The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Dwight Wilmerding, the protagonist of Benjamin Kunkel's 2005 novel Indecision, is acutely aware that other people have trod in his existential shoes. An ambivalent part-time tech support worker, he feels "like a scrap of sociology blown into its designated corner of the world. But knowing the clichés are clichés doesn't help you to escape them. You still have to go on experiencing your experience as if no one else has ever done it."

I had trouble getting into John Updike's writing. As an undergrad, I did the thing where I tried to search out my identity through literature, and this led me (scarily) first to Bukowski, then (understandably) to Jonathan Safran Foer, then (scarily, again, in terms of personality, even though he's indisputably a fantastic writer) to Philip Roth. Right now, for the record, I'm hovering around Saul Bellow, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Kafka.

On the front page of yesterday's New York Times is an article by Motoko Rich titled, "Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?" It's the first in a series that will explore "how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read." This installment focuses on the somewhat new debate as to whether online reading promotes literacy, or is detrimental to it.

NY Times media columnist David Carr told a sad tale today. It started out with him telling how the city of Chicago had just paid out $20 million to settle lawsuits by four former condemned men who had been tortured by police.

This morning, around 7 a.m., a senior White House economist citing unexpected job growth last month pronounced the U.S. economy "still strong" and said he does not believe we are headed into a recession.

If you're like me you're both encouraged by this news and slightly perplexed. The world as viewed by Edward Lazear, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, does not appear to be the same one I'm looking at — and living in — each day.