Roberto Bolano: The Savage Detectives

[ed. Just finished reading Bolano's 2666 a few weeks ago. This, The Savage Detectives, is next.]

Over the last few years, Roberto Bolaño's reputation, in English at least, has been spreading in a quiet contagion; the loud arrival of a long novel, "The Savage Detectives," will ensure that few are now untouched. Until recently there was even something a little Masonic about the way Bolaño's name was passed along between readers in this country; I owe my awareness of him to a friend who excitedly lent me a now never-to-be-returned copy of Bolaño's extraordinary novella "By Night in Chile." This wonderfully strange Chilean imaginer, at once a grounded realist and a lyricist of the speculative, who died in 2003 at the age of 50, has been acknowledged for a few years now in the Spanish-speaking world as one of the greatest and most influential modern writers. Those without Spanish have had to rely on the loyal intermittence of translation, beginning with "By Night in Chile" (2003), two more short novels — "Distant Star" (2004) and "Amulet" (2007) — and a book of stories, "Last Evenings on Earth" (2006), all translated by Chris Andrews and published by New Directions.

The best way to offer a sense of this writer might be to take a scene, and a sentence, from "By Night in Chile," still his greatest work. The book is narrated by Father Urrutia, a dying priest and conservative literary critic, a member of Opus Dei, who comes to emblematize, by the novella's end, the silent complicity of the Chilean literary establishment with the murderous Pinochet regime. In one episode, Father Urrutia is sent to Europe, by Opus Dei agents, to report on the preservation of the churches there.

This is where Bolaño's imagination suddenly expands into a magical diorama. Father Urrutia discovers that the chief threat to the churches comes from pigeon excrement, and that all over Europe churches have been using falcons to kill the pests. In Turin, Father Angelo has a fearsome falcon called Othello; in Strasbourg, Father Joseph has one named Xenophon; in Avignon, the murderous falcon is named Ta Gueule, and the narrator watches it in action:

"Ta Gueule appeared again like a lightning bolt, or the abstract idea of a lightning bolt, and stooped on the huge flocks of starlings coming out of the west like swarms of flies, darkening the sky with their erratic fluttering, and after a few minutes the fluttering of the starlings was bloodied, scattered and bloodied, and afternoon on the outskirts of Avignon took on a deep red hue, like the color of sunsets seen from an airplane, or the color of dawns, when the passenger is woken gently by the engines whistling in his ears and lifts up the little blind and sees the horizon marked with a red line, like the planet's femoral artery, or the planet's aorta, gradually swelling, and I saw that swelling blood vessel in the sky over Avignon, the blood-stained flight of the starlings, Ta Guele splashing color like an Abstract Expressionist painter."

Much of the most successfully daring postwar fiction has been by writers committed to the long dramatic sentence (Bohumil Hrabal, Thomas Bernhard, W. G. Sebald, José Saramago). Bolaño is in their company: the quotation here is broken off of a phrase that takes about a page in the book. The musical control is impeccable, and one is struck by Bolaño's ability to nudge on his long, light, ethereal sentence — impossibly, like someone punting a leaf — image by image: the falcon, the red hue, the sunset, the dawn, the dawn seen from a plane, the femoral artery, the blood vessel, the abstract painter. It could so easily be too much, and somehow isn't, the flight of fancy anchored by precision and a just-suppressed comedy. (In Spain, amusingly, the falcons are too old or docile for killing, and the priests have none of the dangerous elegance of their French or Italian counterparts.) Likewise, this fantasia about falcons in every European city might have been thuddingly allegorical or irritatingly whimsical, and isn't. It is comically plausible, and concretely evoked; the surrealism lies in the systematic elaboration of the image. The Catholic Church is likened to a bird of prey, murderous and blood-red in its second capital, Avignon, and we are free to link this, without coercion, to the Chilean situation and the ethical somnolence of Father Urrutia.

