January 2008
"I just make it up"
Acclaimed, iconoclastic biographer Diane Middlebrook died Saturday, Dec. 15, in San Francisco of cancer. Middlebrook, a celebrated biographer who became a bit of a legend herself, was 68… . Middlebrook leaves behind a manuscript that is groundbreaking in a different way—a biography of Ovid, a work that will be indelibly linked with her life’s end. Viking had planned to publish the work in...
Watch“Underwater Astonishments”
the announcement we've all been waiting for
CHARLESTON, SC — After spending two months accompanying his wife, Hillary, on the campaign trail, former president Bill Clinton announced Monday that he is joining the 2008 presidential race, saying he “could no longer resist the urge.”
“My fellow Americans, I am sick and tired of not being president,” said Clinton, introducing his wife at a “Hillary ‘08”...
"Endnotes" (a short story by Gregory Normington) →
http://idrinkyourmilkshake.com/ →
on Jonny Greenwood's score for "There Will Be...
There may be no scarcer commodity in modern Hollywood than a distinctive and original film score. Most soundtracks lean so heavily on a few preprocessed musical devices—those synthetic swells of strings and cymbals, urging us to swoon in tandem with the cheerleader in love—that when a composer adopts a more personal language the effect is revelatory: an entire dimension of the film experience is...
reparations for the Beatles
“We would like to take this opportunity to rectify a historic missed opportunity which unfortunately took place in 1965 when you were invited to Israel. Unfortunately the state of Israel canceled your performance in the country due to lack of budget and because several politicians in the Knesset had believed at the time that your performance might corrupt the minds of Israeli youth.”...
today is the fiftieth anniversary of the patenting... →
“Multitasking, a definition: ‘The attempt by human beings to operate like...”
– Walter Kirn
Benjamin's miniaturism
To explore the submerged cultures of Berlin or Paris, [Walter] Benjamin had to cram a library in his voluminous brain. He could not take his books with him when he left the Third Reich or Vichy France; the way to manage the feat was to reduce elaborate theses to abbreviated jottings. He found the same miniaturisation in the arcades. They offered customers a city scaled down, where a universe of...
smells like . . .
A prize-winning novelist has won a settlement of more than £100,000 after she claimed to have become so intoxicated by fumes from a nearby shoe factory that she was reduced to writing thrillers. Joan Brady, who beat Andrew Motion and Carol Anne Duffy to win the Whitbread Prize in 1993 with her book The Theory of War, has received £115,000 in an out-of-court settlement after she suffered...
Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas is now a... →
the Clover
A professionwide interest in brewed coffee has driven the stealth spread of the Clover. Introduced less than two years ago, it has become standard equipment at some of the country’s most progressive cafes, including Intelligentsia in Chicago, La Mill in Los Angeles and Caffe Vita in Seattle… . So far, the Clover is still something of a cult object, with just over 200 machines scattered...
"He doesn't preach religion."
Jennifer Lee, a 23-year-old teacher’s assistant for autistic children in New York City, watches [Joel] Osteen every Sunday morning. She also downloaded Your Best Life Now onto her iPod, passionately discusses Osteen’s sermons with friends, and even credits the fresh-faced pastor with helping her cope with her mother’s breast cancer. And she’s not even a Christian. Lee was raised Jewish. As a...
griefers
Griefing, as a term, dates to the late 1990s, when it was used to describe the willfully antisocial behaviors seen in early massively multiplayer games like Ultima Online and first-person shooters like Counter-Strike (fragging your own teammates, for instance, or repeatedly killing a player many levels below you). But even before it had a name, grieferlike behavior was familiar in prehistoric...
