Culture

"Data envelops and surrounds a newborn in a neonatal ward, forming a protective shell/blanket/mobile�we might even think of it as bathwater. It's magical no, wait, it's science!"

I'm eager to see Monsters, Gareth Edwards' film about a man escorting a woman through a zone made deadly by the after-effects of an alien invasion. But wait�that film was made before!

Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, The Tree of Codes, has a marvelous title. But the real marvel begins when you turn the cover to find that the story is literally carved out of another work�namely, The Street of Crocodiles, the 1934 cycle of short stories by martyred Polish writer Bruno Schulz. There's a gadget angle to all this, but you'll have to follow the jump for it.

�Repair is green�repair is joyful�repair injects soul and makes things unique.� Those are some of the claims of Ifixit�s "Self-Repair Manifesto," which is not a self-help tract but a hacker�s call to arms.

The New York Times bestseller list not only measures book sales, it also sells books; millions of readers make selections based on what they find there. Starting early next year, the New York Times Company will try to bring that clout to bear on the electronic books market.

The uncanny valley is getting crowded. A female-modeled version of Geminoid, roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro's creepy android, is now appearing opposite a human actor in Japan in a short play entitled Sayonara�as in, "sayonara, humans."

Zadie Smith's dissection of The Social Network is smart and illuminating. But when she turns to the broader question of the cultural and human dimensions of social networking, things get complicated.

Electronic musician James Blake covers the Feist song "Limit to Your Love"�I've been haunted by this track for a couple of days, and I've finally figured out why.

Artist Jude Buffum has created a series of portraits of beloved Nintendo characters (like Gesso, above) in the form of butcher�s diagrams�bringing together his love of gaming and meat.

The British Library is the original deposit library: as with the Library of Congress in the United States, publishers are required to deposit copies of works distributed under their imprint. Now, according to a report in The Independent, the British Library is considering extending the 350-year-old idea of the deposit library from books to video games, creating a permanent record of the gaming industry in Britain.