That long sentence is a poem, really, proceeding by foliation; in fact the entire novella is a poem of a kind. It will not surprise you to learn that Roberto Bolaño wrote poetry before he wrote fiction. Even in a long novel like "The Savage Detectives," his favorite unit is the discrete, Browning-like monologue, not the extended scene. He was born in Chile in 1953, but came of age in Mexico City, where his family had moved in 1968. Returning to Chile in 1973 to help with the socialist revolution as he saw it, he was caught in the Pinochet coup and briefly arrested. He went back to Mexico, where he published two books of verse, and then began a long period of displacement and travel and drug-taking and odd jobs in France and Spain. He died of liver failure, in Barcelona, a far violin among near balalaikas (to adapt Nabokov's words on a fellow exiled writer). He knew time was short: the fiction that is currently being translated — there are more novellas to come, and a huge novel, "2666," will appear in English next year — was written in a spasm of activity in his last years.

by James Wood, NY Times (2007) |  Read more:

Image: Mathieu Bourgois

Rhys Owens
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Einsamer Angler, Rüdiger Fritsche
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Rodrigo y Gabriela

Let’s Consider Kate

As the new governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, takes up his job, it’s a good moment to reflect on the nature and scale of the work ahead of him. In the rear-view mirror, he can see how our banks reached their current condition – a story full of failure, scandal, greed and incompetence. That, as far as the overall picture of modern Britain is concerned, is the fun part. The difficult thing is looking forward and trying to work out what to do next. That’s because in their current condition our banks are an existential threat to British democracy, a more serious one than terrorism, either external or internal (...)

The reason for that is that in the UK bank assets are 492 per cent of GDP. In plain English, our banks are five times bigger than our entire economy. (When the Icelandic and Cypriot banking systems collapsed the respective figures were 880 and 700 per cent.) We know from the events of 2008 and subsequently that the financial sector, indeed the whole world economy, is in an inherently unstable condition. Put the size together with the instability, and we are facing a danger that is no less real for not being on the front page this exact second. This has to be fixed, and it has to be fixed soon, and nothing about fixing it is easy.

We need two things from our banks. One of them is to keep lending money, especially to small businesses, which are essential as the engine of economic activity – the route out of the state we’re in. The government has poured unprecedented amounts of money into the economy in an attempt to get it moving. It’s done so through quantitative easing, which involves buying back its own bonds using money that doesn’t actually exist. It’s like borrowing money from somebody and then paying them back with a piece of paper on which you’ve written the word ‘Money’ – and then, magically, it turns out that the piece of paper with ‘Money’ on it is real money. (Note: don’t try this.) Another way of describing quantitative easing would be that it is as if, when you look up your bank balance online, you had the additional ability to add to it just by typing numbers on your keyboard. Ordinary punters can’t do this, obviously, but governments can; then they use this newly created magic money to buy back their own debt. That’s what quantitative easing is.

by John Lanchester, LRB | Read more:
Image: BBC

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Ana Elisa Egreja
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Ron Terner
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Someboy Has to be in Control

George Clooney was at home in Los Angeles one afternoon in mid-January, a few days before he flew to Sudan in his new role as a United Nations “Messenger of Peace” (an appointment that overlooked reports of a recent public scuffle with Fabio, the leonine model). Clooney, who is unusual in being both very famous and, apparently, at ease with the fact—he can sometimes look like a spokesman for celebrity itself—was sitting on a long pale sofa, alongside Sarah Larson, his girlfriend. Bowls of chopped salad were on the coffee table in front of them: when Clooney’s electronic pepper grinder was activated, it sent a beam of light shining down onto the lettuce, like a police helicopter.

It was the “for your consideration” season—the run-up to the Oscars, when film studios lobby for the votes of Academy members, using means of varying subtlety. For some days, Clooney had been driven here and there in the back of a black Mercedes, and his presence at promotional cocktail parties had served as an advertisement for “Michael Clayton,” last year’s chilly corruption drama, in which he starred. (The film went on to be nominated in seven categories, including Best Actor; it received one Oscar, for Tilda Swinton, in a supporting part.) I had seen Clooney that morning, still in the role of candidate, in front of a bright-pink curtain on the stage of a theatre at the Hammer Museum, in Westwood, taking part in an Oscar-related panel discussion about acting and filmmaking, with Angelina Jolie, Daniel Day-Lewis, James McAvoy, and others. The event, organized by Newsweek,was leisurely, designed to encourage a degree of self-analysis, but Clooney (looking about as skinny as a young Sinatra, his sunglasses hooked over the opening of his collar) seemed to have set himself the task of resisting group drift toward actorly grandeur or celebrity griping. He was unremittingly affable. “We have time for one more question,” he said, after taking his seat. He traded running jokes with McAvoy, and made mock-scornful comments about Day-Lewis’s exalted reputation. (“You just kill it for the rest of us; we’ll take care of you, pal.”) He capped a conversation about paparazzi intrusions with a politic acknowledgment of the privileges of fame. His manner—nonchalance underpinned, it seemed, by vigilance and self-scrutiny—carried the suggestion that almost any divergence from banter was unforgivable artsy narcissism.

