…nothing is wrong, for all who have emailed.
Month / September 2005
The Moral of the Story: If You Haven’t Changed Your First Name to “Jonathan” by Now, You Should Consider It
A hearty congratulations to Jonathan Lethem, who won a MacArthur Genius Grant this year. Lethem, beyond being a standout correspondent, is also an adventurous stylist and one of the few novelists working today who has written successfully across multiple genres. If you haven’t yet read the gritty The Fortress of Solitude or his futuristic take on Chandler, Gun, with Occasional Music, get thee to a bookstore and sup.
[UPDATE: Matt Cheney argues that while Lethem is deserving, “this choice continues the unfortunate trend of the MacArthur award often going to writers who have already found a lot of success.”]
Slaughterhouse ’05
Kurt Vonnegut on the Daily Show (video).
Great Moments in Reuters Photos
I’ve Got Your POD Right Here. It’s Called the Next-Generation Camera Phone
New Scientist: “Commuters in Japan already anger bookstore owners and newsagents by using existing cellphone software to try to take snapshots of newspaper and magazine articles to finish reading on the train to work. This is only possible because some phones now offer very rudimentary optical character recognition (OCR) software which allows small amounts of text to be captured and digitised from images.”
So how will the publishing industry respond to this? Digital watermarks? A new paper with some harsh reflective surface? Each book issued with a digital code? As the OCR-enabled camera phones make their way into the hands of the public, I foresee a small spike in book piracy four years from now.