Jacob Silverman

Laundry cats.

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:13:24 -0700

Laundry cats.

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Mon, 20 May 2013 10:29:46 -0700

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Mon, 20 May 2013 10:24:31 -0700

For The New Yorker’s Elements blog, I wrote about the 3-D printing of guns and the ideology...

Wed, 08 May 2013 09:08:32 -0700

For The New Yorker’s Elements blog, I wrote about the 3-D printing of guns and the ideology behind it.

A couple other recent things: watching the film “The Attack” with the Boston Marathon bombings in the background, and a panel debate about Zionism and liberalism.

I reviewed Arnon Grunberg’s Tirza for this Sunday’s Los Angeles Times. “Parental...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 11:45:59 -0700

I reviewed Arnon Grunberg’s Tirza for this Sunday’s Los Angeles Times.

“Parental love is the sacrifice made in silence,” says Jorgen Hofmeester, the protagonist of “Tirza,” Arnon Grunberg’s latest translated novel. In “Tirza,” the quiet martyrdom of parenthood rubs up against the banality of bourgeois life. Sacrifices go un-repaid and parents struggle as their children begin to spin beyond their orbit and their own carefully tended lives are revealed as hollow.

The rest is here.

Recent work

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 09:05:33 -0700

A review of William Gerhardie’s Futility.

On the new Philip Roth documentary.

A review of Douglas Rushkoff’s jargon-filled Present Shock.

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Sun, 17 Mar 2013 21:14:47 -0700

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Thu, 07 Mar 2013 15:42:29 -0800

The year’s most accomplished, and most important, films about war, terrorism, and geopolitics...

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 06:44:20 -0800

The year’s most accomplished, and most important, films about war, terrorism, and geopolitics aren’t Argo and Zero Dark Thirty. They’re two modestly budgeted films from Israel and the Palestinian Territories. And, unlike their American counterparts, they’re not drawing on true stories for blockbuster entertainment. No, they are the thing itself: blistering documentaries about life and death, violence and oppression, and the struggle to remain human in unbearable conditions. 5 Broken Cameras and The Gatekeepers are morality tales, as much of a warning for gung-ho Americans of the potential costs of their military adventures as they are stark indictments of the Israeli occupation and its effects on Palestinian life.

More here.

newyorker: Cartoon by Ward Sutton. For more from this week’s...

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 20:33:10 -0800

newyorker:

Cartoon by Ward Sutton. For more from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/WqSOMI

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Sat, 09 Feb 2013 16:04:58 -0800

I reviewed David Shields’ How Literature Saved My Life for The Daily Beast: David Shields is...

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 09:39:29 -0800

I reviewed David Shields’ How Literature Saved My Life for The Daily Beast:

David Shields is done with fiction, at least as you and I probably know it. After beginning his career as a novelist, the 56-year-old Shields, over the last decade and a half, has drifted toward loose, essayistic forms that tear down the walls between fact and fiction. (In fact, he claims that those walls never existed in the first place.) This “project”—a favored Shields word—crested in 2010 with Reality Hunger, a book-length collection of quotations and aphorisms cobbled together to argue that contemporary fiction should embrace hybrid genres, the instability of truth and memory, the essential falsity of the novel, appropriation, and so on.

Shields has been a worthwhile polemicist (Reality Hunger was subtitled A Manifesto) for the sometimes buttoned-up world of literary fiction. But what began as a matter of taste and then matriculated to an argument over aesthetics has now become ideology. In his latest book, How Literature Saved My Life, he recapitulates much of Reality Hunger’s argument while falling into a deep, mawkish solipsism, one that leaves him unable to recognize why anyone may have an interest in the vast range of fiction that centuries of literary culture have produced. More troubling is, he has become so convinced of his own beliefs that he seems to have little desire to convince others of them; they have instead ossified into dogma.

More here.

For The New Republic, I reviewed Andy Carvin’s book, Distant Witness: Social Media, the Arab...

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 09:19:25 -0800

For The New Republic, I reviewed Andy Carvin’s book, Distant Witness: Social Media, the Arab Spring, and a Journalism Revolution.

And for Jewcy, I reviewed the new film Yossi, Eytan Fox’s sequel to his 2002 flick Yossi & Jagger.

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Thu, 24 Jan 2013 18:51:23 -0800

For the Los Angeles Review of Books, I wrote about Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger’s Jews and...

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 06:46:27 -0800

For the Los Angeles Review of Books, I wrote about Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger’s Jews and Words.

Perhaps no religion has as much existential uncertainty baked into the product as Judaism. Who, or what, is a Jew? The question remains Jewishness’s most persistent quandary. In modern times, this has not only been a theological or anthropological question but also a political and military one: leaders as diverse as Adolf Hitler and David Ben-Gurion have sought to develop criteria that may nail down Jewishness as something discrete, distinctive, and susceptible to legislation. But still some confusion persists, some hazy aura around the edges of Jewish identity, evident in the thousand and one sects and offshoots and private credos that, collectively, constitute “the Jewish people.”

The rest is here.

Also, here’s my recent ode to Jean-Ralphio.

Some Notes on a Book

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 08:39:13 -0800

Last month, I sold a proposal to HarperCollins for a book about social media and its role in online identity, privacy, self-expression, and Internet culture. All this began with my “Against Enthusiasm” essay in Slate, but I’m now looking more broadly at the attention and sharing economies; how (for some people) life becomes reconstituted around the ways in which we can broadcast it online; how the wall between online and “real” life has largely collapsed; the values engineered into social networks (which include incessant liking and favoriting); and so forth.

If you’re interested in talking to me about the book, want to send me something to read, or you think there’s someone I should be talking to, please feel free to get in touch. I’ll still be doing some freelancing and book reviewing, though I’ll be focusing more on social media and the culture of technology. But for now, it’s time to get to work. The book will be out sometime in 2014 (release date TK). Thanks for reading.

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Mon, 14 Jan 2013 19:33:50 -0800

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Mon, 14 Jan 2013 15:23:22 -0800

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Sat, 12 Jan 2013 14:54:37 -0800

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Fri, 11 Jan 2013 20:38:28 -0800