Recommended reading for the week ahead.
Short Fiction: Jennifer Egan serialized her upcoming short story for The New Yorker through a series of tweets. In this blog post, she explains the attraction of developing a character and writing “poetry” for Twitter. Also, manager of editorial programming for Twitterm Andrew Fitzgerald (@magicandrew) accurately spotlights the effort as a continued evolution of Twitter as a creative platform.
Mountain People: Anita Thompson waxes poetic at the Owl Farm blog about the attraction for writers to live in the mountains and relatively off-the-grid. She includes an insightful excerpt from a piece Hunter wrote about Hemingway’s Idaho in 1964, in which he says the writer’s greatest frustration is trying to make sense of a world that won’t stand still long enough to make sense. Anita then throws some insight of her own into the post, talking about why Hunter loved Woody Creek: “From such a vantage point, a person tends to feel that it is not so difficult, after all, to see the world clear and as a whole.”
Story: Ken Burns explains what makes a great story in this short video.
Two Americas: David Simon encouraged Georgetown graduates to fix the world in a way his generation, despite great optimism, never could. His entire speech is posted on his blog here. An excerpt: “There cannot be two American experiments, one for the fortunate and another for the rest.”
Ghostown+: Brands may hang a shingle in Google+ but few of them are actually investing in it, according to this very informative article from Advertising Age.
Seth Says: True stories are never true. Digital parking meters are a failure of engineers who seek to recreate instead of advance. Four tipsfor completing a task. All from the wicked smart brain of Seth Godin.