This is probably the performance for which Clooney, now forty-six, is still best known, even as he has become a Hollywood emperor, not to mention a left-leaning activist and a friend of Senator Barack Obama’s. Clooney is America’s national flirt, a pitchman on talk shows and red carpets who, against the background hum of the world’s lust and envy, is lightly ironic, clever, and self-deprecating, with furrowed brow and bobbing head, and a gyration in the lower jaw suggesting something being moved around under his tongue. This busy charm—a man on his way out to a party, feeling pretty good about his hair—was profitably packaged in “Ocean’s Eleven” and its two sequels, films that, more than anything, seemed to be oblique views of the A-list esprit de corps, real or imagined, that went into making them; they were fictions yearning to be “making of” documentaries. (Together, they earned more than a billion dollars.) And that charm was largely withheld, to effect, in the downbeat roles that Clooney took in “Syriana” and “Michael Clayton.” There he played hurting, unanchored men. In both cases, he was assigned a romantic partner—played by Greta Scacchi and Jennifer Ehle, in turn—who was edited out of the movie, with Clooney’s blessing. (Referring to his “Clayton” character—a back-room fixer in a New York law firm—Clooney explained to me, “If he’s loved, then he has a buffer, and somehow it isn’t as awful.”) (...)

I was introduced to Clooney after the panel discussion; his handshake became a shoulder squeeze, and he apologized for the thing taking so long. We got into his car. He was wearing jeans and a thin black sweater and high-laced black work boots. He looked tanned and a little worn, and my mind turned for a moment to “Leatherheads”—his latest film, a comedy about nineteen-twenties football, which he also directed—where it’s sometimes hard to see where his face ends and his beautifully thin brown leather jacket begins. He had a headache, the legacy of a gruesome spinal injury incurred in 2004, while filming a torture scene for “Syriana.” (He hit his head on a concrete floor; not long afterward, cerebrospinal fluid began to leak out of his nose.) His discomfort, which is fairly persistent, was today at the level of “eating ice cream too fast.” The panel discussion had lasted two hours, but he kept talking anyway, in a quiet, dry voice—about a guest saying “Listen, you’ve got my vote” at a “Michael Clayton” Oscar party (“That’s saying out loud what you were pretending wasn’t happening,” he told me, laughing), and a recent night out at a bar in Santa Monica after an award-giving event, with Daniel Day-Lewis, Javier Bardem, Benicio Del Toro, and Sean Penn, during which “we got hammered and we all came to the conclusion we wanted to be Javier Bardem.” He then carefully made the point that none of his closest friends are movie stars. “There are people you spend a lot of time with, and people you enjoy seeing at the office party,” he said—the office party, in this context, being the Venice Film Festival. Speaking of his “Ocean’s” co-stars Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, he said, “Brad and I talk, and Matt and I talk, on a fairly regular basis—text each other, give each other shit.” But, he continued, “I have my friends, nine guys for twenty-five years; they’re the guys I see every Sunday.”

by Ian Parker, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photograph by Martin Schoeller.

How Should Doctors Share Impossible Decisions With Their Patients?

On a Friday evening a few months ago, my mom broke her arm. A doctor in the E.R. told her it was a simple fracture, and put her arm in a sling. The following Monday, though, she called me. She had consulted two surgeons who had a different assessment: the bone was broken in four places, surgery would be quite involved, and the rates of complications were high.

“How high?” I asked.

“Twenty-to-fifty-per-cent risk of avascular necrosis,” she said.

“And the alternative?”

