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Photo: Denis Bocquet, some rights reserved/licensed by Creative Commons

“And so, as with the sufferers from any addiction or obsessive delusion, serial daters often hit bottom. ‘The word “exhausting” came up in every discussion we had,’ Ansari writes. This was particularly true for people who were going on several dates per week (usually arranged through Tinder or OkCupid) and exchanging texts with a half-dozen people at any given time. They grew tired of making the same job-interview-style small talk on what Ansari calls ‘boring-ass dates.’”

-Ann Friedman on Aziz Ansari’s book on dating in the age of Tinder and OkCupid. The comedian collaborated with sociologist Eric Klinenberg to study modern love, surveying  young college grads who used dating apps but were still lonely.

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Photo: freeparking :-|, some rights reserved/licensed by Creative Commons

“Most of James’s fiction is not directly autobiographical, but much of it follows the shape of his feelings and indeed his fears. Thus, during his long sojourn in Europe, he must have dreamed of being recalled, or being pulled back to being ‘a native of the James family.’”  

-Colm Tóibín on how Henry James felt the powerful pull of his family even as he longed to get away from it.

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Photo: Diego Cambiaso, some rights reserved/licensed by Creative Commons

“The impossibly resilient, delightfully lunatic Rose was one of the less buzzed-about writers of William Shawn’s sunset years at the New Yorker—a bit by her own design, we come to realize in these pages. Better Than Sane is the most radical anti-memoir I’ve read: no answers, no questions even, but instead a sort of anti-tribute to the art of finding one’s people, or thriving in the failure to do so.”

-Porochista Khakpour on New Yorker writer Alison C. Rose’s memoir of finding her tribe in Gotham

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“On the afternoon of April 19, 2013, while Jahar was still at large, Ruslan Tsarni, the boys’ uncle, held an informal press conference on his lawn. What provoked the bombing was simple, he said: His nephews were ‘losers.’ He added: ‘My family has nothing to do with that family.’ That family—the more we read about its members, the less they seem to explain their sons.”

-Jesse Barron on Masha Gessen’s book on the Tsarnaev family tragedy that lead two brothers to commit the Boston Marathon bombing

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Photo: David Goehring, some rights reserved/licensed by Creative Commons

“Buddies is, by the end, about the power of the difference between the family you’re born into—one you have no choice but to remember—and the new family you choose, whose secrets you have yet to learn. Rereading these stories again now, even as I’m reminded of their unique value, of their sense of discovery and reinvention, I’m also reminded of their historical context, and I can only wonder what Mordden would do with what was for his characters perhaps unthinkable: federally sanctioned gay marriage.”

-Alexander Chee about Ethan Mordden’s collection of short stories about the family gay men had to create to survive in New York decades before same-sex romance became mainstream and SCOTUS-approved

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“For a lot of people who write autobiographically, memory becomes the main subject, rather than actions. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. It’s just that memory is not very interesting to me as a subject. I’m interested in performative writing, I guess—I like it to have heat, or to feel like you’re moving with something. I don’t have a lot of time for gauziness. It’s like, let the writing perform that the memory is false, but I don’t need to tell you that in words.”

--Maggie Nelson on her memoir, The Argonauts, in conversation with Sarah Nicole Prickett

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Paper trail

One of Kim Gordon’s favorite novelists is Mary Gaitskill. (Ours too.)

(Illustration by Jillian Tamaki)

Tonight, at the Met, a “poetry parade” cosponsored by the Artist’s Institute. Reading aloud texts that respond to artworks in the museum will be Eileen Myles, Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and others. The event begins at 6:30 p.m. in the gallery of Egyptian art and concludes at 8:00 in the exhibition Madame Cézanne.

Former New York Times editor Jill Abramson has sold her book to Simon & Schuster for a sum believed to be around $1 million. ““I’ve been a front-line combatant in the news media’s battles to remain the bedrock of an informed society,” Abramson told the New York Post.  “Now, I’m going to wear my reporter’s hat again to tell the full drama of that story in a book, focusing on both traditional and new media players in the digital age.”

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by the Japanese writer Marie Kondo, has sold over two million copies worldwide. Kondo urges people to have “tidying festivals,” in which they ask her signature question: “Does it spark joy?” If not? Into the bin. The Wall Street Journal reports that “one of her clients . . . even jettisoned her husband.”

The FCC has approved new “net neutrality” rules, to the dismay of broadband companies and the delight of pretty much everyone else. The new rules will prevent broadband providers from blocking content, prioritizing certain kinds of traffic, or indeed discriminating in the provision of any of its services.

Back in June, the New Inquiry started a clever roundup called “This Week in Art Crime” documenting crimes against art and, sometimes, artful crimes. Then Artnet News started paying attention to similar exploits. Now Hyperallergic follows suit with “Crimes of the Art.” Does three make a trend?

