In a few, unique instances, 15 Minutes of Fact has circled back to search out previous interview subjects to check not only on their evolution, but on the evolution of the Occupy Movement as seen by them. And, more importantly, affected by them.

One such person is Andrew Ross, a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and an activist in the debt resistance movement.

Listen to the full podcast at the WeEarth Radio Network.

Yoko Onos Schaffen geht durch alle Kunstkategorien – von Film über Musik bis hin zu Malerei – und basiert vor allem auf Handlungsanweisungen, die entweder utopisch oder umsetzbar sind.

Mit »Acorn« legt Ono ein Buch mit originellen und inspirierenden Instruktionen vor und lädt ein, diese »Pieces« durch die Mitwirkung des Lesers, Betrachters oder Zuhörers zu vervollständigen.

Read more event details via the event page.

Join NYU professor, Strike Debt activist, and OR author, Andrew Ross, to discuss his new book, Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal. In the book, Ross argues that we are living in the cruel grip of a creditocracy—where the finance industry commandeers our elected governments and where the citizenry have to take out loans to meet their basic needs. The time is ripe for a debtors movement to use moral and legal arguments to bring relief to household debtors, and to create an alternative economy, independent of the debt-money system. What can we learn from the history of debt refusal? What are some of the present challenges in organizing around debt? And how might we imagine a debtors movement for the future?

Read all the details at the Brecht Forum.

The Motley Fool’s David Kuo joins us from Singapore, and in New York, Andrew Ross, author of Creditocracy, tells us what he thinks Obama should have put in his sixth State of the Union address, Rahul Tandon’s in Calcutta, bringing us the latest business news from India.

Listen to the full segment at the BBC World Service.

The golden age of unsolicited credit-card applications ended about five years ago. It must have been a relief at the post office. At least ten envelopes came each week — often with non-functioning replica cards enclosed, to elicit the anticipatory thrill of fresh plastic in the recipient’s hot little hand.

For a while, I would open each envelope and carefully shred anything with my name on it, lest an identity thief go on a shopping spree in my name. But at some point I gave up, because there were just too many of them. Besides, any identity thief worth worrying about enjoyed better options than trash-diving for unopened mail.

Something started happening circa 2006 or ’07. More and more often, the very envelopes carried wording to the effect that approval for a new card was a formality, so act now! With the benefit of hindsight, this reads as a last surge of economic acceleration before the crash just ahead. But at the time, I figured that credit-card companies were growing desperate to grab our attention, since many of us were throwing the offers away without a second glance.

The two alternatives – turbocharged consumerism on the one hand, the depleted willingness (or capacity) of consumers to take on more debt, on the other — are not mutually exclusive. It was subprime mortgages rather than overextended credit cards that brought the go-go ’00s to an early end, but each was a manifestation of the system Andrew Ross writes about in Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal (OR Books).

Read the full review at Inside Higher Ed.

Democracy has crumbled in the face of what activist and author Andrew Ross labels a “creditocracy.” Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, coins this term because, as he explained during his speech in Wheeler Hall on Tuesday night, an overwhelming majority of average American citizens face forms of financial “debt bondage” incurred due to an inability to acquire basic services such as education, housing and health care. In his book “Creditocracy,” Ross, an author of 12 other books on political philosophy pertaining to labor issues and human rights, reveals the twisted morality behind the elite few who control the American banking industry and enumerates the detrimental effects this system has on our society.

In a timely fashion, “Creditocracy” asserts that financial institutions no longer value reliable customers. In fact, the book argues, modern banks regard their least reliable customers as the best ones because they are the ones banks profit from most. According to Ross, good credit is a bad thing in the eyes of profit-hungry creditors. Because so many Americans are sliding further into debt of all kinds, widespread “credit slavery” leaves millions in financial “bondage.”

Read the full article at the Daily Californian.

Widely acknowledged as perhaps the most influential editor since Maxwell Perkins, Gordon Lish has worked closely with Harold Brodkey, Don DeLillo, Sam Lipsyte, Ben Marcus, Anne Carson, Cynthia Ozick, Raymond Carver, Will Eno, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel and others. But, as Delillo writes, Lish who may be ” famous for all the wrong reasons,” has also “written some of the most fascinating American fiction of the last ten years.” In the new story collection, Goings, Lish wrestles with memory, self-knowledge (or the lack of it), friendship, mothers, sons and lovers in language which leaps off the page as only Lish can make it.

Gordon Lish is the author of Collected Fictions, Dear Mr. Capote, Peru, What I Know So Far, Mourner at the Door,Extravaganza, My Romance, Zimzum, and Epigraph. This body of work, together with his activities as a teacher and editor, have placed him at the forefront of the American literary scene.

Read the full announcement at McNally Jackson.

Looking for someone to whip your writing into shape? Then tweet the new Gordon Lish bot, a Twitter account which offers unvarnished critiques of your tweets and fictional sentences. (Related: Frank Kovarik on the editor’s relationship with Raymond Carver.)