“No surgery,” she said. “Good chance of immobility and arthritis for the rest of my life.”

And then, after a moment of thinking I might throw up, I said, “I don’t understand. What does avascular necrosis mean?”

Here’s the thing: I’m a doctor. Strictly speaking, I know what avascular necrosis means. It means the bone can die. It means the blood vessels can be compromised. Which means, again, dead bone. My mom, a cardiologist, knows this too, as does my father, a rheumatologist.

But what I meant was: What did it really mean? How would it feel? How was she supposed to make such an impossible decision?

According to the Affordable Care Act, one answer is something called “shared decision-making,” or S.D.M. It’s an approach to medical care in which patients are encouraged to make decisions with their doctors. For some clinical scenarios, like having a heart attack, there is one best treatment, but for many others more than one reasonable option exists. For these less clear-cut decisions, like treatment of early-stage breast cancer, or whether to get prostate-cancer screening, S.D.M. aims to integrate patients’ preferences and values into the weighing of each choice.

Though S.D.M. has captured the attention of policy leaders, investors, and researchers over the years—leading to the creation and testing of support tools, known as “decision aids”—it is rarely used in clinical practice. The A.C.A. aims to change that; it requires Accountable Care Organizations to integrate S.D.M. into the daily rhythms of patient care. Patient-satisfaction surveys, which are being used to partially determine reimbursement, will ask patients whether or not their care honored the principles of S.D.M.

S.D.M. advocates have argued that heeding patient preferences will help improve quality and cut costs. That remains to be determined. For now, we can at least agree that physicians can never fully grasp, nor anticipate, the subjective nature of their patients’ experiences. But whether the answer lies in asking patients to share more in the decision-making process remains a matter for debate. Doctors know all about probabilities and trade-offs, but we don’t know much about how to engage patients in decision-making in a way that actually achieves the most desired long-term outcome.(...)

So we increasingly ask our patients: Which do you prefer?

Do you want chemo and three months of life, or six weeks of life without the nausea and vomiting that the chemo causes? Do you want high-risk open-heart surgery, with a fifteen-per-cent risk of dying during the operation, or would you rather continue as you are, with a fifty-per-cent chance you will be dead in two years? Do you want a prostatectomy, which has a five-per-cent chance of impotence and incontinence, or radiation, with a three-per-cent chance of leaving a hole in your rectum, or would you rather “watch and wait,” with the chance that your cancer will never grow at all?

by Lisa Rosenbaum, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Garo/Phanie/Science Source.

Mission Creep: The Militarization of Law Enforcement

[ed. Now we will know how the Iraqis felt. When you have the resources, you naturally use them.]

Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game — but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit.

Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective David Baucum overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and some friends wagering on a college football game. “To Sal, betting a few bills on the Redskins was a stress reliever, done among friends,” a friend of Culosi’s told me shortly after his death. “None of us single, successful professionals ever thought that betting fifty bucks or so on the Virginia–Virginia Tech football game was a crime worthy of investigation.” Baucum apparently did. After overhearing the men wagering, Baucum befriended Culosi as a cover to begin investigating him. During the next several months, he talked Culosi into raising the stakes of what Culosi thought were just more fun wagers between friends to make watching sports more interesting. Eventually Culosi and Baucum bet more than $2,000 in a single day. Under Virginia law, that was enough for police to charge Culosi with running a gambling operation. And that’s when they brought in the SWAT team.

On the night of January 24, 2006, Baucum called Culosi and arranged a time to drop by to collect his winnings. When Culosi, barefoot and clad in a T-shirt and jeans, stepped out of his house to meet the man he thought was a friend, the SWAT team began to move in. Seconds later, Det. Deval Bullock, who had been on duty since 4:00 AM and hadn’t slept in seventeen hours, fired a bullet that pierced Culosi’s heart.

Sal Culosi’s last words were to Baucum, the cop he thought was a friend: “Dude, what are you doing?”

In March 2006, just two months after its ridiculous gambling investigation resulted in the death of an unarmed man, the Fairfax County Police Department issued a press release warning residents not to participate in office betting pools tied to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The title: “Illegal Gambling Not Worth the Risk.” Given the proximity to Culosi’s death, residents could be forgiven for thinking the police department believed wagering on sports was a crime punishable by execution.

