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The Brooklyn 100: Kevin Nguyen
Last fall, Google brought Kevin Nguyen, and a substantial part of team from the recently acquired ebooks service Oyster, aboard to help recommend and sell ebooks. He’s since moved to GQ, where he’s serving as the deputy editor of GQ.com. He’s a smart person to bring on. With time also spent at Grantland (as a critic) and Amazon (as an editor), Nguyen knows how books and technology and literary culture intersect.
In addition to editing, you also write! Are you working on anything now?
I’m writing a few things, but most urgently, I’m finishing up an essay about my high school wrestling career. It’s weird (in hindsight) just how much wrestling makes prepubescent boys intimately aware of their bodies and other people’s bodies. [Ed. note, the essay—it’s great—went on to appear in BuzzFeed.] It’s for a reading to celebrate the launch of Katie Heaney’s novel. I hope she doesn’t mind how much I talk about pubic hair.
I’m also working on some longer projects that are too early to talk about with any coherency.
Define night tweets.
Night tweets have existed for a long time, but Becca Laurie brilliantly coined the term. Basically a night tweet is a tweet that you deliberately post during the hours when very few people will see it. What that usually turns into is extremely dorky jokes.
As a philosophy, it’s sort of a rejection of the notion that you tweet for faves or retweets, or that Twitter has to be performative at all. In the early days, people weren’t as afraid to be weird or silly. I’d like to think Night Twitter harkens back to that era.
