The concept is simple yet revolutionary: Members meet up at a bar, a library, a bookstore or any venue that will host them. Once the bell rings, silent reading time commences. After an hour, the bell rings again.
Other than that, there are no rules.
Liberated from the orthodoxy of traditional book clubs, participants can bring whatever they'd like to read and chat about anything, before and after the designated reading time.
Here is a secret about writers, or at least most writers I know, including me: we don’t like to read our published work. Conversations I’ve had over the years with author friends have tended to confirm my own feelings on the matter—namely, that it is very nice and fortunate and rewarding to get something published, but you don’t ever especially want to read it again. One reason for this is the fact that, by the time you’ve finished revising, copyediting, and proofreading a book, you have already reread it effectively a hundred million times before publication. Another reason: there is something deeply nerve-wracking about the fact of the thing you’ve written, mutable for so long, now being fixed and frozen forever, with no possibility of rewriting whatever mistakes you might—and will—find upon rereading. Among the countless, loving tributes in the wake of her recent death, one memorable Toni Morrison anecdote recounted her habit of taking a red pencil to her published works as she read from them; Toni Morrison, of course, was one of the few authors who might have reasonably expected reprintings and possible future opportunities for correcting errata. Toni Morrison was Toni Morrison.
When I went to Paris last January, I had not been back for a number of years. Over the last twenty years, I had gradually lost my French; I had also lost Anne-Vir. Nothing in particular accounts for either of these losses, but the latter always seemed the more serious of the two, the one that could not be fixed. The main purpose of my trip was to undertake some research for a book, but I also went to see what kinds of lost things can be found.
And I went, in part, because of something I had written. In the summer of 2017, this site published an essay about a book of Verlaine’s poetry that Anne-Vir had given me years ago. I had read this book in countless cafés and bars and had committed one particular poem to memory: “Il pleure dans mon coeur.” The book always made me think of her and of the past. And I still had it, on a shelf in my house in North Carolina. I sent the essay to Marc because I thought he might like it, and he asked if he could send it to Anne-Vir. I said yes, and he did, and she emailed me. And we made plans to see each other.
Simple rumination – the process of churning your concerns around in your head – isn’t the answer. It’s likely to cause you to become stuck in the rut of your own thoughts and immersed in the emotions that might be leading you astray. Certainly, research has shown that people who are prone to rumination also often suffer from impaired decision making under pressure, and are at a substantially increased risk of depression.
Instead, the scientific research suggests that you should adopt an ancient rhetorical method favoured by the likes of Julius Caesar and known as ‘illeism’ – or speaking about yourself in the third person (the term was coined in 1809 by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge from the Latin ille meaning ‘he, that’). If I was considering an argument that I’d had with a friend, for instance, I might start by silently thinking to myself: ‘David felt frustrated that…’ The idea is that this small change in perspective can clear your emotional fog, allowing you to see past your biases.
The old photograph was taken by Eric Bevington, a British colonial officer, in October 1937, three months after Earhart disappeared. Mr. Bevington and his team had scouted Gardner Island, now called Nikumaroro. A British freighter had run aground years before on the northwest corner of the island, and the young officer snapped a picture of it.
Mr. Bevington didn’t know he had also captured something sticking out of the water. The Bevington Object, as it became known, was less than one millimeter long — a tiny speck near the edge of the frame.
It's not easy to find a tour guide in Gaza. Even clerks at the local Tourism Ministry, a vestige of the 1990s that remarkably still exists, struggle to recommend professional guides, before suggesting a man who hasn't led tourists around for 20 years.
Ayman Hassouna seems delighted to spend a sweltering day in a suit jacket, showing off the historical sites, colorful markets and delicious grilled fish of his native Gaza — among other unexpected gems made even more precious by the reality that most people in the world are unable to experience them.
In the mid-1990s, people could still claim that technology is value-neutral without being laughed at. Yet, even then, it was obvious that the internet pioneers had designed their protocols to conform to the values common to the scientists who were the internet's earliest users: openness, transparency, collaboration, and free access. Technical proposals were meant to be accepted because they were the best solution, not because they were beneficial for some particular company or research institution. Both inside and outside the US, the American First Amendment seemed embedded in those designs, exported as a stowaway with every new connection.
Even so, within the US, a pair of legal cases from pre-internet information services created doubt. In 1991's Cubby v. CompuServe, the Southern District of New York ruled that CompuServe was a distributor, and therefore not liable for a defamation claim against a third-party poster, because CompuServe played no role in editing content. In 1995, Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy, New York Supreme Court ruled that Prodigy, by virtue of its claim to moderate content, was a publisher and therefore liable.