In January 2011, the Culosi family accepted a $2 million settlement offer from Fairfax County. That same year, Virginia’s government spent $20 million promoting the state lottery.

The raid on Sal Culosi was merely another red flag indicating yet more SWAT team mission creep in America. It wasn’t even the first time a Virginia SWAT team had killed someone during a gambling raid. In 1998 a SWAT team in Virginia Beach shot and killed security guard Edward C. Reed during a 3:00 AM raid on a private club suspected of facilitating gambling. Police said they approached the tinted car where Reed was working security, knocked, and identified themselves, then shot Reed when he refused to drop his handgun. Reed’s family insisted the police story was unlikely. Reed had no criminal record. Why would he knowingly point his gun at a heavily armed police team? More likely, they said, Reed mistakenly believed the raiding officers were there to do harm, particularly given that the club had been robbed not long before the raid. Statements by the police themselves seem to back that account. According to officers at the scene, Reed’s last words were, “Why did you shoot me? I was reading a book.” (...)

It can also be difficult to trace an IP address to a physical address, which can lead to yet more mistaken raids. An example of that problem manifested in one of the more bizarre botched raids in recent years. It took place in September 2006, when a SWAT team from the Bedford County sheriff’s department stormed the rural Virginia home of A. J. Nuckols, his wife, and their two children. Police had traced the IP address of someone trading child porn online to the Nuckols’ physical address. They had made a mistake. As if the shock of having his house invaded by a SWAT team wasn’t enough, Nuckols was in for another surprise. In a letter to the editor of the Chatham Star Review, he described the raid: “Men ran at me, dropped into shooting position, double-handed semi-automatic pistols pointed at me, and made me put my hands against my truck. I was held at gunpoint, searched, taunted, and led into the house. I had no idea what this was about. I was scared beyond description.”

He then looked up, and saw . . . former NBA star Shaquille O’Neal.

O’Neal, an aspiring lawman, had been made an “honorary deputy” with the department. Though he had no training as a SWAT officer, Shaq apparently had gone on several such raids with other police departments around the country. The thrill of bringing an untrained celebrity along apparently trumped the requirement that SWAT teams be staffed only with the most elite, most highly qualified and best-trained cops. According to Nuckols, O’Neal reached into Nuckols’s pickup, snatched up his (perfectly legal) rifle, and exclaimed, “We’ve got a gun!” O’Neal told Time that Nuckols’s description of the raid on his home was exaggerated. “It ain’t no story,” he said. “We did everything right, went to the judge, got a warrant. You know, they make it seem like we beat him up, and that never happened. We went in, talked to him, took some stuff, returned it—bada bam, bada bing.”

Incidentally, there have been other strange incidents of SWAT teams with star power. Matt Damon accompanied SWAT officers on several raids while preparing for the movie “The Departed.” And after police mistakenly shot and killed immigrant and father Ismael Mena on a raid in Denver in 1999, they revealed that Colorado Rockies first baseman Mike Lansing had gone along for the ride. Denver police added that it was fairly common to take sports stars on drug raids.

In 2010 a massive Maricopa County SWAT team, including a tank and several armored vehicles, raided the home of Jesus Llovera. The tank in fact drove straight into Llovera’s living room. Driving the tank? Action movie star Steven Seagal, whom Sheriff Joe Arpaio had recently deputized. Seagal had also been putting on the camouflage to help Arpaio with his controversial immigration raids. All of this, by the way, was getting caught on film. Seagal’s adventures in Maricopa County would make up the next season of the A&E TV series Steven Seagal, Lawman.

Llovera’s suspected crime? Cockfighting. Critics said that Arpaio and Seagal brought an army to arrest a man suspected of fighting chickens to play for the cameras. Seagal’s explanation for the show of force: “Animal cruelty is one of my pet peeves.” All of Llovera’s chickens were euthanized. During the raid, the police also killed his dog.

by Radley Balko, Salon |  Read more:

Image: Public Affairs Books/Jenna Pope

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Eddie Colla
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Ani DiFranco

Jennifer Beedon
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Ernst Haas
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Yves Marchand, Romain Meffre: Gunkanjima the island armored
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Awaiting Renewal

When my driver’s licence photo arrives a week later, it feels like an omen of my impending decline. My hair is limp and scraggly, I have dark circles under my eyes. I look like the ‘after’ photo in one of those photo essays on the ravages of crystal meth. I have the blank but guilty look of a sex offender.

