Whatcha Reading? (Picking it up again)

I want this!

Not Susan Sontag-- the poster behind her.

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Agreed! Is it French? The language looks French to me?

Taylor Swift Thats Cool GIF by The Voice

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Right?

(Or maybe Italian?)

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I just read this, really good!

Great voice/style, lots of heart (if you know it, you’ll see what i did there).

Good feature on her writing:

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La rapidissima
“The fastest”

It’s Italian.

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Thanks!

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In case anyone else hits a paywall:

https://archive.ph/1X2Ut

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Oooh, be still my beating heart! :heartbeat:

Thanks, I imagine someone sells copies, off to try my Google-jitsu.

Edit:

https://www.artyposters.com/product/olivetti-typewriter-vintage-poster/

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By Chimamanda Adichie

https://archive.md/V1iTr

In Nigeria, I had often thought about who I was—writer, dreamer, thinker— but only in America did I consider what I was.

I became Black in America. It was not a choice—my chocolate-colored skin saw to that—but a revelation. I had never before thought of myself as “Black”; I did not need to, because while British colonialism in Nigeria left many cursed legacies in its wake, racial identity was not one of them. Had I been raised in eastern or southern Africa, with their own insidious inheritances of history, perhaps I might have thought of myself in terms of skin color. In Nigeria, I was Igbo and Roman Catholic, and even then, growing up on a genteel university campus, neither had a significant bearing on the way I moved through the world.

To be Black in America was to feel bulldozed by the weight of history and stereotypes, to know that race was always a possible reason, or cause, or explanation for the big and small interactions that make up our fragile lives. To be Black was to realize that it was impossible for people to approach one another with the simple wonder of being human, without the specter of race lying somewhere in the shadows. To be Black was to feel, in different circumstances, frustration, anger, irritation, and wry amusement. It also brought the rare wealth of discovering African American literature, those stories full of such graceful grit. Black American writing instructed and delighted me, and I must have at some unconscious level wanted to contribute to that tradition, but obliquely, as someone standing outside American culture, a Black person without America’s blighted history.

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Olivetti typewriters and rapidíssima = Italian but it could well be a French ad. Looking up those words one of the images is from Walmart so I’d say they were selling it! I don’t think the poster looks as good in the original colour though/

ETA
Everyone was there ahead of me.

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A round of drinks on Robert!

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Happy Hour Fun GIF by Law & Order

Slainte!

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In her debut book, Extremely Online , she reveals how online influence came to upend the world, demolishing traditional barriers and creating whole new sectors of the economy. Lorenz shows this phenomenon to be one of the most disruptive changes in modern capitalism.

By tracing how the internet has changed what we want and how we go about getting it, Lorenz unearths how social platforms’ power users radically altered our expectations of content, connection, purchasing, and power. Lorenz documents how moms who started blogging were among the first to monetize their personal brands online, how bored teens who began posting selfie videos reinvented fame as we know it, and how young creators on TikTok are leveraging opportunities to opt out of the traditional career pipeline. It’s the real social history of the internet.

Emerging seemingly out of nowhere, these shifts in how we use the internet seem easy to dismiss as fads. However, these social and economic transformations created a digital dynamic so unappreciated and insurgent that it ultimately created new approaches to work, entertainment, fame, and ambition in the 21st century.

Extremely Online is the inside, untold story of what we have done to the internet, and what it has done to us.

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https://archive.md/zZgqZ

This past Saturday, as part of the festival, Gessen was set to moderate a panel showcasing writers in exile, two of them, like Gessen, Russian-born authors who had left their country in disgust. But a day before the event, ticket holders received an email saying that because of “unforeseen circumstances” the panel had been canceled. Their money would be refunded. No other explanation was offered and any trace of the event disappeared from PEN’s program online.

A small delegation of Ukrainian writers, who participated in a panel planned for the same day as the canceled Gessen event, had declared they could not attend a festival that included Russians. Because two of the writers, Artem Chapeye and Artem Chekh, are active-duty soldiers in the Ukrainian army, they argued that there were legal and ethical restrictions against their participation. Chapeye, a writer whose short story “The Ukraine” was recently published in The New Yorker, texted with me from a bus on his way back to Ukraine. He didn’t see himself as having boycotted the Russians. It was simply that their presence was incompatible with his. “The Russian participants decided to cancel their event themselves because we as active soldiers were not able to participate under the same umbrella,” he wrote.

Chapeye said he couldn’t make distinctions between “good” Russians and “bad” Russians in this case. “Until the war ends,” he wrote to me, “a soldier can not be seen with the ‘good Russians.’”

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In an exclusive excerpt from Miss Major’s long-awaited book, the legendary activist explains why as far as Black trans folks are concerned, it’s as if Stonewall never happened.

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Thanks for the suggestion. Was able to borrow on Libby. Sweet.

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Hopefully, you enjoyed it! It found it an interested take on the genre…

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Looking forward to this one.

Doppelganger, out in September, uses the fact that Klein has often been mistaken for author Naomi Wolf as a jumping-off point to explore conspiracy theories and what Klein calls the “Mirror World”, our destabilised present rife with doubles and confusion.

Combining “tragicomic memoir, chilling political reportage and piercing cultural analysis”, UK publisher Penguin Press said Klein will look at how “far-right movements feign solidarity with the working class, AI-generated content blurs the line between genuine and spurious and new age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers further scramble our familiar political allegiances”.

Klein’s book discusses the author’s “doppelganger”, Wolf, whose name and public persona, “are sufficiently similar that many people have confused the two over the years” even though her views are “antithetical to Klein’s own”, according to her UK publisher.

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