Books Matter for the Long Run | Knowledge@Wharton

Read Why Books Matter for the Long Run (Knowledge@Wharton)
Book publishing is a business and increasingly a technical one, but at its heart it is an art, writes Peter J. Dougherty in this opinion piece. He is the editor-at-large at Princeton University Press,
A nice little essay here.

👓 For the First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter the Public Domain | Smithsonian Magazine

Read For the First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter the Public Domain (Smithsonian)
A beloved Robert Frost poem is among the many creations that are (finally) losing their protections in 2019

👓 An Interview with John O’Brien | Dalkey Archive Press

Read An Interview with John O’Brien (dalkeyarchive.com)
The following interview was conducted in-house at two different times, in 2000 and 2004. The purpose of the interview was to provide a very readable documentation of Dalkey Archive Press’s mission and history. It was amended in 2004, and likely will be amended again in the future, to reflect changes in the culture that have an impact on the work we do.
After reading this interview, how could one not want to devote their life to supporting such an institution?

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

subversive  

maybe also the word uncomfortable?

December 19, 2018 at 05:10PM

uncomfortable  

ha!

December 19, 2018 at 05:11PM

There is no sense that this particular novel has its place among-and should be evaluated against-a whole history of other novels.  

December 19, 2018 at 05:14PM

As with all of the arts, literature was once upon a time entirely made possible through patrons. This goes at least as far back as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. They were able to write because their patrons provided them financial support. And this was of course true of all of the other arts. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, however, literature and commerce got mixed.  

In some sense, there is a link between these areas of art/writing and funding and what we see in social media influencers who in some sense are trying to create an “art” for which they get paid. Sadly, most are not making art and worse, most of them are being paid even worse.

December 19, 2018 at 05:18PM

While many people say that such and such a book changed their lives, you can be sure that they could not tell you who published the book. The identification is with the book and its author, not the publisher.  

December 19, 2018 at 05:25PM

My models were New Directions Press and Grove Press.  

December 19, 2018 at 05:32PM

Michael Orthofer at the Complete Review  

December 19, 2018 at 05:35PM

Academics will probably bristle at this thought but, at least in relation to literature, all you have to do is look at the courses that are offered featuring the literatures of other countries. Not only don’t they teach these literatures, they don’t read them.  

We certainly could use an Anthony Bourdain of literature to help peel back the curtain on other countries and cultures.

December 19, 2018 at 05:38PM

I think only the philistine mind thinks that art needs a social or moral justification.  

Quote of the year.

December 19, 2018 at 05:46PM

A prerequisite for war, as well as bigotry, is that one sees a people or a country as a stereotype, as something sub-human or non-human; this is why politicians spend so much time trying to create stereotypical images for those countries they want to go to war with.  

December 19, 2018 at 05:48PM

Small publishers are oftentimes awful at getting their books out to people, even though of course the marketplace determines many of the limitations.  

December 19, 2018 at 05:51PM

🔖 JSON-LD And You – Google Slides | Aram Zucker-Scharff

Bookmarked JSON-LD And You: A Guide to Structured Metadata for Journalism by Aram Zucker-ScharffAram Zucker-Scharff (docs.google.com)

A presentation on Google Docs.

Hi, I’m Aram Zucker-Scharff and now that we’re settled in, I’ll take a minute to introduce myself. I’m the Director of Ad Tech Engineering at The Washington Post, where I work with teams across the organization to help the Post make money and, through our Arc platform, help other publications make money as well. But I’ve taken a long road to this point, I started off as a journalist, then an editor, a social media manager, a product manager, a freelance strategy consultant and developer and last a full stack developer. I even spent some time being very bad at selling ads.

Aram Zucker-Scharff is about as sharp as it gets when it comes to journalism, adtech, and technology. I do wish he’d spent some additional time on Microformats (or even the v2 implementation) as they’re still broadly supported and much less likely to be treated as the flavor-of-the-month that JSON-LD and schema.org are currently.

I dug around a bit and didn’t see any video from this session.

🎧 This Week in Google 481 Stoned on Cheese | TWIG.tv

Listened to This Week in Google 481 Stoned on Cheese by Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Stacey Higginbotham from TWiT.tv
Foldable Phone, Online Civility

  • The Samsung Developers Conference Keynote features a foldable phone, SmartThings IoT, and Bixby innovations.
  • Android will support foldable phones.
  • Google employees stage a walkout over sexual harassment
  • Tim Berners-Lee's Contract for the Web
  • How to encourage civility online
  • YouTube Content ID
  • Facebook and "White Genocide"
  • Young people are deleting Facebook in droves
  • Facebook's holiday pop-up store
  • Everybody gets free Amazon shipping
  • Amazon's new HQ2(s)
  • 8 new Chromebook features
  • Google Home Hub teams up with Sephora
  • Ajit Pai's FCC is hopping mad about robocalls

Picks of the Week

  • Jeff's Number: Black Friday home tech deals
  • Stacey's Thing: Extinct cables, Alexa Christmas Lights
Leo Laporte doesn’t talk about it directly within an IndieWeb specific framework, but he’s got an interesting discussion about YouTube Content ID that touches on the ideas of Journalism and IndieWeb and particularly as they relate to video, streaming video, and YouTube Live.

