But somewhere in an office at the Washington Post, or the Guardian or Yahoo! News, somebody figured out a simple way to go around that. What if you skip the step where you wait for somebody to recommend your article, and simply compel them by force or trickery to “share” it across Facebook? For every reader, you’d get their friends for free.

They got something wrong about friendship.

Show me two friends who share everything with one another and I’ll show you a pair of identical twins who can’t yet speak English and will need decades of therapy later. We edit our friendships just as selectively as we edit any other part of our social lives, reading choices included. The publishers looking to make a buck here are right—reading is a social activity—except they completely bungled what that means. We read novels to forge the basis for new social responses we didn’t know existed yet, and to see new archetypes in the people around us. We read the news to stay informed of what befalls those we empathize with or fear but do not know. And when we share what we read, it’s a kind of wager: I trust, as a good friend does, that you are like enough to me that this book or story will spark the same feelings in you that I already have. It will create common ground, and then we can talk about it. Whether this happens over the table in a coffee shop or on Facebook, the gambit was the same: let’s find our common ground, and take on this news of the day together.

Until now.

Recently I’ve seen my news feed turn sour with links that are useless, embarrassing, and entirely against the principles that made social networking powerful. They’re the same few stories every day, prefaced with an explanation: “Joe Bob read an article.” And then a link to the article. Sounds innocuous enough. But the link and the thumbnail are things I wouldn’t usually associate with Joe Bob. The article is about a girl in a bikini rescuing a puppy. Joe Bob usually only posts things about being a lawyer. Has he suddenly decided to go on a hog-wild pop-culture binge? Nope, he’s just signed up for an app that broadcasts everything he clicks on to all of his friends, all the time. The Washington Post has an in-house team that developed one of these apps, which is supposed to save the paper or something. The Guardian opened one up last week, after announcing that social had surpassed search in creating traffic to their site. Yahoo! has one too, I guess.

The links are useless because they have nothing to do with the common interests we share. They’re embarrassing because every last one of us reads lowbrow clickbait shit, but we don’t talk about it with our friends because it says nothing about who we’d like to be.

The Facebook news feed has become filled with spam from these “social reading” engines. We’ve become accustomed to seeing old familiar faces on our News Feed when we log in. We read people’s posts in their own voices, imagining them doing the things they’re talking about, and that’s what made Facebook so powerful in the first place. It’s a living, breathing scrapbook and totem of all the relationships we’ve forged, and it lets us send little blinks of information between one another with almost no effort.

Facebook, as a company, has interpreted this a little differently. Their analytics people look at the swift tide of new memberships and increased communication and interpret it, optimistically, as an innate human desire to wipe away all barriers of privacy. To share everything. That certainly works well for advertisers, but there’s a fatal flaw that will be the downfall of Facebook or society or both. When everything is shared, everything is homogenized. If we cannot edit friendships and communications the way we have been for thousands of years, we will become nothing more than an angry mob, a shrill chorus of barking broadcasters struggling to be heard, each uttering variations on the same message. The message will be thus: ONE WEIRD TIP! BOOBS AND TITS! MILEY CYRUS WORKOUT WEAR MAKE IT AT HOME TONIGHT! SHARE! SHARE! SHARE!

The climax of the zombie movie is when the friends you trusted as allies start to gnaw flesh and bark the zombie-party line. All it takes is a click: Authorize this App. And then the content is consumed. It will be interesting to see.

Ms. Karenina’s story reflects a growing trend among Russian women who, fed up with their aging husbands, are leaving their families, taking up with handsome young men and, when things go badly, eventually falling under moving trains…

Michael Shapiro, Columbia Journalism Review, 2008

Outside, the stars had darkened and it had started to drizzle, so the prospect of a nightcap was pleasing, especially if I should have to return on foot to my own hotel, which was a mile distant from the Miyako. I poured some vodka; Brando declined to join me. However, he subsequently reached for my glass, sipped from it, set it down between us, and suddenly said, in an offhand way that nonetheless conveyed feeling, “My mother. She broke apart like a piece of porcelain.”

Capote meets Brando in Kyoto, 1957.

