Nicholas Carr contrasts situational information overload, easily assuaged by search engines and filters that let us find our needle in a haystack, with ambient overload, which he describes as “haystack-sized piles of needles”:

We keep clicking links, keep hitting the refresh key, keep opening new tabs, keep checking email in-boxes and RSS feeds, keep scanning Amazon and Netflix recommendations — and yet the pile of interesting information never shrinks.

There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.

from The Desire to Paint by Charles Baudelaire

At SAI, Steve Cheney writes about how Facebook is “no longer a social network” but essentially a reality-TV broadcaster. “People don’t want one normalized identity, either in real life, or virtually,” he argues. Nonetheless, Facebook imposes unity on our online behavior and broadcasts our doings more or less indiscriminately, which in turn makes what we do “sterile and neutered.”

(Image: Vivian Maier)

At the Beheld, Autumn Whitefield-Madrano discusses how prettiness can become an implicit contract in which small favors come at the cost of a broader complicity:

I’ve never consciously exploited being a young-enough, attractive-enough woman for personal gain. But that’s just it: I’ve never consciously done it. How many times have I told myself that I’m just being friendly—and meant it! I am a friendly person!—quietly knowing that on the back end there’s a small reward that I might not get if I weren’t a young-enough, attractive-enough woman?

Brooklyn based lit-mag Armchair/Shotgun kick off their Author Drink Review with Teddy Wayne, author of Kapitoil at Angel Share. Drinks ordered: (1) Stormy Weather (2) Whip the Mule

On Friday, March 4, a symposium: The Scandals of Susan Sontag, at CUNY’s Elebash Recital Hall.

At Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee reviews Terry Castle’s memoirish The Professor and Other Writings.

In the LRB, from March 2005, Castle recounts her turbulent “semi-friendship” with Sontag:

Then she stopped abruptly and asked, grim-faced, if I’d ever had to evade sniper fire. I said, no, unfortunately not. Lickety-split she was off – dashing in a feverish crouch from one boutique doorway to the next, white tennis shoes a blur, all the way down the street to Restoration Hardware and the Baskin-Robbins store.

Eaten away by the Everglades, Florida is a drowned state, the end of America, and thus the ideal setting for a story about the end of American manhood. This is the tip of the country; this is a peninsula that pokes feebly at the ocean, which feels nothing.

At This Recording, Elizabeth Gumport assesses John McNaughton’s neglected 1998 masterpiece, Wild Things .

The librettist of a new opera based on Anna Nicole Smith’s life defends his choice of subject:

“People ask me if she’s worthy,” he wrote. “What’s ‘worthy’? And who gets to decide? Everything is a fitting subject for an opera. Every life lived contains glory and tragedy. If we live our lives on a scale of one to 10, then most of us, most of the time, experience something between three and seven. Anna was ones and 10s from beginning to end.”

Dull-eyed, he gazed at the wall of books. He hated the whole lot of them, old and new, highbrow and lowbrow, snooty and chirpy. The mere sight of them brought home to him his own sterility. For here was he, supposedly a ‘writer’, and he couldn’t even ‘write’! It wasn’t merely a question of not getting published; it was that he produced nothing, or next to nothing. And all that tripe cluttering the shelves — well, at any rate it existed; it was an achievement of sorts… But it was the snooty ‘cultured’ kind of books that he hated the worst. Books of criticism and belles-lettres. The kind of thing that those moneyed young beasts from Cambridge write almost in their sleep — and that Gordon himself might have written if he had had a little more money. Money and culture! In a country like England you can no more be cultured without money than you can join the Cavalry Club.

—from George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying

The Last Psychiatrist responds to a New York magazine story about men replacing real sex with masturbation to online porn: “No one climaxes unexpectedly from watching online porn. You decide you’re done… You have to decide the time has run out. This is why online porn is so problematic: there’s no natural end in sight… You don’t do it because you’re horny, you do it because you’re bored.”

Kristol was not a Trilling, a Hook, a Howe or a Bell. For that matter, he never produced anything as substantial as his wife’s scholarly meditations on English history.

In the New York Times Book Review, Paul Berman reviews The Neoconservative Persuasion, a collection of previously unanthologized essays by Irving Kristol.

Devin Friedman visits a Silicon Valley startup incubator for GQ and talks to the would-be architects of the internet’s “social layer” and “game layer.” The social layer captures our social activity as exploitable productive labor; the game layer then strives to increase that labor’s productivity.

I’d finally found what most of us are looking for: a place where people would listen to us and congratulate us on our opinions about everything.

“Social media is not going to create dissent where there is none.” In the wake of Egypt’s attempt to shut off the internet, seven theses on the “dictator’s dilemma” from sociologist Zeynep Tufekci

(Image: Al Jazeera)

Benjamin Kunkel surveys David Harvey’s Marxist crisis theory in the London Review of Books

We all want to know that we matter, and being paid is one way of knowing we have value. It may be inelegant and often impersonal, but because money is quantifiable, its message is indisputable.

At Salon, a prostitute writing under the pen name of Charlotte Shane describes the “merciful clarity” of having a number with which to quantify one’s value.