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November 09, 2017

From Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants:
An earlier generation would find it astonishing that, without payment or even much outcry, our networks of family, friends, and associates have been recruited via social media to help sell us things.

From Harper's:
Japanese subjects can be trained to unconsciously improve their ability to differentiate English r and l sounds.

From The New York Times (Karl Ove Knausgaard on “Remembrance of Things Past”):
It opens the world up in a way no other book I have read does. But please don’t stop after two and a half volumes, you have to go all the way; it is all about the accumulation. It won’t make you a better person, nor more empathetic or intelligent, but it will make you see and smell and think slightly differently, also about yourself, and so enrichen your life and your understanding of it.

From The TLS (Nicola Barker on "Knausgaard or Ferrante?"):
[He] has a generous spirit and a real writer’s attention to detail. So, Knausgaard. God bless him for being the one person everyone at that event was most interested to see, yet still taking the time to notice my quiet humiliation.

From Teju Cole's Known and Strange Things:
[We] are creatures of private convention.
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