A twenty-two-second video of a cat vomiting on a turtle is clearly the internet’s raison d’être, but sometimes you long for something a little more…substantial. In today’s Thursday Three, our weekly assortment of randomness in triplicate, we take a quick look at three artful and arts-full aggregators.
1. Longform is really two sites: the original Longform, which offers a collection of non-fiction, old and new, and their sister site for fans of make-believe, Longform Ficton. They have an impressive list of writers, from A. M. Homes to ZZ Packer (they index authors by first name, oddly), and they source their essays and short stories from a wide range of publications. I recently read—and heartily recommend—Zadie Smith’s essay on her uneasy relationship with Facebook and Mac McClelland’s account of her “brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine” (i.e. why you should buy your books from a bricks-and-mortar bookstore and not that other place).
By the way, if you hate reading lengthy articles on your cumbersome computer screen, you can always sign up for a free service like Instapaper, which lets you save web content to read later—so when you’re on the bus and you’re sick of playing Hearts against computer avatars with 1950’s barbershop hair, you can pull up a saved essay about pro-level Ultimate Frisbee and feel just that little bit smarter.
2. Videosift is my go-to for kitten vids, but for documentaries, there’s always Watch Documentary. You have to sift through some less-than-exquisite films (the BBC’s My Big Breasts and Me unsurprisingly ranks high in the Most Watched category), but there’s plenty of good stuff to see, and it’s free. In the Arts & Artists section, for example, there’s Exit Through the Gift Shop, Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens and an Al Jazeera doco about death row art in Texas. Best of all, they have the entire A History of Britain series, narrated by Simon Schama, the dapper and delightful narrative historian. You don’t have to be an Anglophile to enjoy the series; Schama is a wonderful writer and an engaging (and occasionally sarcastic) host, and his approach is to focus on characters and cultures, and not on the usual boring lists of royal Richards.
3. If you’d rather stare at a few frozen pixels, check out 9-Eyes, artist Jon Rafman’s compilation of images sourced from Google Street View’s cameras. Rafman combs through the millions of pictures to find the most beautiful and bizarre snapshots of our world. And it’s a truly weird place, full of naughty children and errant tigers; car crashes and prostitutes; mysterious forests and men in white masks. It’s silly, sinister, and beautiful—and best of all, you’re living in it.