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I’m someone who feels so hemmed in and controlled by a sort of internal tyranny all the time. My saving grace, my only way out most of the time, is a radical left turn that I’m not expecting. It may seem goofy, but to the people around me, it’s clear that it's my way to freedom.

Miranda July, interviewed by Lara Zarum for Bookforum

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"Psychiatry, in his view, isn’t in need of rethinking, or at least it hasn’t been since it dumped its Freudian baggage. What it needs now is only better public relations. His book is an attempt to let the world know that the bad old days are over, that the profession has transcended its past and entered a “pluralistic” era in which doctors use “the latest techniques of neuroscience and the latest psychodynamic theories of mental function.” This anodyne summary discounts the possibility that we will never know how brain produces mind, that indeed the two realms are incommensurable, and it overlooks the continued unsatisfactory performance of even these latest techniques...For Freud, the past is prologue. For Lieberman, it is merely backdrop."

- Gary Greenberg on Jeffrey Lieberman's Shrinks and the history of psychiatry.

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"Gottschall’s leap from behavioral similarity to genetic causality is based on nothing more than a selective catalogue of circumstantial evidence—as scientific reasoning goes, it’s on a par with Jenny McCarthy’s assertion that vaccines cause autism because her son manifested symptoms of autism after he got vaccinated. But this appears to be evolutionary psychology’s preferred dialectic, which is perhaps why biologist and blogger PZ Myers calls it “garbage science”: “a grandiose exercise in leaping to conclusions on inadequate evidence.” I can’t claim to have read much evolutionary psychology, but Myers’s assessment seems an accurate description of what’s going on in The Professor in the Cage."

- Dale Peck on Jonathan Gottschall's The Professor in the Cage, and the falsehoods of essentialist male violence.

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“Crowds are justifiably celebrating bin Laden’s death in downtown Manhattan, where a decade ago al-Qaeda terrorists infamously massacred nearly three thousand people. But since the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan, terrorists have killed many times that number of people in Pakistan. Tens of thousands have died in terror and counterterror violence, slain by bombs, bullets, cannons, and drones. America’s 9/11 has given way to Pakistan’s 24/7/365.”

- An excerpt from Mohsin Hamid's essay "Osama bin Laden's Death" from his recently published collection Discontent and Its Civilizations, reviewed by Jake Lamar.

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"One forgets that July’s characters are aspirational because they aren’t traditionally so. Their fantasies reflect not class anxiety but love anxiety. Instead of wanting to jump an income bracket, they strive for human connection of any flavor. Cheryl’s life in the six years before she got the courage to approach Phillip wasn’t a life at all, yet her new life could have been started by just about anyone. This thesis, which you’ll find at the heart of July’s oeuvre, is provocative—who needs compatibility when you have fantasy? But there is something hollow in it, something unaspirational in the novelist herself, such that our protagonist can’t be called a heroine. She’s just a lonely woman who can’t make herself less lonely."

- Kaitlin Phillips on Miranda July's debut novel The First Bad Man.

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"With Satin Island, McCarthy has cast a new light on the debate about avant-garde and realist novels. Whereas Remainder confronts ideas about the authenticity of the self by destabilizing notions of selfhood, the new novel recognizes that such a confrontation is not enough. Power carries on, no matter how much one writes against it....In the 1950s, artists worried about the concentration of power in hierarchies. They worried about the political effects of appeals to the authentic. Now we understand all too well that power functions pretty well in networks, too. You can have a very sophisticated theory of the self, and that won’t stop power from going about its business."

-Gideon Lewis-Kraus on Tom McCarthy's Satin Island 

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"Like everybody who is not in love, he imagined that one chose the person whom one loved after endless deliberations and on the strength of various qualities and advantages."

-Marcel Proust, see also: Proust and neuroscience

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"This photograph is my proof. There was that afternoon when things were still good between us, and she embraced me, and we were so happy. It did happen. She did love me. Look for yourself!"

-Duane Michals, see also this interview with Artforum and Christopher Lyons on Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals

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"Yalta was barely visible through the morningmist, white clouds stood motionless on the mountaintops. The leaves ofthe trees did not stir, cicadas called, and the monotonous, dull noise ofthe sea, coming from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep that awaits us. So it had sounded below when neither Yalta nor Oreanda were there, so it sounded now and would go on sounding with the same dull indifference when we are no longer here. And in this constancy, in this utter indifference to the life and death of each of us, there perhaps lies hidden the pledge of our eternal salvation, the unceasing movement of life on earth, of unceasing perfection. Sitting beside the young woman, who looked so beautiful in the dawn, appeased and enchanted by the view of this magical décor—sea, mountains, clouds, the open sky—Gurov reflected that, essentially, if you thought of it, everything was beauti- ful in this world, everything except for what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher goals of being and our human dignity."

-Anton Chekhov, Lady with a Little Dog (see more recommended readings on  Bookforum's Pinterest)

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-Vivian Maier, see also Christopher Lyon on Vivian Maier: A Photographer Found