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Presentations from Startup School 08.

An Atlantic Monthly correspondent visits Seattle using only community-driven web content as his guide.

Quoted: m

Another photo collection of funny graffiti. I like the one shown here: Press button. Receive bacon.

The National Gallery of Victoria has now officially admitted that their Van Gogh is not, in fact, a Van Gogh. It’s apparently accomplished enough, however, to have at least this one Guardian UK writer questioning whether it’s a Rubens character study.

100 Best First Lines from Novels. A ton of great stuff here, including Thomas Pynchon at #3!

Frank Lloyd Wright interviewed by Mike Wallace in 1957.

A Financial Times writer says that Salman Rushdie’s novel is good, so good in fact, that he may have to try it with curry.

Quoted: For Rushdie, as for the artists he writes about, the pen is a magician’s wand. There is more magic than realism in this latest novel. But it is, I think, one of his best. If The Enchantress of Florence doesn’t win this year’s Man Booker I’ll curry my proof copy and eat it.

Flurb, a webmag containing astonishing tales from some of the top sci-fi/fantasy writers out there. Put together by Rudy Rucker.

X-Files 2 is coming. This link has an illicitly shot capture of the trailer (via cell phone video).

This sounds like an interesting book about reading, speculating that the act itself is one of improvisation and that it changes the brain in positive ways.

Quoted: Reading, says Wolf, changed history. More than that, it changes the brain. It creates new pathways in the brain, and, by doing this, makes us think in new ways. When you read, you see letters written on a page, then you recognise them as representations of sounds made by the human voice, then you join the sounds together to make words, then you fit the words together into sentences.

Michael’s Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” has become the first book ever to be nominated for the Nebula, Edgar, and the Hugo awards.

I love how the only full sized statue of Dickens was made by the Americans as a present to the British, and that that present had to be sent back to to respect Dickens’s wishes.

Quoted: Seeking an appropriate means of marking the 200th anniversary of his birth, several of Dickens’ descendants have come out in support of a commemorative statue at Eastgate House, Rochester, Kent, a building that appears in many of his novels, including The Pickwick Papers.