February 2012
25 posts
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Mandy Brown: "Deploy" →
Really like this post:
Iteration in public is a principle of nearly all good product design; you release a version, then see how people use it, then revise and release again. With tangible products (hardware, furniture, appliances, etc.), that release cycle is long, just as with books. But when the product is weightless, the time between one release and the next can be reduced from months or...
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Aleksander Hemon: "National Subjects" →
Another very good (and very dispiriting) non-fiction piece from the Bosnian-American writer, published in Guernica’s January 2012 issue.
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5 Highlights from Germany & Spain →
My post for the “Artful Travels” series at the TOKY Blog.
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WatchKara Swisher’s technology-focused interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick at D: Dive Into Media last month. I admire Remnick a tremendous amount, not just for his editorial and writing muscle but for his sharp humor and candor. (Enjoyed his comment during this interview about the “evangelical smugness” of those younger dinner-party companions who would tell him his...
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Tim Parks Defends E-Books →
At the New York Review of Books blog, a refreshingly contrarian post:
The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the...
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Steve Coll Remembers Anthony Shadid →
At newyorker.com:
When he came to the Washington Post about a decade ago to serve as a correspondent, I was working as an editor at the paper. I asked a standard job-interview question about his goals in the years ahead, and he provided one of the most striking, emphatic answers I can recall from countless discussions of that type: He intended to move to the Middle East, to chronicle in every...
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John Gruber on Mountain Lion →
Apple’s next OS — highly informed by iOS — introduced to Gruber in a private briefing by Phil Schiller himself.
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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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WatchSpeaking of The Bureau of Common Goods: Here’s a spot the company did for Tattly.
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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...