It’s maybe the shittiest photo of me ever taken, and now I have to carry it with me everywhere I go. On the bright side, my husband and I spend a good half-hour passing the licence back and forth, laughing at how hideous it is. But privately, I wonder if I have the face of a woman who missed out on something. This is the shape my mid-life crisis is taking: I’m worried about what I have time to accomplish before I get too old to do anything. I’m fixated on what my life should look like by now. I’m angry at myself, because I should look better, I should be in better shape, I should be writing more, I should be a better cook and a more present, enthusiastic mother.

I go online looking for inspiration, but all I find is evidence that everyone in the world is more energetic than me. Thanks to blogs and Twitter and Facebook, I can sift through the proof that hundreds of other people aren’t slouching through life. They’re thriving in their big houses in beautiful cities, they’re cooking delicious organic meals for their children, and writing timely thank you notes to their aunts and uncles and mothers for the delightful gift that was sent in the mail and arrived right on time for Florenza’s third birthday.

Forget those weary strangers at the DMV. This country is apparently populated by highly effective, hip professional women, running around from yoga class to writing workshop, their fashionable outfits pulled taut over their abs of steel, chirping happily at each other about the upcoming publication of their second poetry chapbook — which is really going to make the move to the remodelled loft a little hectic, but hey, that’s life when you’re beautifulish and smartish and hopelessly productive!

It’s not enough that I know all about their countless hobbies and activities and pet projects and book clubs. I’m also treated to professional-looking shots of their photogenic families, their handsome, successful husbands and their darling children who are always hugging kitty cats or laughing joyfully on pristine beaches, children who are filled with wonder around the clock. Their children never pee in their Tinker Bell undies by accident and then whine about going commando, just for example. But maybe that’s because their children have parents who never lose their tempers or heat up frozen fish sticks for dinner or forget to do the laundry. Their kids have parents who let them sleep under the stars at Joshua Tree, and no one soils her sleeping bag or has a bad trip from too many corn-syrup-infused juice boxes.

Dear sweet merciful lord, deliver me from these deliriously happy parents, frolicking in paradise, publishing books, competing in triathlons, crafting jewellery, speaking to at-risk youth, painting bird houses, and raving about the new cardio ballet place that gives you an ass like a basketball. Keep me safe from these serene, positive-thinking hipster moms, with their fucking handmade recycled crafts and their mid-century modern furniture and their glowing skin and their optimism and their happy-go-lucky posts about their family’s next trip to a delightful boutique hotel in Bali.

I am not physically capable of being that effective or that effusive. I can’t knit and do yoga and smile at strangers and apply mascara every morning. These people remind me that I’ll never magically become the kind of person who shows up on time, looks fabulous, launches a multimillion-dollar business, and travels the world. When I was younger, I thought I might wake up one day and be different: more sophisticated, more ambitious, more organised. Back then, my ambivalence, my odd shoes, my bad hair seemed more like a style choice. When you’re young, being sloppy and cynical and spaced-out looks good on you.

But my flaws are no longer excusable. I need to fix everything, a voice inside keeps telling me. It’s time to be an efficient professional human, at long last, and a great mother and an adoring wife. It’s time to shower on a predictable schedule.

No matter how fervently I try to will myself into some productive adult’s reality, though, I’m still that 43-year-old superfreak in my driver’s licence photo. Some day, one of my daughters will hold this licence in her hand and feel sorry for me, long after I’m gone. ‘She was only 43 in this one. But, Jesus, look at that awful hair. And that look on her face. Why does she look so down? Or is that fear? What was she so afraid of?’ I don’t want my daughters to look at me — then or now — and see someone who’s disappointed in herself. At the very least, I have to change that.

by Heather Havrilesy, Aeon |  Read more:
Photo by Nadine Rovner/Gallery Stock

Deactivated

You have confirmed your selection to deactivate your Facebook account. Remember, if you deactivate your account, your nine hundred and fifty-one friends on Facebook will no longer be able to keep in touch with you. Drew Lovell will miss you. Max Prewitt will miss you. Rebecca Feinberg will miss you. Are you still sure you want to deactivate your account?