From the introduction:

There’s one last truth that I don’t tell them, because it’s needlessly disturbing and would serve no pragmatic purpose. I’ll say it now, just once, and be done with it. A real writer is someone for whom writing is a terrible ordeal. That is because he knows, deep down, with an awful clarity, that there are limitless ways to fill a page with words, and that he will never, ever, do it perfectly. On some level, that knowledge haunts him all the time. He will always be juggling words in his head, trying to get them closer to a tantalizing, unreachable ideal.

It’s a torment you can’t escape. It will reach even into the comfort of a drunken sleep, and it will shake you awake, and send you, heart pumping, to an empty piece of paper.

If you have that, you can be a good writer. Congratulations, I guess.

He tells her what it’s like watching the children of the guards, who live on the plantation grounds, grow up, and how strange it is to see young boys who once called “Hey, nigger!” to him as he worked the fields become guards themselves—yes, that much time is passing—with rifles in their hands and toothpicks in their mouths and absolute power over where he rests his eyeballs. He tells her he is losing his grasp on time, losing his ability to count, in a way; how during his first four years of imprisonment, at Caddo Correctional, time was still solid, still the bedrock of his reality, each day marked by a beginning and an end linked by a continuous line of being, but how at Angola, a place that cannot possibly be real (can it?), he has learned that a man’s grasp on time is like his good health— something taken for granted until it dissolves. He tells her about the way a cell becomes a kiln in the summer, the air void of motion, 110 degrees at two in the morning, the way he will take a tin cup and splash the brown water from the tap onto the concrete floor, then lie in it face down, spread-eagled and naked, his nose and mouth filled with the ever present shit-stink bubbling up from the drain, his ears filled with the baboon shrieks of men whose consciousness has been reduced to the purely physical, saying to himself over and over, for hours on end, I will not die in Angola.… I will not die in Angola.… I will not die in Angola.…

Read it. And weep. Download it, print it out. Read it on a bus. Read it out loud to your girlfriend. You know what to do.

The simpler the better, really. I want to know what you did, what you ate, and who was with you when you went to bed. Were you cold on this day? Did eating a can of beans make you feel better, or remind you of your home? Are your calves itching as you walk? Really, give me empathy and I’ll give you a book you’re not supposed to like.

I just finished reading A Walk Across America, in which the author and his half-Malamute wander down the eastern part of the country in the mid-’70s and encounter all sorts of magical and genuine folk. As the end of the book approaches the narrator quickly finds God at stadium revival and falls in love and gets married. See, urbane fucks like myself would scoff at such moral investment, if I hadn’t experienced firsthand the embarrassingly pure emotions that seep in when you’re traveling on your own.

Why is it that when people in our country do this sort of thing they’re always “looking for America” as well as “looking for themselves?” What’s so outdated about just looking?

Now, Steinbeck is a master of unirony, and he wrote Travels with Charley in Search of America, which I haven’t read. But it contains all the good stuff: a man, his dog, a vehicle, and a trite metaphor about America. Whee!

A while ago as college was grinding to a halt I read a book whose title I can’t remember, by a guy who rode around the world on his bike. It had a forgettable title, and forgettable contents. Which is absolutely fine by me. I had a great time reading it. As I recall, he broke up with his girlfriend in the shadow of the Himalayas and had forgotten about it by the next chapter.

Then there’s the mother lode of all inane touring journal repositories, crazyguyonabike.com. You can find my journal as well as an amazing story of a trip from LA to Malaysia that had me reading every night, finally “bumping into” the end of the journal, when the dude was still on the road somewhere in western China, and I had to slow down and wait for him to wake up and write the next day. I mean, holy crap! How is some dead literature person going to move you more than that?

All this got started when I first visited Ken Kifer’s bike touring pages. Talk about unironic. Tells how feels and where itches.

Now I’m reading Blue Highways, by the improbably named William Least Heat-Moon. It’s interesting enough, although you sort of miss an overarching narrative because he leaves people behind after a single conversation and obstinately (and, I think, presumptuously) refuses to write himself into the book much. Come on, man! It’s a narcissistic project to begin with! Also, reading about how he just rides around in his van and gets out to stretch and then gets back in makes me antsy as all hell.

It provides a constant string of those “how-did-I-miss-this” moments that are the keystone of memorable reporting. Horton only bites when he’s sure he’ll get something good, and his restraint and lack of embellishment is almost as mesmerizing as the risk he takes in stating the simple facts.