How top companies are using Twitter for business:
Building community and brand - Publishing - Customer service - Product feedback - Direct sales - Crisis management - Internal company communications

Whether your company's already on Twitter or just getting starting, you need to read the Shorty Report. You'll learn...

+ The full report costs $$$, but a sample is available for free, free, and free.

The Takedown Artist

By James Atlas

Published: Sunday, October 26, 2003

Correction Appended

'Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation.''

''Birkerts trots out all his allusions and factlets and trivia, regardless of accuracy, relevance or extraneousness, with the tinkling insistence of a 5-year-old learning to play 'Chopsticks.'''

''Terry McMillan's 'How Stella Got Her Groove Back' is the most lazily written book I've ever read. Some people -- namely, the book's publishers -- might be inclined to characterize its style as 'breathless,' but I think of it as a panting, gasping, protracted death rattle.''

You're curious, right? Aghast yet mesmerized.

[Thank-you for the balls-out opinions. I REALLY miss the days when reading a review was not about "This is what happened, and it was delectable. Then this happened, and I wondered lasciviously. Then, after a wild ride, this occurred, and for the first time since Joyce, blah blah blah." Do you still read reviews? Why?]

George Orwell, in his essay “Confessions of a Book Reviewer,” postulates a Sisyphean vision of the average book critic, a pouchy-eyed and preternaturally geriatric fiction writer clad in grubby robe and slippers, cowering behind a vertical thatch of cigarette butts and gazing at a mail packet of five novels, about which he’s meant to write an 800 word review by noon the following day. This coal laborer of the intellectual set has made his living turning “tripe” into cultural fossil fuels, he has sacrificed his standards for “a glass of inferior sherry,” and the effects, Orwell warns, are dismally incapacitating. Finally, as the shadow of the deadline darkens his study door, the despondent reviewer plods to action, dragging from his weary critical arsenal phrases such as “a book that no one should miss” and “something memorable on every page”—and types the concluding period just as the new packet of books thumps onto his doormat.

via http://www.believermag.com/issues/200303/?read=article_julavits

[Thanks to soyrique for sending these reviews!]

Practical and prophetic, particular and poetic, and entirely personal, this is how I would describe Our Life in Gardens.  Composed of nearly 50 essays arranged in alphabetical order, the book is termed by its authors a “gypsy trunk of this and that.” I’d think of it more as an old-time curiosity cabinet, a curio full of treasures to be pulled out and carefully savored, one by one. Part memoir, and part garden how-to, it is a completely engaging book to enjoy, perhaps while sitting in a favorite chair in the garden on a sunny afternoon, or by the fire on a cool, wet day, when gardening might be more of an intellectual pursuit. Read More

http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

Below you'll find links to downloadable editions of the text of Little Brother. These downloads are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license, which lets you share it, remix it, and share your remixes, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis. Some people don't understand why I do this — so check out this post if you want my topline explanation for why I do this crazy thing.