February 2012
14 posts
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"The Germans Dive Deeper"
Peter Watson’s The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century is an extraordinary 1,000-page book. It is immensely ambitious, rich in ideas and evidence of the German-speaking peoples’ world-changing achievements in music, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, biology, geology, bioethics, archeology, art history, and...
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Harper's: "What happened in Vegas" →
An entertaining exchange, which the magazine introduces this way:
From The Lifespan of a Fact, by writer John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, published in February 2012 by W. W. Norton. In 2005, as an intern at The Believer, Fingal began fact-checking D’Agata’s article on the 2002 suicide of Las Vegas teenager Levi Presley. The book is based on emails exchanged by D’Agata and Fingal. The fact-checked...
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"CCTV police officer 'chased himself' after being... →
From The Telegraph:
An undercover police officer ‘chased himself round the streets’ for 20 minutes after a CCTV operator mistook him for suspect. As the probationary officer from Sussex Police searched for suspects, the camera operator radioed that he had seen someone ‘acting suspiciously’ in the area. But he failed to realise that it was actually the plain-clothed...
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This American Life: "Alien Experiment" →
Jack Hitt explores Alabama’s immigration bill, HB56. Great segment.
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“Moreover, critics have been displaying a reverse-style NIMBY reaction: Nowhere...”
– From “The Meet and Greet Museum,” Steven C. Dubin’s considered take on Crystal Bridges in this month’s Art in America. A museum-going friend who visited last month has given it her thumbs up. Tamara and I will certainly make a trip there this year.
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David Carr: "At BuzzFeed, the Significant and the... →
From this NYT look at the evolving Buzzfeed:
As the consumer Web has matured, readers have become minipublishers, using social media platforms to share information they think will entertain and enlighten their friends. No longer is it just about so-called sticky content that keeps readers around, or even clicky content that causes them to hit a link; it’s also about serving up content that is...
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Evgeny Morozov: "The Death of the Cyberflâneur" →
An interesting piece published in today’s NYT:
As the popular technology blogger Robert Scoble explained in a recent post defending frictionless sharing, “The new world is you just open up Facebook and everything you care about will be streaming down the screen.”
This is the very stance that is killing cyberflânerie: the whole point of the flâneur’s wanderings is that he does not know...
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Co.Design on Keith Ehrlich's Bureau of Common... →
Interesting post about another smart, craft-heavy, personal-project endeavor becoming a sought-after business:
It helps that the Bureau’s current clientele is mostly smaller startups and brands who “can’t afford to talk to a Radical Media, or don’t even know they exist,” Ehrlich says. “What they do know is that whether they’re making baseball bats or iPhone apps, they want to...
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Dahlia Lithwick: "Colbert v. the Court" →
A sharp summing up. It’s interesting to learn that Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion stated, presciently, that “fiction and caricature can be a powerful force.”
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Building a Mind Created in Words
Two passages, among many, that struck me in William H. Gass’ wonderful new essay collection Life Sentences: Literary Judgements and Accounts:
From “The Literary Miracle”:
Emerson’s essays build the mind that thinks them. It is that mind that is the miracle that interests me. Did he think the thinker who then thinks his thoughts? “The eye is the first circle; the...
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Nicholas Carr: "Why publishers should give away... →
Kind of.
Readers today are forced to choose between buying a physical book or an ebook, but a lot of them would really like to have both on hand - so they’d be able, for instance, to curl up with the print edition while at home (and keep it on their shelves) but also be able to load the ebook onto their e-reader when they go on a trip. In fact, bundling a free electronic copy with a...
January 2012
38 posts
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Franzen on Books, E-Books, and Permanence
Jonathan Franzen, regretting the rise (and, it seems, existence) of e-books:
“Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent...
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Emily Nussbaum on "Downton Abbey" →
Really liking Nussbaum’s work in her new role as The New Yorker’s TV critic:
Like “Luck,” “Downton Abbey” arrives wrapped in the shiny foil of cachet TV (PBS, WWI, tea and corsets!). But the British series, about the aristocratic Crawley family and their titular home, goes down so easily that it’s a bit like scarfing handfuls of caramel corn while swigging champagne. To let us know...
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"What will our (future) interfaces feel like?" →
From this Franicisco Inchauste post (prompted by what looks like an unusual new to-do app, Clear):
These days [web design is] about the content. Design starts with the content. Language is the navigation. The interface is words. We’re advised to choose them carefully. Copywriting is now where the interface lives or perishes. We can’t trust those devious icons or that friendly, yet somewhat...
