Inputs / 25 November – 02 December 2017
A week in reading.
+ “But for a group of hacker-minded teenagers who were born a decade after I was, a new practice emerged. Rather than trying to hack the security infrastructure, they wanted to attack the emergent attention economy. They wanted to show that they could manipulate the media narrative, just to show that they could.” – danah boyd, Hacking the Attention Economy (Data and Society: Points)
+ “‘Those panels are each units of time. You see them simultaneously, so you have various moments in time simultaneously made present.’” How Art Spiegelman Designs Comic Books (Open Culture)
+ “While I still use Twitter sparingly for professional purposes, I delete the app from my phone on weekends because looking at it either makes me sad, angry, or anxious. (I can’t recall the last time I looked at social media and felt happy afterwards, or even enriched by the experience.) This might not seem like much on the surface, but this is coming from someone who loved Twitter so much that I chose to write a book about it.“ – Nick Bilton, The End of the Social Era Can’t Come Soon Enough (Vanity Fair)
+ The Glass That Laughed, a recently discovered short story by the great Dashiell Hammett. (Electric Literature)
+ “By combining the neural network and the machine-learning algorithm, the study found that AI was able to correctly identify a work’s author 80 percent of the time. Even more impressive was its ability to detect each and every forgery with which it was presented, just from looking at a single stroke.” – Sarah Cascone, Artificial Intelligence Can Now Spot Art Forgeries by Comparing Brushstrokes (Artnet)
+ The Washington Post’s reporting on the efforts to discredit them via a fake Roy Moore allegation is astounding; a testament to The Post’s excellence as a news institution.
+ “It’s a long, lifetime continuation of figuring things out by doing them. I feel like every time I sit at the piano or get up on stage with Metric or do any part of this work, it’s connected to the very first thing I ever did. There are fragments of things that I’ve been carrying around for years that have finally ended up on Choir of The Mind, little passages that I carried around forever that eventually found their place. It’s the same thing with narrative writing. You just have to sit in the chair and most of the job is letting it come. You write your way through it. You figure it out while you do it.” – Emily Haines, interviewed by T. Cole Rachel. (The Creative Independent)
+ “Mueller’s team has recommended nearby lunch spots, but many witnesses have food brought in for fear of being spotted if they go outside… People familiar with the Mueller team said they convey a sense of calm that is unsettling. ” – Robert Costa and Rosalind S. Helderman, Inside the secretive nerve center of the Mueller investigation (The Washington Post)
+ “On the wall of one of those early, drab offices hung a 1988 Technicolor poster by Marvel artists Ed Hannigan and Joe Rubinstein, crowded to the margins with hundreds of characters from all different story lines with the words MARVEL UNIVERSE emblazoned across the top. Feige would challenge visitors to find the smallest figure in the scrum.” – Joanna Robinson, Secrets of the Marvel Universe (Vanity Fair)
+ An excerpt from Charlotte Saloman’s staggering Life? Or Theatre?. (Literary Hub)
+ “This year, among the Kochs’ aims is to spend a projected four hundred million dollars in contributions from themselves and a small group of allied conservative donors they have assembled, to insure Republican victories in the 2018 midterm elections. Ordinarily, political reporters for Time magazine would chronicle this blatant attempt by the Kochs and their allies to buy political influence in the coming election cycle. Will they feel as free to do so now?” – Jane Mayer, Can Time, Inc. Survive the Kochs? (The New Yorker)
+ “‘I saw these patterns that are really part of minimalist art, op art,’ Hafermaas says. ‘But here it’s not meant as art but as the functionality to disguise a warship. It looks like art, but it’s actually engineering.’” – Marty Graham, How Cubism Protected Warships In World War I (WIRED)
+ Silent Protest, a beautiful new short story from Annie Q. Syed. (Ellipsis Zine)
+ “There’s a funny thing that happens sometimes when you’re writing fiction. The covert—or overt—transfer of life into art is well-known and well-documented. A piece of the real world might be moved onto a page to populate a fiction, recast slightly, greatly, or not at all. But sometimes it feels as if the transfer can happen in the other direction as well, from art into life, so that something fabricated for the page manifests—surprise!—in the novelist’s real world.” – Ashley Hay, Encountering My Son’s Older Doppelgänger (Literary Hub)
Happy Sunday.
(TW)
