What We're Reading | 8.4.13

Each week, members of the WFPL News team spotlight interesting stories we've read and enjoyed, for your weekend reading pleasure:

Gabe Bullard: Google Glass is behind some of the best hand-wringing, paranoia, fantasy and apologia in writing today. Two pieces out now highlight that. The first is Gary Shteyngart's first-person account of his time with Glass in the New Yorker. It includes this description of meeting another person with Glass. Before I leave, Aray and I have a Google “hangout.” We essentially swap identities. I see what she sees through her Glass, which is me. She sees what I see through my Glass, which is her. We bring our faces closer, as if approaching a mirror, but the feeling is more akin to being trapped in an early Spike Jonze movie or thrust into an unholy Vulcan mind meld.Read O.K., Glass.Wired's Mat Honan has an interesting defense of Glass, in particular, he defends the use of the camera in Glass. Read The Glass Backlash.Devin Katayama:I’m continuing to research memory. More specifically memory sharing (or memory stealing, however you want to look at it). Researchers in New Zealand looked at siblings who shared memories and found that twins had more of these types of instances. Also, that memories that reflected more negatively on the self, were more likely to be passed along as the other sibling’s memory. Further, twins experienced more vivid descriptions of their “disputed” memories, each owning the recollection more intimately. What can you recall? Now think, was it real? Read  Mind Bending: Why Our Memories Are Not Always Our Own.Joseph Lord:Fun fact—significantly more books published in the 1910s are in print than books published in the 1980s. This Atlantic piece argues that copyright laws are the culprit. Read The Hole in Our Collective Memory.