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Zola, born in 1840, two years before Stendhal died, and one year after the appearance of the daguerreotype—the first commercially practical photographic process—referred to this impossible reproduction of a consensus reality as “idealism,” and opposed it with “naturalism,” which characterized novel…

What Lanier calls this type of redistribution: “The humanistic information economy.”

How disappointed is this reviewer in Lanier: Enough to end our relationship, despite forfeiture of any future “nanopayments.”

WHEN WE STOPPED SAYING WE WERE GOING TO MOVE OUT OF THE CITY

When we stopped saying we were going to move out of the city, we had: nothing to talk about at parties, nothing to talk about on the Q/N/R trains, nothing to talk about to my aunt, her mom, the pizza guy, over decent but insufferabl…

By contrast, the techniques that Lish imposed on his own fiction, and that he advocated for decades in the notorious non-MFA writing workshops he ran after leaving Knopf (workshops in which he mentored, among others, Amy Hempel, Christine Schutt, and Diane Williams), are considerably simpler to art…

“Bleeding edge” is a techie phrase meaning beyond even the “cutting edge”—so new that it hurts. The irony of this as a title is that the novel is set mostly in the spring and summer of 2001. Pynchon offers such nostalgic references as Beanie Babies, Furbys, Pokémon, Razor scooters, and Jennifer Ani…