The Unauthorized Marissa Mayer Biography
22,000 words. A very interesting read.
Ramón Lobo Interviews David Remnick
From the lengthy Q&A:
Coming back to the first topic of our conversation, how can we convince people that Internet is not enough to be informed?
I don’t agree with you. I think the Internet is just a tool, a means of distribution. And it’s a radically more efficient means of distribution than print.
But some people may have the impression they can know everything what is happening only with a click.
And they can. If they buy things on the Internet. In other words, The New York Times can’t be for free and I have no problem with people reading The New Yorker online. I’m 54 years old, you’re 58 and we may prefer it printed for all the reasons that all the people prefer things that they are used to. I prefer certain kinds of drinks, I prefer Bob Dylan to the latest hip hop sensation, but that’s because I’m 54, that’s nothing, that’s just an ordinary normal human being.
What I want to say is that you can be beautifully informed with nothing but a laptop, but you need a laptop and a credit card. Because it can’t be for free.
Can’t recall a single run-in with David Remnick — reading a piece of his, or an interview like this — where I didn’t come away incredibly impressed.
My Father-in-Law, Profiled
“Artist’s wire trees free the mind, shape the future,” written by Doug Moore and published in this past Sunday’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch. With some nice photos to boot.
Gass at 89
A very happy 89th birthday to the great William H. Gass, with whom I’m pictured here in 2007. I’m incredibly glad he’s still writing every day.
Bezos and the Six-Page Meeting Narrative
A Fortune profile on Jeff Bezos reveals how Amazon’s senior-executive team presents, consumes, and prepares to discuss plans and information:
Meetings of his “S-team” of senior executives begin with participants quietly absorbing the written word. Specifically, before any discussion begins, members of the team — including Bezos — consume six-page printed memos in total silence for as long as 30 minutes. (Yes, the e-ink purveyor prefers paper. Ironic, no?) They scribble notes in the margins while the authors of the memos wait for Bezos and his minions to finish reading.
Amazon (AMZN) executives call these documents “narratives,” and even Bezos realizes that for the uninitiated — and fans of the PowerPoint presentation — the process is a bit odd. “For new employees, it’s a strange initial experience,” he tells Fortune. “They’re just not accustomed to sitting silently in a room and doing study hall with a bunch of executives.” Bezos says the act of communal reading guarantees the group’s undivided attention. Writing a memo is an even more important skill to master. “Full sentences are harder to write,” he says. “They have verbs. The paragraphs have topic sentences. There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking.”
Interesting. And people love to bash email, but working to refine and articulate a specific point or goal in writing (including in Basecamp) is valuable for everyone.
On Quora, a former Amazon staffer gives his (unverifiable) explanation for how these narratives are structured:
Like a dissertation defense:
1) the context or question.
2) approaches to answer the question - by whom, by which method, and their conclusions
3) how is your attempt at answering the question different or the same from previous approaches
4) now what? - that is, what’s in it for the customer, the company, and how does the answer to the question enable innovation on behalf of the customer?
Robert Silvers: Toward a "New Form of Criticism"
At New York Magazine, the great journalist Mark Danner talks at length with The New York Review of Books' Robert Silvers. Here’s one bit about online publishing and social media, which strikes me not as fuddy-duddy, but very considered:
To tweet or not to tweet. And not to tweet is to be left behind. And that raises a question: What is this? What are the kinds of prose, and the kinds of thinking, that result from the imposition of the tweet form and other such brief reactions to extremely complex realities? My feeling is that there are millions and millions if not billions of words in tweets and blogs, and that they are not getting and will not get the critical attention that prose anywhere should have unless we find a new form of criticism.
If a novel is published, we have a novel review. If poetry is produced, if a play or a movie or a TV show is produced, there are the forms of criticism we know. With the new social media, with much of the content of the Internet, there are very few if any critical forms that are appropriate. They are thought to be somewhere partially in a private world. Facebook is a medium in which privacy is, or at least is thought to be, in some way crucial. The premise, at least, is that of belonging to a family, a circle of friends. And there’s another premise, that any voice should have its moment. And so there seems a resistance to intrusive criticism.
