Friday News: editing Milo, best of book lists, lava lamps, and funny animal pics
2017’s Last Surprise: Milo’s Book Edits Are a Reading Masterpiece – If you’ve (happily?) forgotten that time when Simon & Schuster cancelled Milo Yiannopoulous’s contract for Dangerous (which he later self-published), dredge up the memory long enough to check out the editing on the S&S manuscript, which has been submitted as evidence in response to Milo’s suit against the publisher. I would feel sorry for Mitchell Ivers, the editor in question, except for the fact that he acquired the book in the first place, so to the victor go the spoils – or the spoiled bigoted brats. Anyway, you can download the edited MS yourself from the New York Courts website (search by party: Schuster), but in the meantime, check out some of the excerpts (and keep in mind that it’s all pretty offensive):
You know your life is in shambles when you’re being taken down a peg by the Track Changes function. Anybody who has ever worked with an editor or even a particularly friendly pedant has found themselves on the receiving end of a critique or suggestion that may have bruised the ego. But there’s a big difference between “You should maybe find another way to say this” and “My advice would be to crawl back into the womb, and start everything over again. Whatever you are, whoever you thought you’d become, that’s cancelled.” The Ivers edits are solidly on the latter end of that spectrum. – Elle
Best books of 2017: indie publishers on their favourite books of the year – A good friend assures me that The Guardian has cleaned up its act since the Kathleen Hale scandal, so I am willing to give the publication some linkage with this interesting book list, in which independent publishers name their book of the year (and it really is their book of the year in the publishing sense), a book of theirs that ‘should have done better,’ and a book ‘they wish they had published.’ In too many cases that last category gets short shrift, and let’s face it, the whole post is still marketing, but at least it’s not the same Booker and NBA lists regurgitated for the hundredth time. For example, here is Dead Ink’s Nathan Connolly’s entry:
The book that made my year: Without a doubt, Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class By the Working Class. After raising £10k on Kickstarter, this collection has gone on to be our bestselling book ever. The important conversations it has started about being working class in Britain today are vital.
Our book that deserved to do better: Not that it hasn’t done well, but Naomi Booth’s Sealed is a book that everyone should be reading. An expertly crafted eco-horror that is so beautifully written that it should be sold as poetry. No book has summed up our precarious position in the world so well for me.
I wish I’d published:The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers. Within this book there is something beyond truth: a mythology of England’s North. – Guardian
The Best Comic Book Covers of 2017 – 75 provocative comic book covers, guided by this philosophy (and a reminder that “book” applies here, too) :
Every month, we curate cover galleries that reinforce comics as the default home of transgressive, batshit-cool art. Comic covers have more responsibility than to solely look alluring: they must represent the 20 pages (or more) of story beyond the cover they adorn in one striking image. And if they’re really good, they also channel the mood of the story within as well. – Paste Magazine
Encryption Lava Lamps – This is just plain cool. A wall of more than 100 lava lamps generating random patterns that are videotaped and converted into “virtually unhackable code” for the roughly 10% of the Internet that Cloudflare protects. You can even see the display in the company’s San Francisco headquarters, and in doing so, you are allegedly making a contribution to online security:
It may seem bizarre that Cloudflare would allow average people to affect the video footage, but that’s actually intentional. External disturbances like human movement, static, and changes in lighting from the adjacent windows all work together to make the random code even harder to predict. So, by standing in front of the lava lamp display, you add an additional variable to the code, making it even harder to hack. In a way, by visiting Cloudflare’s wall of lava lamps, you can play a role in making the internet more secure. – Atlas Obscura
Award Winning Images Capture the Goofiness of the Animal Kingdom – Winners of the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards. A great way to end the not-so-goofy tricks of 2017 – Smithsonian
We hope everyone has a safe and happy New Year’s weekend!
