Bedugul Coffee: How cell phones would change the plot of famous books

The Huffington Post

Culture Shift is a newsletter curated by the HuffPost Culture writers and editors.

This week we're talking about the power of GIFs on the Internet, how cell phones would change the plots of famous books, the first legally recognized cyborg and that new David Foster Wallace film.

If You Have To Say It, Say It In GIFs

"The GIF has rocketed to the top of the Internet communications pecking order, an unlikely queen of digital chatter. Nearly 30 years ago, CompuServe's Steve Wilhite launched the graphics interchange format as a higher quality and more compressed image file than existed on the market. Then, copyright squabbles tied up the GIF in court for nearly 10 years and, according to Mashable, put off many developers, who adopted the PNG format instead of the GIF when the former debuted in 1996. As the years passed, however, rather than fading away, the GIF evolved in directions its creator could never have predicted." (Read more here)

The New David Foster Wallace Film Is Exactly The 'Grotesque Parody' He Feared

"'The End of the Tour' opened Friday with a well-deserved 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. Jason Segel and Jesse Eisenberg have, by many accounts, given career-best performances in this 'biographical road trip' of the five days Rolling Stone writer David Lipsky spent with literary heavyweight David Foster Wallace as his book Infinite Jest was rising to national acclaim. It's a good film, maybe a great one. It's also a cultural and artistic tragedy." (Read more here)

How Cell Phones Would Change The Plots Of Famous Books

"High Schoolers reading Romeo and Juliettoday probably have a hard time imagining a world in which two people have such catastrophically frustrating communication problems. 'Juliet, send the man a text before you initiate a complicated fake death scheme,' a present-day Mercutio might suggest. 'Drop him a DM. Toss over a Snapchat.'" (Read more here)

The World's First Legally Recognized Cyborg May Be Onto Something

"[Neil] Harbisson's journey toward becoming a cyborg began, essentially, at birth. He was born colorblind; specifically, Harbisson experienced a rare form called achromatopsia, which allowed him to see the world only in shades of gray. As far as colorblindness goes, he possessed a severe and rare form, affecting one in every 33,000 people. These days, however, Harbisson holds an even more singular condition, sonochromatopsia." (Read more here)

This Is What A Love Story Without Genders Looks Like

"Enter Anne F. Garréta, a French author whose experimental tricks aim to make readers question the strictures we apply to our love stories. In particular, she's interested in how gender influences how we write about romance, and her newly translated novel, Sphinx, avoids gendered descriptors altogether in its characterization of its two protagonists." (Read more here)

Wear Whatever The Hell You Want To The Theater

"On Tuesday, New York Post theater critic Elisabeth Vincentelli wrote a piece called 'For the love of God, stop dressing like crap.' In it, she describes a few incidents in which she witnessed theatergoers wearing what she describes as 'hideous' attire. She berates women who 'look as if they had stepped out of a jazzercise class,' men who wear cargo shorts, and people in Crocs. My thought on the subject: WHO CARES?" (Read more here)

7 Forgotten Women Surrealists Who Deserve To Be Remembered

"The names most often associated with surrealism, the avant-garde cultural movement born in the 1920s, include Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp and Yves Tanguy, among others. Surprise, surprise, they're all men. Thankfully, Sotheby's is now hoping to illuminate the many women artists who deserve equal recognition." (Read more here)

You're More Creative When You're Sarcastic, Says Study

"Sarcasm doesn't always land well. Comedians like Sarah Silverman and Trevor Noah have come under fire for jokes gone awry (or misunderstood, depending on where your tastes lie), and some psychologists even equate sarcasm to 'bullying.' If the line between harmless fun and hostile snark can often be thin, why take the risk? For one, sarcasm can be pretty damn funny. And now, researchers have identified actual cognitive benefits to being sarcastic. " (Read more here)