But this means that billions of words go without the faintest sign of assessment. And yet, if one cares about language, if one cares about the sensibility in which language is expressed, and if one cares about the values that underlie our use of language, such as affection, privacy, honesty, cogency, clarity—then these media, it would seem to me, should qualify as the subject of criticism. We seem at the edge of a vast, expanding ocean of words, an ocean growing without any critical perspective whatever being brought to bear on it. To me, as an editor, that seems an enormous absence.
CoDesign on Editorially
Excited to try this new online writing and editing environment, built by a few all-stars.
Hemon: "The Book of My Lives"
I’ve written before of the penetrating, often funny essays of Aleksandar Hemon, the Bosnian writer who, fortunately for us, calls Chicago home. His new collection, The Book of My Lives, is terrific, whether the subject is gravely serious (war, illness) or much more fun (pick-up soccer with a crew of fellow refugees).
Here’s one opening paragraph I quite liked from the essay “The Lives of Grandmasters,” which has just been published online as well:
I do not know how old I was when I learned to play chess. I could not have been older than eight, because I still have a chessboard on whose side my father inscribed, with a soldering iron, “Saša Hemon 1972.” I loved the board more than chess — it was one of the first things I owned. Its materiality was enchanting to me: the smell of burnt wood that lingered long after my father had branded it; the rattle of the thickly varnished pieces inside, the smacking sound they made when I put them down, the board’s hollow wooden echo. I can even recall the taste — the queen’s tip was pleasantly suckable; the pawns’ round heads, not unlike nipples, were sweet. The board is still at our place in Sarajevo, and, even if I haven’t played a game on it in decades, it is still my most cherished possession, providing incontrovertible evidence that there once lived a boy who used to be me.
St. Louisans: Hemon, who I’ve heard read in town before, returns this Friday. Don’t miss it.
Remnick: "A Scandal at the Bolshoi Ballet"
Continually impressed by David Remnick, who, between serving as the bloody EIC of The New Yorker, has time not just to bust out whip-smart blog posts on Obama in Israel and Philip Roth, but to pen 11,000-word, richly reported pieces on, say, the Russian ballet. Here’s a characteristically wonderful paragraph:
I lived in Moscow in the last years of the Soviet era, when tickets to the Bolshoi were cheap, and I used to go whenever I could, happily enduring even Grigorovich’s agitprop warhorses “Spartacus” and “Ivan the Terrible.” There was something magical about stepping off the freezing, chaotic streets of the city and settling into a velvet upholstered seat, a million-crystal chandelier twinkling overhead, the balconies crowded with older perfumed women swelling with cultural aspiration and sitting with their adorable pigtailed granddaughters. When the ballet was bad, as it sometimes was, it was still a pleasant escape from newspaper deadlines and the antics of Gorbachev and Yeltsin. When it was good, I was entranced. But now, to watch the dancers from this meagre distance was to see them as if with binoculars: the sinewy weave of a young comer’s quadriceps; the palm-in-the-breeze articulation of a woman’s arm. After a while, one became aware, as well, of the pungent result of increasing exertion. “I don’t understand anything about the ballet,” Chekhov wrote. “All I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses.“
At McSweeney’s, Teddy Wayne’s “Feedback From James Joyce’s Submission of Ulysses to His Creative Writing Workshop.”
"William H. Gass: How I Write"
[Fun interview](https://www.thedailybeast.com/william-h-gass-how-i-write/) in The Daily Beast. Happily surprised to see my name pop up.