You have confirmed your selection to deactivate your account. Just something to keep in mind: if you deactivate your account, you’ll no longer have access to Rebecca Feinberg’s photo albums. I find it pretty interesting that this wouldn’t bother you, considering that you spend almost an hour every day looking at her albums “Cancun 2012,” “Iz my birthday yall,” “Iz my birthday yall Part II,” and “Headshots.” You know, if you deactivate your Facebook account, you’ll never be able to see her photograph “Bikiniz in the dead sea” in her album “We went on Birthright!” again, right?

You have confirmed your selection to deactivate your account. Hey, I just remembered—you know who else might miss you on Facebook? Your girlfriend, Sarah Werner. You know, the girl you’ve been in a relationship with for almost three years? You’re tagged in five of her seven profile pictures? Yeah, Sarah Werner might miss you. Probably not a good idea to deactivate your account, huh?

You have confirmed your selection to deactivate your account. It’s funny—you spend a lot more time looking at Rebecca Feinberg’s photo albums than the photo albums of your actual girlfriend, Sarah Werner. A lot more time. Even though you’re dating Sarah Werner. Just wanted to throw that out there, that I have all this information logged. It’s just sitting in our storage banks. Who knows what happens when things get deactivated. Probably nothing, but do you really want to take that chance?

by Ethan Kuperberg, New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration by Michael Kupperman

Reading the Web Alone, Together

In early March, Google announced that it would “retire” Google Reader tomorrow, July 1st. An outcry followed. Google Reader had come to define the way many of its information-addicted users sorted through otherwise unmanageable amounts of Web content. It provided an answer to a question everybody asks when they sit down in front of a computer: What should I read right now? Everything.

Reader allowed its millions of users to quickly scan and read every story from any number of Web sites in a single, constantly updated stream. It worked fairly simply: many Web sites produce standardized feeds of their content. Users add the feeds of the sites they want to read—which can number dozens, hundreds, or thousands—to their list, and instead of visiting those however many different Web sites each day, they just wait for the sites’ content to come to them. Launched in 2005, Google Reader was not the first feed reader, but it became the most iconic.

The use of feed readers never became a truly mainstream Web habit, which is why Google is comfortable closing Reader over the shouts of its devoted user base. Moreover, the way we discover and read on the Web has changed dramatically since the birth of Google Reader, eight years ago. While Google Reader’s sharing features spawned an ersatz social network based on sharing feeds with other users, what most users read was largely self-directed.

Since 2005, social media has become the de facto way one keeps up with the Internet, and it has been repeatedly fingered over the years as the culprit in the demise of feed readers generally. Facebook transformed, from a place to stalk classmates, into an unending stream of things to view: links, photos, comments (and advertising). By July 2012, one billion things were shared daily on Facebook. At the same time, Twitter rapidly became more and more popular, creating personalized news—and not news—feeds. Twitter is the most efficient link-sharing medium on the Internet; there is always something to read, and it is almost always up to the minute, with four hundred million tweets per day. And while community-driven link-sharing Web sites have existed for a long time, there has been nothing that approaches Reddit’s current scale or scope as a community-driven link-sharing site. Over the last couple of years it has become a true internet juggernaut, with thirty seven billion page views and four hundred million unique visitors in 2012.

Nonetheless, in killing Reader, Google created a new product category overnight: the Google Reader replacement. A number of companies have sought to build the next Google Reader, in order to woo its millions of users to their Web sites. Good alternatives already exist, but press attention has largely been lavished on one built by Digg, a news Web site that was revived last year. Digg Reader, currently in its early stages, is explicitly intended as a successor to Google Reader; the first thing it asks new users to do is import their Google Reader feeds. It complements Digg’s Web site, which uses algorithms and human editors to surface news and interesting content from around the Web. The current interface is focussed and pleasantly minimal: a soft gray sidebar shows a list of feeds, while content appears in a larger pane on the right side. That’s it.

by Matt Buchanan, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: uncredited