What a difference 27 years makes, huh? I'm referring to the gap between the 1971 film adaptation of Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain and the 1998… whatever that was… of Sphere. I mean, we're mostly going to be talking about Michael Crichton's novels, but to prattle on happily for several paragraphs about Sphere without acknowledging what Barry Levinson did to it would be like not picturing a blue Billy Crudup in your head while re-reading Watchmen. We need to breathe through it, come to acceptance, and move on.
That was a shitty movie. And, to my earlier point about the gap between The Andromeda Strain and Sphere, here is [...]

Today TED is an insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering—a place where ideas, regardless of their quality, go to seek celebrity, to live in the form of videos, tweets, and now e-books. In the world of TED—or, to use their argot, in the TED “ecosystem”—books become talks, talks become memes, memes become projects, projects become talks, talks become books—and so it goes ad infinitum in the sizzling Stakhanovite cycle of memetics, until any shade of depth or nuance disappears into the virtual void. Richard Dawkins, the father of memetics, should be very proud. Perhaps he can explain how “ideas worth spreading” become “ideas no footnotes can support.
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"Here is a sad reflection for the ordinary reader, faced as he is with lifetimes upon lifetimes worth of books on entering even a small public library or a reasonably well-stocked bookshop. Since we can’t have very many, we must husband our time and attention carefully. But how to choose? The melancholy may lift a little when we realize that so many wise souls who have come before have been willing to serve as guides."
Oh perfect, Google News has announced a revolutionary new product: badges for your Google News Reading Activity. See now when you prove you are Good At Reading, your Google Teacher gives you a gold star for the day.
Actually, no gold stars: the badges range "from Bronze to Ultimate," which… that's not really a coherent scale? I think folks just think no one knows what "platinum" is anymore and why it's "better" than gold. But come on. It's not like I'm suggesting maybe rhodium should start showing up in the metal-based scale of BADGIFICATION.
Anyway, R U going to READ MOAR now that Google gives you [...]
"In college, during the time that I went to a college that had majors, I thought mine would be English, so I took a poetry class because it was required. The professor had long, long center-parted flat brown hair and was rumored to be going through a divorce. The celebrity she most closely resembled was the farm wife in the painting American Gothic crossed with an Aubrey Beardsley engraving of the Lady of Shalott. (This is how I thought about things at the time.) We read poems by women poets who were dissatisfied with their domestic lives, or by Randall Jarrell posing as one of these women…. Everything about the [...]
What did people read this year? For one, Hob Broun. Who, you ask? You should definitely find out. Perhaps you should try on some Andrey Platonov as well?