a few thoughts on There Will Be Blood →
the Mythbusters: liberal arts poster children →
more proof that everyone oughta be tweetin' →
a few thoughts on my home town and Dr. King →
Family Boat Dining Café: we serve all our food in... →
merely a "document"
Working as a journalist in his mid-20s, Wiesel wrote the first version of “Night” in Yiddish as “Und di Velt Hot Geshvign” (“And the World Remained Silent”) while on assignment in Brazil. But it wasn’t until he returned to Paris and met François Mauriac, a noted Catholic novelist and journalist, that “Night” took the shape we know today. Mauriac urged Wiesel to rewrite the book in French and...
the pathology of shyness
[Christopher] Lane writes: ‘Beginning in 1980, with much fanfare and confidence in its revised diagnoses, the American Psychiatric Association added “social phobia”, “avoidant personality disorder”, and several similar conditions to the third edition of its massively expanded Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In this 500-page volume… the introverted individual morphed into the...
Vikram Seth and George Herbert's house
When I was seventeen or so, I came to England (from India) to do my A-levels in physics and mathematics. In the event, I did only one A-level: in English. One of our set books was a collection of George Herbert’s verse. I felt a deep affinity for Herbert from the first time I read him – though I am not Christian and am, indeed, hardly religious. When, more than three decades later, I heard that...
A. E. Housman on the causes of obscurity in poetry
When the meaning of a poem is obscure, it is due to one of three causes. Either the author through lack of skill has failed to express his meaning; or he has concealed it intentionally; or he has no meaning either to conceal or express. In none of these cases does he like to be asked about it. In the first case it makes him feel humiliated; in the second it makes him feel embarrassed; in the third...
Cloverfield
In a quote from the press notes, Abrams says, “We live in a time of great fear. Having a movie that is about something as outlandish as a massive creature attacking your city allows people to process and experience that fear in a way that is incredibly entertaining and incredibly safe.” Cloverfield’s entertainment value remains to be determined over its opening weekend. For...
there must be clowns?
LONDON - Bad news for Coco and Blinko — children don’t like clowns, and even older kids are scared of them. That’s the finding of a poll of youngsters by researchers from the University of Sheffield who were examining how to improve the decor of hospital children’s wards. The study, reported in the Nursing Standard magazine, found all the 250 patients aged between 4 and 16 they...
Karl Barth, donkey
With horror I read [a] statement that I was the greatest theologian of the century. That really terrified me… . What does the term ‘greatest theologian’ actually mean? … As a theologian one can never be great, but at best one remains small in one’s own way… . Let me again remind you of the donkey I referred to [earlier]. A real donkey is mentioned in the Bible, or more specifically an...
Spengler on textual criticism of the Koran
The Muslim world will continue to treat Koranic criticism as an existential risk, and apply whatever pressure is required to discourage it … The Islamic world is forced to adopt an openly irrational stance, employing its power to intimidate scholars and frustrate the search for truth. It is impossible for Muslims to propose a dialogue with Western religions, as 38 Islamic scholars did in an...
Caitlin Flanagan on Katie Couric
That Katie has bombed at CBS is a testament, not to the existence of a glass ceiling, but to the fact that real revolutions are so thoroughgoing that they don’t just provide a new answer, they change the very questions being asked. Katie’s mandate to lure women and young people to the nightly news was in itself ridiculous and doomed to fail—and a goal beneath her talent and ambitions. No woman...
nothing more
[Caitlin] Flanagan says that Juno is a “fairy tale” because, “As any woman who has ever chosen (or been forced) to kick it old school can tell you, surrendering a baby whom you will never know comes with a steep and lifelong cost. Nor is an abortion psychologically or physically simple. It is an invasive and frightening procedure.” It’s not the sentiment that bugs...
honoring your mothers and fathers
To my mind the whole question of tradition falls under the Fifth Commandment: Honour father and mother! Certainly that is a limited authority; we have to obey God more than father and mother. But we have also to obey father and mother… . There is no question of bondage and constraint. It is merely that in the Church the same kind of obedience as, I hope, you pay to your father and mother, is...
