Photo by nwhitford on Flickr.
I started Is Greater Than in late 2007 with little direction or ambition, as a response to the sadness and frustration I felt after the end of Punk Planet magazine, where I served as an intern and a reviews editor during its last year. Despite my brief tenure at the magazine, I had been a long-time reader, and it had a huge impact on my thinking. I credit Punk Planet with inspiring me to leave the soul-sucking customer service jobs I had held for 13 years, and pursue a writing and editing career. My only real hope with Is Greater Than was that I could in some small way try to carry on the legacy of politically-minded cultural coverage that Punk Planet excelled in.
As a result of that excessively vague mission, Is Greater Than has seen multiple permutations in the past four years, from a overtly political direction in the early days to its recent incarnation, in which politics still inform the coverage but the focus is more squarely on culture, literature, art, life and music.
Uli Westphal‘s photo collection of mutatoes, mutated and surreal fruits and vegetables from Berlin’s farmer’s markets.
Combatting air pollution with…glowing artificial trees?
MIT publishes back issues of its Technology Review dating back to 1969.
Much was made of how social media affected Egypt’s uprisings, but not about the role Google Earth played.
The Is Greater Than Digital Omnibus is now available for the Kindle and related iOS/Android/desktop apps, for download through Amazon. Fiction, art and essays. The eBook collection of essays, fiction and art includes some of 2010′s best of Is Greater Than as well as work never before published on the web. Buy it for $3.00 at Amazon. A brief overview of what you’ll find on our first eBook collection:
There’s been a slew of recent attempts glean insights from hip-hop’s history by exhaustively examining the genre’s lyrics. Yale University Press attempted to do so with The Anthology of Rap, to mixed reviews. Even though it focused on his own lyrics, Jay-Z’s Decoded served a similar purpose, arguably more effectively. Could a machine do better? Artist Tahir Hemphill thinks so, and is raising funds on Kickstarter to datamine the entire history hip-hop lyrics. Duncan Geere at Wired reports:
Our friend Cooper McBean of The Devil Makes Three has kept himself busy in the band’s downtime, putting together a backing band on the side for his solo efforts and recording a four-song ep available for download over at Bandcamp. Though many of his songs in The Devil Makes Three have a raggy, swingy lilt to them, the stuff on his side project Cooper McBean and the Vested Interests places its boot firmly in the honky-tonk camp.
The bleak iconography of digital illustrator Yehteh.
Do you know the difference between introversion and fear? Common mistakes introverts make.
Is Apple’s aggressive new stance on third-party iOS eBook readers monopolist?
To understand numbers, we must first have language.
Armelle Caron’s “villes rangées“, maps that break cites down to their constitutive parts.
Deb Olin Unferth, in defense of the much-maligned memoir.
Ahem…Naomi Campbell interviews Vladimir Putin.
2011 has already been a year of major transformation for the publishing industry.
In 1820, Thomas Jefferson Beale buried $65 million worth of treasure, never to be found. The Thomas Beale Cipher is a beautiful animated short about the mystery. via
Schadenfreude/man’s hubris alert: Dubai’s man-made islands are sinking into the sea.
Nostalgia for the vintage Internet aesthetics of Myspace?
More than just grist for overwrought think pieces about Google/Twitter/whatever, information overload is apparently an evergreen topic. Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock is an earlier look at having of too many media inputs, and was the subject of a long-lost documentary narrated by Orson Welles. At long last, the film is now available on Youtube in five parts.
Good tells the story of the invisible immigrant bicyclist.
The story of a bonobo chimp and his mixed-species family.
A Cornell psychologist claims to have found strong evidence for ESP, delighting believers and horrifying scientists. But sometimes the line between respected science and pseudoscience is more porous than we might like.
The fantastic space-age art of Franco Brambilla.
At Shareable, Douglas Rushkoff argues that net neutrality and Wikileaks are sideshows that distract from the need to build our own Internet.
Is the doctoral degree process little more than a pyramid scheme?
It’s been a year since Is Greater Than relaunched, which means we have an opportunity to reflect on some of the most notable essays, fiction and articles by our contributors over the past year. In the weeks and months ahead, the site is going to continue to evolve and I’m really excited about some of the changes in store. But for now, a look back. After the jump, I present a collection of our most popular posts in 2010.
