An updated notion of genius would have to center around one's mastery of information and its dissemination.

We're living in a time when the sheer amount of language has exponentially increased. As writers, if we wish to be contemporary, I think we need to acknowledge that the very nature of the materials that we're working with - the landscape of language - is very different than it was a few decades ago.

I never wanted my books to be mistaken for poetry or fiction books; I wanted to write reference books. But instead of referring to something, they refer to nothing.

And I think this is the real epiphany: the ways in which culture is distributed become profoundly more intriguing as a cultural artifact itself. What we've experienced is an inversion of consumption, one in which we've come to prefer the acts of acquisition over that which we are acquiring, the bottles over the wine.

It's Twitter's combination of simplicity and complexity that is astonishing in the same way that minimalist sculpture was inspiring and enlightening.

If you don't want something to exist - and there are many reasons to want to keep things private - keep it off the web. But if you put it in digital form, expect it to be bootlegged, remixed, manipulated, and endlessly commented upon.

New York City is just one node on the global cultural scene now. Social media reflects the state of the world, so I've become more devoted to that. To be a NYC artist today feels local and small. Social media feels now.