The Ecosystem Known As Reading
Andrew Piper, writing in Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times:
Books will always be there. That is what they are by definition: there. Whether in the classroom, the library, the archive, the bookstore, the warehouse, or online, it is our choice, however, where books will be. It is time to stop worrying and start thinking. It is time to put an end to the digital utopias and print eulogies, bookish venerations and network gothic, and tired binaries like deep versus shallow, distributed versus linear, or slow versus fast. Now is the time to understand the rich history of what we have thought books have done for us and what we think digital texts might do differently. We need to remember the diversity that surrounds reading and the manifold, and sometimes strange, tools upon which it has historically been based. The question is not one of “versus,” of two antagonists squaring off in a ring; rather, the question is far more ecological in nature. How will these two very different species and their many varieties coexist within the greater ecosystem known as reading?
Asimov: Why Wine
From Eric Asimov’s How to Love Wine, which I quite enjoyed:
To assert that tasting notes amount to an “intellectual dissection” of a wine is to ignore the fact that the more specific the description of flavors and aromas, the less one is actually saying about a wine and what it has to offer. People drink wine for many reasons. It makes them happy, it cheers them up, it is delicious, it makes meals better, it is intoxicating, it enhances friendships, it serves a spiritual purpose, and that is only the beginning. Wine can be transporting. It can, in one glass, embody culture, science, economics, personality, history, and much more. Fine wines stimulate conversation. We may be moved to debate what makes it so fine. But very rarely, if ever, does a true intellectual dissection of wine consist of sticking one’s beak into a glass and reciting the components of a cornucopia.
"The sirens had hoarse throats"
From William H. Gass’ forthcoming novel, Middle C:
Joey … rails ran across France then, rails ran through the mountain passes and through tunnels into and out of the mountains, rails ran along the Mur, through forests of fir trees, because the war was over, the sirens had hoarse throats, all the bombs they’d dropped on one another had gone plode, and so we could have traveled home together, because there were no more warplanes, no more lights fingering the sky, no more Nazis; it was, we used to say when we slunk from our underground huddle, the large lot of us, and looked to see if our rubble was still standing, we used to say that the sirens said — the sirens said, All clear.
Virginia Woolf, Observing
A passage of exceptional precision in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1:
On Sunday Lytton came to tea. I was alone, for L. went to Margaret. I enjoyed it very much. He is one of the most supple of our friends; I don’t mean passionate or masterful or original, but the person whose mind seems softest to impressions, least starched by any formality or impediment. There is his great gift of expression of course, never (to me) at its best in writing; but making him in some respects the most sympathetic & understanding friend to talk to. Moreover, he has become, or now shows it more fully, curiously gentle, sweet tempered, considerate; & if one adds his peculiar flavour of mind, his wit & infinite intelligence — not brain but intelligence — he is a figure not to be replaced by any other combination.
Year in Review: 2012
This post is part of my Annual Favorites list I’ve been keeping for the past decade-plus.
Favorite Books (Goodreads profile)
The German Genius, by Peter Watson (choice passages)
Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918 (choicepassages)
Life Sentences, by William H. Gass
Nox, by Anne Carson
A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, by D.T. Max
The Long Goodbye, by Megan O’Rourke
Where Good Ideas Come From, by Steven Johnson
The Lifespan of a Fact, by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal
The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin
The Obamas, Jodi Kantor
Some of My Lives, by Rosamond Bernier
The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach
Berlin Stories, by Robert Walser
The Address Book, by Sophie Calle
The Englishman who Posted Himself and Other Curious Objects, by John Tingey
The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes
The Bridge on the Drina, by Ivo Andrić
Shards, by Ismet Prcić
The Promise: President Obama, Year One, by Jonathan Alter
Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee
How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne, by Sarah Bakewell
Death in Spring, by Mercè Rodoreda
The Art of Intelligence, by Henry A. Crumpton
Mortality, by Christopher Hitchens
Karaoke Culture, by Dubravka Ugrešić
The Fate of Greenland, by Philip W. Conkling
Redheaded Peckerwood, by Christian Patterson
Happy to have read Karen McGrane’s Content Strategy for Mobile, Frank Chimero’s The Shape of Design, and Mike Monteiro’s Design Is a Job, but would keep them off the ranked list. Same with “Mark Owen”‘s No Easy Day.