While most people are forced to rely on Google as their silo of choice for video and specifically live streaming video, he points out a painful single point of failure in their system with regard to copyright rules and Google’s automatic filters that could get a user/content creator permanently banned. Worse, as Leo indicates, this ban could also extend to related Google accounts (YouTube, Gmail, etc.) One is thus open to potential chilling effects of intimidation, censorship, and deplatforming.

Leo discusses the fact that he’s not as beholden to YouTube because he streams and hosts all of his content on his own website and only utilizes silos like YouTube as ancillary distribution. In IndieWeb parlance what he does is known as POSSE or Post to your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere and this prevents his journalism, commentary, and even his business from being ravaged by the whims of corporate entities whose rules he can’t control directly.

The discussion starts at 1:05:11 into the episode and goes for about 10 minutes for those who are interested in this particular sub-topic.

This idea also impinges on Cal Newport’s recent article Is YouTube Fundamental or Trivial? which I read the other day.

 

👓 The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine critical of Trump, to shutter after 23 years | CNN

Read The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine critical of Trump, to shutter after 23 years (CNN)
The Weekly Standard, the magazine that espouses traditional conservatism and which has remained deeply critical of President Donald Trump, will shutter after 23 years, its owner Clarity Media Group announced Friday morning. The magazine will publish its final issue on December 17.
Alas there goes the last bit of logic to the center of the old party. Trump’s transformation of the Republican Party is almost complete.

📺 Jeremy Keith on Taking Back The Web (Opening Keynote) at Voxxed Thessaloniki 2018

Watched Taking Back The Web - Opening Keynote by Jeremy KeithJeremy Keith from Voxxed Thessaloniki 2018 | YouTube
In these times of centralised services like Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, having your own website is downright disruptive. If you care about the longevity of your online presence, independent publishing is the way to go. But how can you get all the benefits of those third-party services while still owning your own data? By using the building blocks of the Indie Web, that’s how!
Great overview of the building blocks of the IndieWeb from Voxxed Thessaloniki 2018.

Hat tip: Jeremy Keith​​​​​​​​​

👓 Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953 | SFMOMA

Read Robert Rauschenberg, Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953 (SFMOMA)
From 1951 to 1953, Robert Rauschenberg made a number of artworks that explore the limits and very definition of art. These works recall and effectively extend the notion of the artist as creator of ideas, a concept first broached by Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) with his iconic readymades of the early twentieth century. With Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), Rauschenberg set out to discover whether an artwork could be produced entirely through erasure—an act focused on the removal of marks rather than their accumulation.
I love the idea here of making art by removing things. It’s somewhat akin to removing stone in a block of marble to create a sculpture, but at the same time this is also different. I’m also reminded of the idea of a photo negative or the concept of publishing negative results in science to give us a fuller picture of an area. Translating this idea from art into broader life could be quite interesting.

Hat tip: graffiti story, body art

👓 Kevin Hart Steps Down as Oscar Host | Variety

Read Kevin Hart Steps Down as Oscar Host by Kristopher TapleyKristopher Tapley (Variety)
Just 48 hours after agreeing to host the 91st Academy Awards, Kevin Hart unceremoniously stepped down late Thursday night on social media. The turn of events followed outcry over previous anti-gay tweets, and comments Hart made during stand-up routines nearly 10 years ago. Some of the tweets were feverishly deleted throughout the day on Thursday, leading to an Instagram video from the comedian that only made matters worse for him.

👓 MoviePass competitor Sinemia is making big changes after it was hit with a lawsuit by angry customers | Business Insider

Read MoviePass competitor Sinemia is making big changes after it was hit with a lawsuit by angry customers (Business Insider)
MoviePass competitor Sinemia is re-introducing debit cards that allow customers to bypass its per-movie fees (though the card itself costs $14.99).

👓 'Sneaky Pete' Producers Adjusting Season 3 After Ricky Jay's Death | Hollywood Reporter

Read 'Sneaky Pete' Producers Adjusting Season 3 After Ricky Jay's Death (The Hollywood Reporter)
The magician and actor, who died Saturday, had his final acting role on the Amazon series.