In his eulogy for Christina Taylor Green, one of the victims of the Tucson shooting spree, President Obama said, "If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina is jumping in them today." However, for many of us in the post-transcendent twenty-first century, death is not a passageway to eternity but...

My new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, is awash in conscious, self-conscious, conspicuous appropriation. I and many other contemporary writers, musicians, visual artists, and copyleft lawyers are trying to think in new and different and (we believe) exciting ways about quotation, citation, appropriation, and plagiarism. We're trying to regain the...