This is chompy.net, a part of Spaceship No Future.

James Wood: Laurent Binet’s “HHhH” and Historical Fiction

“But Binet does not seem aware that this trick of giving the impression that he is thinking the book through as he is writing it is one of the oldest tricks of novelistic verisimilitude: it is inseparable from the fraudulence of the first-person narrator, who is pretending to be speaking to the reader off the cuff even as the novel has been rewritten a thousand times by the laboring author.” (#)

dark entries · Thursday, May 17
Mexico: A guide to which parts are safe to travel to, and which are dangerous

(#)

dark entries · Thursday, May 17
The True Bolaño

An interview with Barbara Epler of New Directions. (#)

dark entries · Tuesday, May 15
3quarksdaily: Rethinking Lawns

(#)

dark entries · Tuesday, May 15
Louisiana is the world’s prison capital

(#)

The Longest Train I Ever Saw · Monday, May 14
The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine

(#)

dark entries · Sunday, May 13
“I’d say the greatest success that I’ve had in my life is that I never have to be around assholes anymore; that’s better than rich. And rich just means you can just afford any book you want without looking at the price. That, to me, is rich.”
¡Ask a Mexican! Is Mitt Romney Really Part-Mexican?

(#)

dark entries · Saturday, May 12
THE WEEK IN GREED #6: To Behave Like The Fallen World

“It’s no coincidence that the one man willing to lie about his savagery as an adolescent is the one running for president. In a sense, the modern political system selects for this kind of moral amnesia.” (#)

dark entries · Saturday, May 12
NYRB: The Myth About Marriage

Linked because it’s interesting, though of course we must acknowledge that you are unlikely to sway any opponent of gay marriage through argument. (#)

dark entries · Wednesday, May 09
NYRB: No Accountability for Torture

(#)

dark entries · Tuesday, May 08
How to cook onions: Why recipe writers lie and lie about how long they take to caramelize.

“That’s on some bullshit. You want caramelized onions? Stir for 45 minutes”
(#)

The Longest Train I Ever Saw · Thursday, May 03
“Wouldn’t the sentence ‘I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign’ have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?”
Dalkey Archive Press on TV!

(#) (via)

dark entries · Monday, April 30
Nipples at the Met

(#)

dark entries · Friday, April 27
Descriptive Camera

“This is a faded picture / of a dilapidated / building. It seems to be / run down and in the need of /repirs.” (#)

dark entries · Thursday, April 26
The Mind is a Metaphor

(#)

dark entries · Sunday, April 22
Sissel Tolaas

Smell Collecting
(#)

The Longest Train I Ever Saw · Sunday, April 22
Jonathan Sterne: What if Interactivity is the New Passivity?

“What if all the bad things that media critics have been said about passivity for the past century or two are now equally applicable to all the demands to interact, to participate? What if interactivity is now one of the central hinges through which power works? In many moments today, the most compliant gesture we can make is to consent to interact on the terms presented to us by our software and machines. This pull is especially strong in those commercial platforms that celebrate their own difference from the so-called passive media of previous decades, and in the process monetize their users’ participation either directly or indirectly. What if—from time to time—we chose not to identify with the interactive promise of new media platforms or for that matter new media art?” (#) (via)

dark entries · Friday, April 20
Where You Live Could Make Your Kids Fat

(#)

dark entries · Monday, April 16
“The chair was sturdy and comfortable, suitably presidential … but sometimes Affenlight pined for a sleek modern one, with casters and a medial axis on which you could spin. Having shuffled the big chair to the window, he leaned his forehead against the glass, which felt cold despite the sunlight, and dragged his neatly trimmed nails across the exposed portion of the screen, producing a scratchy metallic sound. The word for what a chair should do had been escaping him: swivel. Melville had once called America a seat of snivelization; what Affenlight wanted was a seat of swivelization.”
T.C.B.

carefully selected garbage · Wednesday, April 04
“I first thought Noam Chomsky was a woman, maybe because of the soft vowels in his first name, or because I found, and still do, his linguistic approach to be gentle, considerate, and receptive. These are great qualities in writing, which I generally attribute to women, who often make better writers, but historically were not given an equal chance to write and publish due to a complex set of institutional matters. See? That wasn’t so hard. During college, in a damp seminar room which exuded patience, I kept referred to him as “she,” and the (this was some political theory class, in UC Santa Cruz) feministy T.A. sort of looked at me with huge grateful eyes, like I single-handedly had done what her Ph.D. was trying to do.”
Cal-Adapt

Via the Google Developers Showcase:

“Using the Google Maps API, Cal-Adapt has created several tools to help users understand climate change. This includes maps for local climate snapshots, decadal averages, degrees of changes, monthly temperature averages, and much more exciting geo data visualization!”

Related posts: Google, Microsoft, shutter their home energy management offerings Via Greenmonk: Last week Google announced that it was shutting…

Green Interfaces · Wednesday, March 21
Oxfam Shelflife

A backstory implementation for Oxfam shops.

Oxfam Shelflife – How does it work?

Related posts: Glowy dress monitors pollution in the air Glowy dress monitors pollution in the air via [experience-it-all]…

Green Interfaces · Friday, March 09