1 tag
studying the meaning of life (or not)
In the past few weeks, tens of thousands of young men and women have begun their college careers. They have worked hard to get there. A letter of admission to one of the country’s selective colleges or universities has become the most sought-after prize in America. The students who have won this prize are about to enter an academic environment richer than any they have known. They will find...
human value and literary value
In the second of the essays here, ‘The Voice of the Lonely Crowd’, Amis argues that one of the first casualties of ‘The Long War’ after 11 September was the western literary imagination in general, and his own in particular. ‘After a couple of hours at their desks, on September 12,’ Amis wrote, ‘all writers on earth were considering the course that Lenin...
what an electronic reading device should be
Please don’t imagine that I’m one of those muttering diehards who exhibit an irrational fetish for the book-as-object. Instead, in the hope of hastening the exciting ebook revolution, I here propose a minimal list of features that any really successful ebook device must eventually have. Feature parity with physical books, after all, is surely a reasonable baseline demand. So here is what the...
fun & games with trains
A Polish teenager allegedly turned the tram system in the city of Lodz into his own personal train set, triggering chaos and derailing four vehicles in the process. Twelve people were injured in one of the incidents.
The 14-year-old modified a TV remote control so that it could be used to change track points, The Telegraph reports. Local police said the youngster trespassed in tram depots to...
Sean Dodson's ten favorite bookshops in the world →
evidence that your grades depend on the font you... →
J. K. Rowling versus the Harry Potter Lexicon
Unlike a Potter film or computer game, the authors of the Lexicon encyclopedia are not simply moving Potter to another medium. Their purpose, rather, is providing a reference guide with description and discussion, rather like a very long and detailed book review. Such guides have been around forever—centuries if you count the Bible, and more recently for complex works like the writings of Jorge...
"the best way to avoid dying"
Having a pint of beer after a game of football or going to the gym could be the key to a long, healthy life, new research claims. According to the study, moderate drinking combined with exercise is the best combination to prevent life-threatening conditions - even better than total abstention. The survey of more than 11,000 people over 20 years showed that drinking and exercising - though not...
compression
Too much compression can be heard as musical clutter; on the Arctic Monkeys’ debut, the band never seems to pause to catch its breath. By maintaining constant intensity, the album flattens out the emotional peaks that usually stand out in a song. “You lose the power of the chorus, because it’s not louder than the verses,” Bendeth says. “You lose emotion.” The...
“It’s easy being President, Lisa! You just point the army and shoot.”
– Homer Simpson
Nicholar Carr, optimist (via Wired)
Wired: What happened to privacy worries?
Carr: People say they're nervous about storing personal info online, but they do it all the time, sacrificing privacy to save time and money. Companies are no different. The two most popular Web-based business applications right now are for managing payroll and customer accounts — some of the most sensitive information companies have.
Wired: What's left for PCs?
Carr: They're turning into network terminals.
Wired: Just like Sun Microsystems' old mantra, "The network is the computer"?
Carr: It's no coincidence that Google CEO Eric Schmidt cut his teeth there. Google is fulfilling the destiny that Sun sketched out.
Wired: But a single global system?
Carr: I used to think we'd end up with something dynamic and heterogeneous — many companies loosely joined. But we're already seeing a great deal of consolidation by companies like Google and Microsoft. We'll probably see some kind of oligopoly, with standards that allow the movement of data among the utilities similar to the way current moves through the electric grid.
Wired: What happened to the Web undermining institutions and empowering individuals?
Carr: Computers are technologies of liberation, but they're also technologies of control. It's great that everyone is empowered to write blogs, upload videos to YouTube, and promote themselves on Facebook. But as systems become more centralized — as personal data becomes more exposed and data-mining software grows in sophistication — the interests of control will gain the upper hand. If you're looking to monitor and manipulate people, you couldn't design a better machine.
Wired: So it's Google über alles?
Carr: Yeah. Welcome to Google Earth. A bunch of bright computer scientists and AI experts in Silicon Valley are not only rewiring our computers — they're dictating the future terms of our culture. It's terrifying.