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Gerard Craft on Niche's Early Days →
From the post:
In 2005, I didn’t know what the midwest was let alone what midwestern cuisine was. Niche opened on the basis and goal to serve simple, quality food in the Benton Park neighborhood in St Louis, Missouri. We had zero connections upon moving to this city: no friends, family, business ties. I was 25 years old, in a new and unfamiliar city. I ended up wandering around and introducing...
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"Can Pinterest and Svpply Help You *Reduce* Your... →
In The Atlantic, Chris Tackett describes how Svpply has helped him by “fewer, but better, things”:
The more interesting angle to the shopping via bookmark idea is that in some instances bookmarking is even replacing real-world consumption. Just as Megan Garber explained the endorphin hit we can get from adding a great story to our Instapaper queue, I have found that adding items to...
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Airbnb's Global Growth Infographic →
Beautiful work, great writing.
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NYT's Interactive Look at the SOTU Speech →
Interesting three-column approach, with individual video clips on the left, related transcript sections in the center, and “Fact Check” call-outs on the right. All synched up well. Impressive.
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Gruber on the iBooks File Format →
I’ve been following the iBooks Author discussions with a lot of interest, and I find myself among those (like David Sparks) whose reservations and questions aren’t strong enough to quash the enthusiasm for what we all might be making. As is often the case, a post from John Gruber — Friday’s ”On the Proprietary Nature of the iBooks Author File Format” — has tweaked my...
"The Flip Side of a Big Audience" →
Candid, interesting post from Gina Trapani.
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"Moonrise Kingdom Trailer: A Visual Breakdown" →
A slideshow at Slate of the movie’s Wes Andersonness.
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NYT: "Design Sets the Tone at Square" →
The start-up already has a million customers and manages more than $2 billion a year in credit card transactions.
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2011: The Year at Kickstarter →
Some incredible stats at this year-in-review post:
Launched Projects: 27,086
Successful Projects: 11,836
Dollars Pledged: $99,344,382
Rewards Selected: 1,150,461
Total Visitors: 30,590,342
Project Success Rate: 46%
$99 million pledged! Remarkable. I’ll likely be submitting my Gass Interviews project in the next three months.
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Peter Hessler: "All Due Respect" →
Since this is behind The New Yorker’s paywall, I’m linking to it mainly so that any subscribers who skipped the piece promptly return and dig in. Hessler, a recent MacArthur Fellow, paints a vivid portrait of Jake Adelstein, an odd-duck reporter from rural Missouri who’s taken on organized crime in Japan. For those who’ve read it, you can listen to Hessler talk about the...
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Jonathan Rosenbaum on "Kicking and Screaming" →
A summary paragraph from the essay, written for Criterion in 2006:
Grover (Josh Hamilton), expecting to live in Brooklyn with his girlfriend, Jane (Olivia d’Abo), is so dumbstruck and angry when she accepts a scholarship to study in Prague that he won’t reply to any of her phone messages and can only brood over their past in five strategically placed flashbacks, each one heralded by a...
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"How Many Stephen Colberts Are There?" →
Terrific cover story in today’s New York Times Magazine. I was usually just annoyed (and fast-forward-prone) when Colbert started in on “Colbert super PAC” segments, but I get it now.
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Balzac, Pre- and Post-Publication
From a very positive mini-review in the New Yorker of Balzac’s Omlette, a new non-fiction book by Anka Muhlstein (translated from the French):
When writing, Balzac subsisted on little more than coffee, but, post-publication, he was known to down, in a single sitting, a hundred oysters, four bottles of wine, twelve lamb cutlets, duckling, a brace of partridge, sole, and pears by the dozen.
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NYT Profiles Tyler Brûlé →
From “Mr. Zeitgeist,” written by Alex Williams and published in the paper’s Fashion and Style section:
For the last 15 years, Mr. Brûlé, an Estonian-Canadian who keeps his perma-stubble artfully cropped like Tom Ford’s, has gone outside the publishing establishment and started two culture magazines regarded as bibles in certain design-savvy circles: Wallpaper and Monocle.
And...
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On Being: "Pursuing Happiness" →
A recently broadcast roundtable, in which Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks — alongside the Dalai Lama and others — offered this:
Sometimes we don’t need to pursue happiness. We just need to pause and let it catch up with us.
Good reminder.
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The Millions' "Great 2012 Book Preview" →
The list includes two of my very favorite writers: William Gaddis and William H. Gass.
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The Believer Thanks Ed Park →
A really great (brief) goodbye to one of the magazine’s co-founders, who was hired last fall by Amazon:
We commemorate his contribution to the magazine by continuing the Parkian editorial tradition of hard-assed enthusiasm.
“Hard-assed enthusiasm” is perfect.