Books

Delany, who is seriously one of the greats, is “willing to discuss nearly anything but his own literary significance. Openly sharing the most intimate minutiae of his life—finances, hookup apps, Depends—he recoiled with Victorian modesty whenever I asked why he’d written his books or what they meant to his readers.”

#BookTok is evidently a big thing, and seeing how influential its platform is, TikTok owner ByteDance has begun to court writers to publish their books under its new 8th Note Press, according to The New York Times.

Hello, fellow olds. Let’s help solve a mystery. Remember that cover of A Wrinkle in Time with the centaur that’s got wings for arms? The nightmare-fuel one? Okay. Does anyone know who designed it?

Check out the new Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy collectible edition being released tomorrow by The Folio Society. Gizmodo has some of the artwork in a slideshow.

The actor Edward Herrmann, who died in 2014, is still the narrator for newly-published audiobooks. His family has used DeepZen Ltd, to reanimate his voice, and presumably make more profits from his synthetic narration.

Hulu’s apparently no longer working on an adaptation of The Devil in the White City, a book about a serial killer and a world’s fair that helped usher in alternating current electricity as the dominant form of power.

Ken Kocienda, the longtime Apple designer and current exec at Humane, dropped 12 books he recommends in a tweet thread. They’re not all tech, but they’re mostly tech, and I nodded vigorously at all the ones I’ve read before. Definitely reading Longitude this weekend, too.

If you don’t know about Lena Forsén — aka the ‘Patron Saint of JPEGs’ — then a little history lesson wouldn’t go amiss today. You can read all about Forsén in my review for the London Review of Books of Dylan Mulvin’s book “Proxies.” It’s all about the standards, templates, and, yes, Playboy photographs, that invisibly shape the technological landscape around us.

The obvious example is Peter Thiel naming his surveillance company Palantir (after an unspeakably evil scrying artifact that irreversibly corrupts its users?) but once you notice one profile of an alt-right or extremist figure mentioning how much they love Lord of the Rings, you start seeing it everywhere — including the footnotes of specious lawsuits attempting to undermine the 2020 election.