Favorite Movies: 2012 (Letterboxd profile)
Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present
Gerhard Richter Painting
Moonrise Kingdom
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
Lincoln
The Master
The Queen of Versailles
Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap
Arbitrage
Skyfall
The Dark Knight Rises
Didn’t connect with: Headhunters, We Have a Pope, The Bourne Legacy.
Favorite Movies: Pre-2012
A Separation
Bill Cunningham New York
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Certified Copy
Margin Call
Notorious
A Dangerous Method
Bridesmaids
Young Adult
Moneyball
Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop
J. Edgar
Too Big to Fail
Hopscotch
Haywire
Music
I continue to be a huge fan of Rdio, which I pay $10 a month to be able to stream music on a desktop, iPad, or iPhone. (This includes, say, streaming the new Nas via my home’s wi-fi as I mow my suburban lawn.) There will always be rituals and a closeness to the music I miss from my CD days, but the advantages of Rdio — especially the ability to discover and immediately listen to new music, particularly hip-hop and classical — are significant. I don’t have a ranked list here, but my listening history is an open book.
Favorite Articles, Essays & Blog Posts (categorized, not ranked)
Affairs
“Newtown and the Madness of Guns,” by Adam Gopnik
“The Voter-Fraud Myth,” by Jane Mayer
“I Didn’t Come Back to Jerusalem To Be in a War,” by Dahlia Lithwick
“The Implosion,” by Jon Lee Anderson
“Of Babies and Beans: Paul Ryan on Abortion,” by Adam Gopnik
“It Matters,” by Josh Marshall
“A Victory for Obama and for Obama’s America,” by John Cassidy
“The Choice,” by The New Yorker Editors
“2,700 Hundred Pages for Anton Scalia,” by Amy Davidson
“Money Unlimited,” by Jeffrey Toobin
“Obama, Explained,” by James Fallows
“One More Massacre,” by Adam Gopnik
“Colbert v. the Court,” by Dahlia Lithwick
“Pussy Riot Closing Statements,” by Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich
“Something Wicked This Way Comes,” by Atul Gawande
“How Obama’s Long Game Will Outsmart His Critics,” by Andrew Sullivan
“The Obama Memos,” by Ryan Lizza
Culture
“Too Big To Succeed,” by Lee Kponstantinou
“Spotify and Its Discontents,” by Mike Spies
“When Art Makes Us Cry,” by Francine Prose
“Much God Damned Entropy,” by Gabriel Blackwell and Greg Gerke
“The First Church of Marilynne Robinson,” by Mark O’Connell
“We Are Alive,”by David Remnick
“Viewer Discretion,” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus
“The House That Hova Built,” by Zadie Smith
“Peace, Adam,” by Sasha Frere-Jones
“American Mozart,” by David Samuels
“Diary of an Aesthete,” by Alex Ross
“Till the Knowing Ends,” by Joanna Scott
“Radiohead’s Runaway Guitarist,” by Alex Pappademas
“The Meet and Greet Museum,” by Steven C. Dubin
Tech & Media
“Your Anti-Social Media Rant Reveals Too Much About Your Friends,” by Alexis C. Madrigal
“Facebook and Instagram: When Your Favorite App Sells Out,” by Paul Ford
“29th Street Publishing and the Next Wave of Digital Publishing,” by Jim Ray
“The Way We Read Now,” by Dwight Garner
“BuzzFeed’s Strategy,” by Jonah Peretti
Craig Mod: “The Digital-Physical”; “Hack the Cover,”; “Subcompact Publishing”
“Deploy,” by Mandy Brown
“E-books Can’t Burn,” by Tim Parks
“Small Presses & Self-Publishers: Enemies? Or Half-Siblings?” by Sean Bishop
“Out of Touch,” by Andrew Piper
“I’ma Set It Straight, This Watergate,” by John Gruber
“The Death of the Cyberflâneur,” by Evgeny Morozov