Work by the late Flemish graphic novelist Frans Masereel at Princeton’s Graphic Arts blog.
Stunningly brilliant author/blogger Geeta Dayal on Wikileaks, the David Wojnarowicz/Smithsonian controversy, music, Foucault and a whole lot more.
The Department of Homeland Security continues to shut down the country’s greatest terrorist threat, hip-hop mp3 blogs.
Sites of urban disrepair in Detroit become swampland.
Google’s book store has launched, though there are still many questions about the Google Book Search settlement. In other Google news, they reveal some tidbids about their news aggregation secret sauce.
Who were the cowboys behind the cowboy songs?
If you’re a fan of Brian Eno and/or unconventional songwriting/recording processes, you must read Geeta Dayal’s 33 1/3 book on Brian Eno’s Another Green World.
A brief history of the New York Times gender essentialist trend piece.
I’ve been fascinated by the never-realized utopian plans for future cities so popular in the ’50s and ’60s. A consideration of this nostalgia, and a site about Walt Disney’s original vision of Epcot Center as a city of tomorrow.
“Written On The Forehead“, a new song from P.J. Harvey’s forthcoming album Let England Shake.
Anne Elizabeth Moore’s Revision Street project comes to a premature end (haitus?).
“…we know that the cuteness epidemic—with its manifestations of craftiness, color-saturation and childishness—in contemporary art has been a terrible, demeaning thing…There’s nothing cute about our trash, or our purchasing, or our engagement with environmental disaster, or you know, our impending deaths—or our overwhelming forced involvement with capitalist superstructures and brands. The cute things? They are what beg us not to think about these things.” Choire Sicha on the cute crafts aesthetic
In 2007 and 2008, we did a year-end roundup using the following format:
X event/news item/cultural artifact/personal experience was > Y event/news item/cultural artifact/personal experience
(short explanation)
Last year we lapsed, but not this one. Anyone with the inclination should submit an equation–it can be something serious or funny, whatever you want to do with it. Keep your explanatory blurb short—three sentences or less. Feel free to submit multiple equations, but if there’s a ton of submissions I may have to pick one per person.
For the short holiday week, an early Reading Room:
Patti Smith talks books with Jonathan Lethem. In other Lethem news, he’s got a new book about John Carpenter’s over-the-top political allegory They Live.
“What are we to make of the brain processing literal and metaphorical versions of a concept in the same brain region? Or that our neural circuitry doesn’t cleanly differentiate between the real and the symbolic? What are the consequences of the fact that evolution is a tinkerer and not an inventor, and has duct-taped metaphors and symbols to whichever pre-existing brain areas provided the closest fit?” Do metaphors stymie understanding?
The human race had a good run, before flying squid were discovered.
Please participate in this (short) reader survey! It’d be an enormous help to us as we plan the site’s future. RSS and mobile readers can access the survey here.
Historical footnote still bears grudge against marginally more relevant legacy indie-rock outfit.
David Mitchell auctions off a character name in a future novel to benefit autism research.
Does the Internet enable casual racism and classism?
“The Trembling Giant, or Pando, is a enormous grove of quaking aspens that takes the “forest as a single organism” metaphor and literalizes it: the grove really is a single organism. Each of the approximately 47,000 or so trees in the grove are genetically identical and all the trees share a single root system.” Pando, the Trembling Giant.
Jonathan Safran Foer constructs a new novel by redacting items from an old book. Matt Wood argues that it’s not all rear-guard print book nostalgia.
Welcome to a new weekly feature on Is Greater Than, a roundup of interesting items I’ve come across over the past few days:
“The Tea Party, in this sense, is not a new development so much as it is part of an ongoing migration of the perpetually petulant, a political phenomenon grounded in a demographic one: the creation of a class of baby-boom retirees who have been deprived of meaningful work but given personal computers as Christmas presents.” – Tom Junod on the Tea Party as Sore Winners
Grain Edit features typographically-minded poster artist Jon Contino
“Myself, I’m inclined to think that if they prove to be right, what will really be proven will be something very sad; and not about Singapore, but about our species. They will have proven it possible to flourish through the active repression of free expression. They will have proven that information does not necessarily want to be free.” – A fascinating William Gibson piece from ’94 about Singapore’s repressive IT state
BY PAUL M. DAVIS: Some notes and thoughts about Is Greater Than’s newest look.
Paul M Davis