Read the full story at the Millions.

We kid Arthur Yorinks, because the name of his new Web venture is in fact, indeed – Lost Marbles.

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Yorinks is a man of many talents (film, opera, theater, radio, etc.). On the children’s book front, he has collaborated with such esteemed artists as Maurice Sendak, Mort Drucker and Richard Egielski. The New York Times once said of his work: “Some of the best humor to appear since Woody Allen was writing for the New Yorker.”

Read the full piece at Mediabistro.

The Gordon Lish Bot is trolling Twitter, demanding that writers craft their 140 characters more meticulously. It’s fine invective, but masochists will wish for the sting of the real thing.

Read more at the Paris Review.

LOST MARBLES launch featured in Publishers Weekly

Arthur Yorinks, a playwright, director, and author of more than three dozen children’s books, has just launched Lost Marbles Books, an online digital publishing venture, in collaboration with OR Books, a publisher that focuses on selling direct to consumers via the Internet. Each week, Lost Marbles delivers to subscribers a short story or essay written by Yorinks or a guest contributor. The company’s Web site features separate sections for children’s and adult stories. The initial selections for children are The Wooden Table, It Happened in Pinsk, and The Scribbler. These are all written by Yorinks, as are the first three adult stories, How Do Spiders Sleep?, Lost Keys, and Dogs Matter

Read the full article at Publishers Weekly.

So I read five of the thirteen stories in Gordon Lish’s forthcoming collection Goings In Thirteen Sittings (OR Books) the afternoon it arrived. Each story, told by a narrator named “Gordon,” I could not help but here in Lish’s precise but gruff voice. Great stuff. Full review forthcoming.

Read the full post at Biblioklept.

Biblioklept interviews Jason Schwartz, author of JOHN THE POSTHUMOUS

Biblioklept: Your book John the Posthumous is a challenge to describe, let alone summarize. How do you describe the book to those who haven’t read it?

Jason Schwartz: I lie–it seems the only decent way to proceed. Why dwell upon unpleasant things?

Read the full interview at Biblioklept.

A story by Lish is anything but innocent. It is the precisely, even obsessively, crafted product of an all-knowing narrator who dazzles with asides and distractions. It is a celebration of loss, a poison gift from its creator dropped into the receptacle—you and I, miserable recipients of beautiful lies.

Read the full story at Electric Literature.

Gordon Lish will now critique your morning musings, commuter complaints and feigned attempts at appearing to know it all. At least, an algorithm-driven facsimile of the famed editor and author will. The Gordon Lish twitterbot challenges you to write a single sentence that would knock his socks off.

Read the full article at Electric Literature.

The tickets sold out months ago. Long before the admiring reviews of the stage adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s novels Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies hit the press at the end of last week, theatre-goers were in no doubt they wanted to see six hours of blazing Tudor intrigue.

A £7m BBC adaptation beckons, with the actor Mark Rylance teaming up with Peter Kosminsky, director of The Government Inspector.

The runaway success of Mantel’s story could be seen as a heartwarming tale for the book industry, but it comes at a time when many insiders worry such a tale will become increasingly rare as talented authors find it ever harder break through.

Read the full article at The Guardian.

To commemorate the year that was, we invited artists, designers, and thinkers across disciplines — from conceptual artist Liam Gillick and spoken word artist Dessa to design firm Experimental Jetset and musician Greg Tate — to share their most noteworthy ideas, events, and objects of 2013. See the entire series 2013: The Year According to ______________________.

Individually, Paul Chan, Ian Cheng, and Micaela Durand have got to be among today’s hardest-working artists: Chan, recently shortlisted for the 2014 Hugo Boss Prize, will show his work at a survey at Schaulager in Basel, starting in April 2014. Badlands will co-publish two books by Chan with Schaulager to for the occasion: New New Testament and Paul Chan: Selected Writings 2000-2014. Between writing gigs — like his contribution to Frieze‘s “Future Fictions” series on new forms of narrative — Cheng exhibits internationally, including a just-closed show at Standard (Oslo) and an upcoming show at Triennale di Milano. Durand makes online art and commentary through the collective BFFA3AE (which includes Daniel Chew and Matthew Gaffney); the group will be featured in a forthcoming show at MoMA PS1.

Collectively, the trio is known as Badlands Unlimited, an experimental venture that’s equal parts print publishing house, ebook developer, gif factory, and digital curator. Recent projects have ranged from a bodice-ripper romance novel inspired by Rep. Michele Bachmann to the enhanced ebook Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews by Calvin Tomkins, a compendium of Saddam Hussein’s democracy speeches from the 1970s to a volume of jottings, notes, and mind maps created by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Read the full list at Walker Art Center.

Read the full review at The Rumpus.

