The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld Behind the familiar Internet most of us inhabit skulks the dark net: unlinked, encrypted, password-protected sites and pages serving as forums for everything from marijuana-by-mail sales to mutual suicide webcam pacts. Author Jamie Bartlett is director of the Centre for Analysis of Social Media at the United Kingdom think tank Demos, which makes him well qualified to dive in and find out what the deeper implications of the dark net might be. Some British reviewers have taken issue with Bartlett’s optimistic assessment that these unregulated channels are by and large a good thing; […]

I’ve long been a fan of Dennis Cooper’s, the author of such formally audacious, heartbreakingly terrifying and sexually transgressive novels as Closer, Frisk and My Loose Thread. He has a new novel, God, Jr., a “PG-13” one, coming out this spring, but in the meantime Cooper has chosen the small Void Books to publish a “side project,” The Sluts, he considers too much for his regular publisher, Grove. Considering that Cooper has spent his entire literary career living outside the envelope, it does make me a little afraid to contemplate this new one. Says the press release: Set largely on […]