Internet

Saying "The vibes are off" no longer cuts it, if it ever really did. Twitter is broken/has been broken/was broken/perhaps has always been broken, but more people than before seem to be draped in mourning black, dropping last flowers on their way out the door. I would like to be one of them-I am one of them, in my heart-but bad habits, as it turns out, are often easier made than broken.

On the occasion of publishing a brief collection of some of my older short stories-at the onset of the third decade of a century marked, so far, by our complete submission to market-driven technological distraction and surveillance-I am awash in a kind of nostalgia. Not for a better America.  Read more

When 21-year-old Alfie Deyes released his first book, it was No 1 on the Sunday Times bestseller list for 11 weeks. Who are the YouTubers - and why are their books so successful?

As Alison Flood reported in The Guardian as the project got under way, it's been almost 200 years since Charles Dickens took Britain by storm with the serialization of his first major novel, The Pickwick Papers. And now, "American novelist Joshua Cohen is setting himself a larger target - of the internet at large - as he embarks on an a mission to reinterpret Dickens' debut live online."  Read more

Last week I had the pleasure of interviewing Andrew Keen, journalist, polemicist and self-styled Antichrist of Silicon Valley. Keen's new book, The Internet is Not the Answer, is being published by Atlantic in 2015, a historical reflection on the World Wide Web 25 years after its creation.  Read more