A fascinating look at Camus’s The Stranger + MORE Oct 23rd

Looking for the Stranger by Alice Kaplan (No credit)
LOOKING FOR ‘THE STRANGER’
By Alice Kaplan
Published on the heels of Michael Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel and Peter Finn and Petra Couvée’s The Zhivago Affair—fascinating works about the cultural, historical and personal provenance of Henry James and Boris Pasternak novels—Kaplan’s equally stellar new book about Albert Camus’s absurdist-minimalist masterpiece, The Stranger, confirms the arrival of a promising new genre: the “novel biography.”
With its unusual combination of an Algerian setting and American noir style, Kaplan describes The Stranger’s impact as “a blood transfusion to the genre of the novel.” Written in 1940 during a lonely sojourn in a Paris apartment and inspired by Camus’s work as a court reporter in his native Algiers, The Stranger explores colonial ethnic tensions and the author’s own humanist philosophical leanings through the story of Meursault, a French Algerian whose failure to weep at his mother’s funeral influences his receiving of the death sentence for the murder of a (famously nameless) Arab man…

The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu (No credit)
THE ATTENTION MERCHANTS
By Tim Wu
Humanity is in crisis, Tim Wu asserts—not so much because of climate change, or inequality, or the rise of the alt-right, but because . . . look, a baby sloth! Sorry. Where was I? We’ve become, in Wu’s words, “‘homo distractus, a species of ever-shorter attention span known for compulsively checking his devices.” We’ve (d)evolved thusly due to what Wu calls “attention merchants,” those who make a profit by capturing and selling our attention.
Wu, a law professor at Columbia and the author of The Master Switch (2010), offers a caustic, illuminating history of advertising. He explains how the concept of turning customers into products did not originate with social media, charting its rise from the early days of the ad-driven New York Sun in the 1830s through the gradual colonization of radio, TV, computers and smartphones.
Wu connects dots between the early 20th-century snake-oil salesmen who were sold readers’ attention by newspapers, and 21st-century online advertisers that snare our eyes when we look at clickbait…

Looking for the Stranger by Alice Kaplan (No credit)
LOOKING FOR ‘THE STRANGER’
By Alice Kaplan
Published on the heels of Michael Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel and Peter Finn and Petra Couvée’s The Zhivago Affair—fascinating works about the cultural, historical and personal provenance of Henry James and Boris Pasternak novels—Kaplan’s equally stellar new book about Albert Camus’s absurdist-minimalist masterpiece, The Stranger, confirms the arrival of a promising new genre: the “novel biography.”
With its unusual combination of an Algerian setting and American noir style, Kaplan describes The Stranger’s impact as “a blood transfusion to the genre of the novel.” Written in 1940 during a lonely sojourn in a Paris apartment and inspired by Camus’s work as a court reporter in his native Algiers, The Stranger explores colonial ethnic tensions and the author’s own humanist philosophical leanings through the story of Meursault, a French Algerian whose failure to weep at his mother’s funeral influences his receiving of the death sentence for the murder of a (famously nameless) Arab man…

The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu (No credit)
THE ATTENTION MERCHANTS
By Tim Wu
Humanity is in crisis, Tim Wu asserts—not so much because of climate change, or inequality, or the rise of the alt-right, but because . . . look, a baby sloth! Sorry. Where was I? We’ve become, in Wu’s words, “‘homo distractus, a species of ever-shorter attention span known for compulsively checking his devices.” We’ve (d)evolved thusly due to what Wu calls “attention merchants,” those who make a profit by capturing and selling our attention.
Wu, a law professor at Columbia and the author of The Master Switch (2010), offers a caustic, illuminating history of advertising. He explains how the concept of turning customers into products did not originate with social media, charting its rise from the early days of the ad-driven New York Sun in the 1830s through the gradual colonization of radio, TV, computers and smartphones.
Wu connects dots between the early 20th-century snake-oil salesmen who were sold readers’ attention by newspapers, and 21st-century online advertisers that snare our eyes when we look at clickbait…

Equifax is using Canada – and its financial institutions – as the first market for the new approach