Virginia Heffernan contemplates the lost art of the analog datebook, with this caveat: “As a committed user of the BlackBerry, Kindle, MacBook Pro and World Wide Web, I rarely get nostalgic for print.” Conclusion? “You never know what you’re going to miss.”
The new book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, points out that Andy Warhol was something of a hoarder. He “would periodically sweep everything — cash, artwork, apple cores — off his desk and into a cardboard box,” writes Peter D. Kramer in his review of the book. “He stored hundreds of these ‘time capsules.’”
Pop Matters is running a series of essays called “Retroactive Listening,” exploring how technology has changed the way we experience music. Here’s Emily Becker on the death of the record store, Jennifer Waits on college radio, and Jay Somerset on the death of AM radio.
In the New Statesman, Mark Fisher bemoans the lack of a “public space that could surprise or confound our understanding of ourselves,” and asks, “Where, today, is the equivalent of the Top of the Pops stage, which could suddenly be invaded by the unexpected?
In Reason, Andrew Potter (author of The Authenticity Hoax) looks at the tenth anniversary edition of Naomi Klein’s No Logo and wonders what we should make of it a decade on.
Hopefully, now copies of the White Pages will stop piling up on my doorstep!