Hello to the new subscribers who recently joined because of Robin, whose continued championing of this newsletter is very appreciated.
I want computer to work on hair.
Andrés Cuervo giving a talk at Brooklyn Web Workers
There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.
"An Uncomplicated Man", Emily Wilson for London Review of Books
People seem to have a lot of strong feelings about this essay, and I don't know if I am that invested in the discourse but I appreciate this line because it is a succinct summary of just how much Nolan departed from the original text of The Odyssey. Also, I like that in between all the very serious What It Means To Adapt Homer's Epic Poem discussion we're also offered "this movie doesn't even fuck." Separately, Andreas submitted this sentence:
Yet again, we watch a male character’s desperate quest to recover and/or avenge a female love object.
We are left with an administrative landscape where the boundary between public service and private enterprise dissolves into a twilight of bureaucratic convenience, and where the citizen is treated merely as a passive spectator to an expensive conjuring trick.
"The €1.2 billion Public Service Obligation-funded Heist", Tim Hannon for Village
Submitted by Natalie.
I don’t know why everyone’s losing it over these swords he said.
"The sword situation", Luke O'Neil
I'm so glad that people are still out here going full Barthelme sicko mode writing short stories with absurd framing devices and the barest minimum of punctuation. I know writers who use quotation marks and they're all cowards, etc.
The hard drive dies with me and the poems vanish into the ether.
This Year: 365 Songs Annotated, John Darnielle
This makes sense insofar as the maiden voyage of the Titanic was also a historic milestone in maritime transportation.
"Wi-Fi Fiasco Transforms Washington Bar Exam Into an Even Bigger Waste of Time Than Usual", Madiba K. Dennie for Balls and Strikes
Every social media user is a day trader looking for God in the Like economy.
"Terminal Surrender", Sarah Friend for the Arab Bank Switzerland newsletter
Sarah's really been on a tear lately with good writing. Also bangers:
I can’t recommend this lifestyle, but it was useful as artistic research.
Incidentally, The End of Evangelion begins with the male hero masturbating.
"Incidentally", followed by a totally ridiculous thing, is a pretty obvious setup for a good sentence but it's well-executed here and particularly in context.
Hers was a long and beautiful laugh, it had many elsewheres in it.
Twist, Colum McCann
I currently have a small pile of Novels About/Involving Internet Infrastructure By Men (Twist, Cloudthief, Air) sitting on my desk, which might make for a nice review essay if I can figure out where to pitch it or what there is to say about them. Also very good:
The light was snatched inside and served with silver tongs.
Thunder at sea can help you believe all the myths.
There were a lot of vectors in what he said.
At the bar I had a Jameson to rebalance myself, but even the giant ice cube was an accusation: all the straight edges, Sykes-Picot in a glass.
The Claude Accent has the mouthfeel of those Rubbermaid non-slip bathtub flowers.
It's also possible that I'm having an extremely vivid dream in which I'm writing this book, but actually I'm a sixteenth-century bishop napping in the nave of a Gothic cathedral in the lowlands of Europe.
The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, Cory Doctorow
Submitted by Nick.
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