Years before I read it, Jason Schwartz’s 1998 collection A German Picturesque (Knopf) captured my imagination. It wasn’t just because I knew Schwartz as a favorite of legendary editor and teacher Gordon Lish, who published Schwartz’s first stories in his magazine The Quarterly, or because the title struck me as provocatively incongruous given that there wasn’t anything obviously Teutonic about Schwartz, whose author note described him as living in Pennsylvania (he has since decamped to Florida). More than anything, it was that it seemed possessed of the power to make anyone who tried to describe its contents sound completely insane. “The nouns will be the bones, the adjectives the cartilage or skin and the verbs will be the organs,” wrote The Los Angeles Times in a typically gnomic review, while Ben Marcus, not obviously insane, described Schwartz as being “unlike any writer on the planet . . . a master.” I was curious, if not outright incredulous: how was it possible for a single writer, a twentieth-century American “master” no less, to depart wholesale from the line of succession and influence that I understood literature—with its various avant-gardes, occasional norms, and buffet plate of styles—to comprise?

Schwartz’s second book, John the Posthumous, new from OR Books, confirms Schwartz as a writer with neither peer nor precedent, except perhaps in certain Puritan textbooks, diagnoses of medieval plagues, and Biblical glossolalia. Broken into three sections—“Hornbook,” “Housepost, Male Figure,” and “Adulterium”—John the Posthumous reads like a story that already befell its characters, disastrously, and what is left is to pore over the rooms, interrogating the objects and words as though they themselves were the guilty parties. Or perhaps these remains are the stories themselves.

Read the full interview at BOMB.

“TO read a novel is a difficult and complex art,” Virginia Woolf wrote in a 1925 essay, “How to Read a Book.” Today, with our powers of concentration atrophied by the staccato communication of the Internet and attention easily diverted to addictive entertainment on our phones and tablets, book-length reading is harder still.

It’s not just more difficult to find the time and focus that a book demands. Longstanding allies of the reader, professionals who have traditionally provided guidance for those picking up a book, are disappearing fast. The broad, inclusive conversation around interesting titles that such experts helped facilitate is likewise dissipating. Reading, always a solitary affair, is increasingly a lonely one.

A range of related factors have brought this to a head. Start with the publishing companies: Overall book sales have been anemic in recent years, declining 6 percent in the first half of 2013 alone. But the profits of publishers have remained largely intact; in the same period only one of what were then still the “big six” trade houses reported a decline on its bottom line. This is partly because of the higher margins on e-books. But it has also been achieved by publishers cutting costs, especially for mid-list titles.

Read the full op-ed in the New York Times.

When asked, in the dog days of the 2008 presidential campaign, to reveal his favorite literary hero, John McCain named Robert Jordan, the silent and sinewy protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Few eyebrows were raised: the Navy pilot of Vietnam and the dynamiter of the Spanish Civil War were easy enough to conflate. And to readers and voters alike, both seemed like anachronisms.

What, after all, has Hemingway to teach us on the cusp of 2014? Young men today, left and right seem to agree, are mostly pajama-clad creatures; they have less in common with Papa and more with Nathaniel P., the sad cad of Brooklyn. Why, then, Hemingway?

The answer—or an answer, as definitive declarations are as antiquated these days as the #3 Royal Corona on which Hemingway typed his masterworks—comes in the form of an empathic, humorous, and illuminating little book from Clancy Sigal, himself a literary lion and an ambassador from an era in which having lived life was a prerequisite to feeling entitled to write about it.

Read the full review at Tablet.

There was a game we played. Maybe it wasn’t a game in and of itself. Is a ball a game? A ball is not a game. But you can make a game with it, can’t you? What can’t you make a game with or of? You just have to decide you’re going to do it, is all. Or not even make up your mind and go ahead and decide as such. All you have to do is take the thing and start doing something with it and then say to a boy on the block, Can you do this? and then you show the boy that you can, and then the next thing is that that particular boy has to see if he can do it too or even if he can’t, well, I ask you, is there or is there not already enough of a game going from just that much of it already? Or even better, let’s say he can’t do it, the boy, that particular boy, then even better, even better that he can’t, except who can say, maybe before you know it you’re the boy who’s sorry you started the whole thing in the first place, because maybe the boy we’re talking about, maybe he can go ahead and do it better than you can do it, and then you wish you had never even taken the reins and started the game and could instead of any of that just stop playing it, but you can’t stop playing it, because every time that particular boy on the block comes around he’s got the thing you need for the game with him and he says to you, Hey look, can you do this, can you, can you? even if all you have to do is do it as many times as he can, or do it a little farther than he can, or do it faster than he can, or, you know, more times, or do it some other way different like that.

Read the full story in January 2014 Harper’s.

I’ve been hyping this book quite insistently since the summer, so I’ll stop soon! Suffice to say, I agree with Sam Lipsyte’s assertion that Schwartz has achieved “a unique relation to the language.” I remember reading that Denis Donoghue once proposed three “stages” through which writers should pass. First, self-expression. Second, communication. And third, exploring the form of language itself. But Schwartz’s work does more than merely “explore.” It twists the common tongue into something truly unprecedented: a new species of utterance.

Read the full list at The Quarterly Conversation.