Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac has been in the news lately. First, the 120-foot, type-written scroll of his 1957 classic On The Road has been put on display as part of an exhibition at the British Library (until December). The scroll was written in three drug-fueled weeks. BBC profiled the exhibition with a nice video. Although the book is always said to have “defined a generation,” what it really defined is how people imagine the U.S. West. Now, the NY Times published a feature on the Beat Museum in San Francisco. I was obsessed with Beat Lit growing up.
Thanks to my friend Alex T., I came across Action Philosophers!, self-described as “the award-winning, critically praised comic book series detailing the lives and thoughts of history’s A-list brain trust in a hip and humorous way that proves that philosophy can be for everyone!” All nine editions are available as a single volume. A preview is available on their site (PDF).
Motherboard a blog with Vice published an interesting piece on research about the relation between the timing of social uprisings in 2008 and 2011 and food prices. E.P. Thompson’s moral economy of the crowd in action? (h/t: Rory Padfield)
Public Works got twenty-seven designers to interpret the idea of “public” in relation to space and bicycles and out came some really cool posters. (h/t: @backspace)