The Daily

Posts Tagged ‘Alikewise’

Like Minds

June 29, 2011 | by

Photograph by Ruth Fremson.

Life of Pi, Yann Martel (F, 20s, long hair, worn black T-shirt, skinny jeans, brown purse, L train)

Any Man of Mine, Rachel Gibson (F, 40s, stripey tote, black pants, F train)

For those of us prone to paranoia, the tumblr CoverSpy has made the New York commute infinitely more harrowing. The site (which also has a Twitter arm) enlists a “team of publishing nerds [who hit] the subways, streets, parks & bars to find out what New Yorkers are reading now.” It makes for addictively voyeuristic reading. And it’s enough to make you long for the soulless inscrutability of a Kindle. Do they know this is for work? you think, and Why are so many people on the L reading Ayn Rand?, and How old would they think I am?

Judging others by their books—or, more charitably, forming relationships based on shared literary tastes—is also the guiding principle behind the online dating site Alikewise.com, which was conceived when one of the founders voiced his wish for a woman who liked The Black Swan. (One friend described it as “actually, a very convenient way to expedite the weeding process.”) As always in such situations, the question quickly becomes not whether people are lying but why and how well. In its way, it is every bit as harrowing as the roving judgments of CoverSpy. So it is perhaps natural that the two organizations should join forces and produce an event that’s either a bibliophile’s dream or a neurotic’s nightmare, depending on how you look at it.

Read More »

3 COMMENTS
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/tag/alikewise/
www.theparisreview.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2016-44
46202
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:5DCH3P3B7QLWGWTSX34NFAKXGD542GEC
<urn:uuid:1e29778f-ab68-441f-8888-d24695729d20>
2016-10-26T19:11:56Z
66.175.215.207
sha1:6ER35EBORRF4VIDLDN5MVXKC6YZUYC3R
<urn:uuid:5847361a-ffe4-4231-ada2-cf3bdb5d37ff>
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/tag/alikewise/
length
response
<urn:uuid:4765b050-a0ae-44c9-9c1e-cf383ed33331>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-171-6-4.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-44
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf