Month: July 2012

The Real Jonah Lehrer Problem (from Salon.com)

Posted on by CJ Verburg

Tuesday, Jul 31, 2012 05:00 AM PDT

Jonah Lehrer throws it all away

Why does a “young genius” risk everything by making up quotes? A better question is why we coddle young male genius

By

“…Jonah Lehrer is part of a system that allows magazines, year after to year to publish men, and white men in particular, significantly more than women or people of color. He is part of a system where the 2012 National Magazine Awards have no women nominees in several key categories. He is part of a system where white editors belabor the delusion that there simply are few women or writers of color who are good enough for their magazines because said editors are too narrow in what they want, what they read, what they think, or just too lazy to work beyond their Rolodex of writers who look and think just like them.”

Hurray for SOBAY (which would be SOBA except it sounds like a noodle)

Posted on by CJ Verburg

Science Online Bay Area sponsored a truly inspiring presentation at Swissnex Tuesday night 7/17 on the rapidly evolving e-book sphere, where diversity already borders on multiple personality disorder.  Peter Brantley sketched the Net as the world’s largest public-works project and tech firms as the prime shapers of 21st-century literature.  (Stop and think about that.)  John Tayman of Byliner described his medium-length wedge into the literary world; Ron Martinez of Aerbook showed off his newly launched Aerbook Maker, whereby we can all create gorgeous multimedia works in the art form formerly known as books.  Librarian-in-Black Sarah Houghton fumed about the middlemen barring libraries and their readers from borrowing e-books — a problem to which I suspect the epub offers a solution; we’ll see.  Stay tuned for more news as it happens!