Broken Pencil co-founder Hal Niedzviecki offers up his Must-List

TODAY: Writer, editor and pop culture critic Hal Niedzviecki

Hal Niedzviecki is the author of ten books including The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbours, which was listed as one of Oprah’s top-25 reads for the summer and the inspiration of the much-anticipated documentary of the same name. He is the co-founder of Broken Pencil, the magazine of zine culture and the independent arts as well as the annual Canzine festival of underground culture.

Doug Saunders: Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History is Reshaping Our World (2011)

“As far as I can tell, it’s about the rise of the urban and how the entire world is basically going to be big, massive cities, which I think is really interesting. I’ve often commented on the illusion that Canada is a rural country when, just about everyone lives in cities and suburbs clustered along the American/Canadian border and we are in fact intensely urban and intensely technological.”

Adrian Grenier’s Teenage Paparazzo (2010)

[Documents the relationship between 14-year-old paparazzo Austin Visschedyk and actor Adrian Grenier.]

“This is nothing, even remotely serious about world issues, which I suppose I should have an interest in, but I tend to avoid those types of documentaries. These are the types of stories I live to tell, or like to see being told. Just that whole idea of people really trying to enter pop culture in the fullest way possible. Because of course even today the vast majority of human beings are not going to be celebrities, or have any contact with celebrities. So the ways in which people try to get around that fact, that indisputable fact that celebrity will always be a precious commodity and if you want to get your hands on it it’s going to be very difficult. In many ways that’s been the staple of my non-fiction writing and my journalistic career.”

Wiretap with Jonathan Goldstein (CBC Radio)

“It’s Goldstein! It’s Goldstein saying a bunch of stupid sh-it with his dumb friends. Every once and a while it breaks into the sublime, almost by accident, but really, there’s nothing else like it on the CBC that’s for sure, or really not much like it on radio in general. It’s just kind of my wavelength.”