Tuesday News: Did Uber threaten a female journalist; are books essential goods; why is the Internet a guilty pleasure; and how we can get the meaning of life in 60 seconds or less

JanetPublishing NewsBooks / creative writing / doxxing / harassment / Internet / journalists / Literary Criticism / Misogyny / philosophy / publishing / Uber / videos10 Comments

Report: Senior Uber exec threatened to dig up dirt on journalists – So apparently stalking and doxxing have gone mainstream. According to a story in Buzzfeed and discussed in this Gigaom piece, Uber’s Senior Vice President of Business Emil Michael proposed holding female journalist Sarah Lacy “personally responsible” for any woman who deleted the Uber app and then got sexually assaulted. Lacy wrote a story about how she removed the app in the wake of some not so woman-friendly comments from folks at Uber. Part of this ‘personal responsibility’ apparently involved proving “a particular and very specific claim about her personal life.” I know that many women think that Gamergate is fringe. But an Uber executive is not, especially when this conversation apparently occurred in public. Did this really happen? If it did, it’s so seriously fucked up that I can barely manage to assimilate it. And no fucking way am I installing the Uber app.

Uber has extensive data on its customers, from their credit card numbers to real-time locations. With the power of that information, it would have an easy upper hand at tracking reporters — and almost anyone using its service, really — and unveiling details of their personal lives. The idea of them attacking journalists in a Machiavellian political scheme is downright creepy. It also says a lot about the company’s ethical issues and take-no-prisoner approach to business. –Gigaom

Should the United States Declare Books an ‘Essential Good’? – Daniel Mendelsohn and Mohsin Hamid trade arguments about whether the US should make books an “essential good.” Both use the example of France, where books are considered an essential good, to make their argument. Mendelsohn claims that the government has protected French literary culture, and because of that, the French read, on average, 25% more books per year than Americans. By contrast, Hamid is wary of the idea that writers are any different from other “workers,” and that Americans need to see themselves as both producers and consumers, as was the case in the mid-20th century. As he describes his position:

In the balance between our rights as consumers and as producers — as, go on, say it: laborers — the pendulum has swung too far one way. (I say “our” rights even though I live in Pakistan and don’t have an American passport; my qualifications are a merit badge as a cub scout in California and 17 years of residing in the United States.)

The America that boomed in the mid-20th century was a place where the state demanded that male citizens surrender years of their lives to national service, where the top income tax rate hovered between 70 and 94 percent, and where commercial banks were prohibited from investment banking. It was a veritable socialist paradise compared to the America of today. –New York Times

Why I Am Teaching a Course Called “Wasting Time on the Internet” – University of Pennsylvania’s Kenneth Goldsmith is teaching a creative writing class that is based in the idea of “wasting time on the internet,” or how our online life is actually a form of personal expression and we need to get over this idea that our online engagement is somehow inferior or shameful. It’s a pretty interesting and provocative piece, and I kind of want to take the class.

Similarly, I have no doubt that the students in “Wasting Time on the Internet” will use Web surfing as a form of self-expression. Every click is indicative of who we are: indicative of our likes, our dislikes, our emotions, our politics, our world view. Of course, marketers have long recognized this, but literature hasn’t yet learned to treasure—and exploit—this situation. The idea for this class arose from my frustration with reading endless indictments of the Web for making us dumber. I’ve been feeling just the opposite. We’re reading and writing more than we have in a generation, but we are reading and writing differently—skimming, parsing, grazing, bookmarking, forwarding, retweeting, reblogging, and spamming language—in ways that aren’t yet recognized as literary.

And yet this is nothing new: modernism prepared us to interact with words in the digital environment. Joyce’s use of compound words in “Finnegans Wake” predicted lengthy run-on hashtags; Mallarmé’s visual use of words splayed across pages are, in essence, nineteenth-century animated GIFs; Zola’s “Rougon-Macquart” series anticipates long-form blogging; Hester Thrale’s trolling of Boswell in the margins is exactly what happens in comment streams; and Félix Fénéon’s recasting of newspaper headlines as poems in his “Novels in Three Lines” is a 1906 version of Twitter. –The New Yorker

A History of Ideas: Animated Videos Explain Theories of Simone de Beauvoir, Edmund Burke & Other Philosophers – 60-second animated clips, narrated by Harry Shearer and each focused on either a philosophical issue, debate, or thinker. Written for people with absolutely no background in these subjects. Good luck pulling yourself away from these little gems.

Drawn from Bragg’s BBC 4 radio program “A History of Ideas,” the shorts introduce exactly that—each one a précis of a longstanding philosophical problem like Free Will vs. Determinism (top) or the Problem of Evil (above). Unlike some similarly rapid outlines, these videos—like the tie-in Bragg radio program—don’t simply sketch out the issues in abstract; they draw from specific approaches from fields as diverse as neuroscience, moral philosophy, theology, and feminist theory. –Open Culture

Janet

isn't sure if she's an average Romance reader, or even an average reader, but a reader she is, enjoying everything from literary fiction to philosophy to history to poetry. Historical Romance was her first love within the genre, but she's fickle and easily seduced by the promise of a good read. She approaches every book with the same hope: that she will be filled from the inside out with something awesome that she didnʼt know, didnʼt think about, or didnʼt feel until that moment. And she's always looking for the next mind-blowing read, so feel free to share any suggestions!

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