“Good Things About Twitter,” by Sasha Frere-Jones
“Does Time Magazine Think Americans Are Stupid?” by L. V. Anderson
Essays
“National Subjects,” by Aleksandar Hemon
“War Dogs,” by Aleksandar Hemon
“The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent,” by Chrystia Freehand
“A Boy to Be Sacrificed,” by Abdellah Tao
“Tony Judt: A Final Victory,” by Jennifer Homans
Misc. Reporting, Articles & Posts
“The Yankee Comandante,” by David Grann
“Boss Rail,” by Evan Osnos
“All Due Respect,” by Peter Hessler
“Cocaine Incorporated,” by Patrick Radden Keefe
“The Story of a Suicide,” by Ian Parker
“Big Med,” by Atul Gawande
“What Brand Is Your Therapist?” by Lori Gottlie
“Artisanal Baby Naming,” by Bob Powers
“Resilient Redbirds Refuse to Lose,” by Bernie Miklasz
“Lionel Messi Never Dives,” by Jason Kottke
“Fals Nine vs. Real Nine,” by Dushko Petrovich
“The Caging of America,” by Adam Gopnik
“Study Reveals Dolphins Lack Capacity to Mock Celebrity Culture,” by The Onion
“The World’s First and Only Completely Honest Résumé of a Graphic Designer,” by Marco Kaye
“How Many Stephen Colberts Are There?” by Charles McGrath
Most-Used iPhone & iPad Apps
I start every morning with the NYTimes’ iPad app. I listen to podcasts, NPR, and music via Instacast, Public Radio Player, and Rdio. I journal using Day One, which is synched using Dropbox on all devices. The new 1Password 4 is a slick companion to the essential desktop app. I organize a lot of my work and personal life using Evernote, and keep up with tasks using Things. Other apps I use often: Reeder (every night, to catch up with the day’s articles), Goodreads, Fantastical, Tweetbot (iphone) and Twitter (iPad), Instagram, Facebook, Checkmark, Instapaper, Pinboard, Netflix, PBS for iPad, Simple, and iBooks (largely for work PDFs).
Final Notes
One unusual memory I have from 2012 is spending several weekday evenings in March walking through my neighborhood for an hour or so, listening to the day’s oral arguments for and against the healthcare act. (My greatest moment of exasperation was hearing Justice Scalia mock-ask whether he was seriously supposed to get through so many pages of material.) In April, I published Abstractions Arrive: Having Been There All the Time, an iPad-only e-book pairing an essay by William H. Gass with photographs by Michael Eastman; New York Times coverage was a cherry on top. May’s Confab conference was one of the best I’ve attended. In August, Tamara and I enjoyed a few highly cultural days in Miami. Surpassing all that, though — we’re expecting a baby in late May of 2013. I expect this should be my best year yet.
Craig Mod: "Subcompact Publishing"
An important and insightful essay. I hope Mod writes a part two that looks a bit more at how exactly (to continue his metaphor) the small vehicles would get made.
Related: Mod’s round-up of coverage of his essay. This Jim Ray piece from the Mule blog isn’t on there, but I think it’s worth reading.
"Small Presses & Self-Publishers: Enemies? Or Half-Siblings?"
[Interesting piece](https://www.vqronline.org/articles/small-presses-self-publishers-enemies-or-half-siblings) by Sean Bishop in the VQR blog. (And yes, I agree with this sentiment, and not just for literary publishers, but other groups in the arts: “There is still a contingent of presses and publishers who bristle at the idea of ‘branding,’ 'marketing’ and the lot. Stop it…. They (you) need to get over that. I mean, seriously: you’re a publisher, not a religion.”)
Evan Osnos: "Boss Rail"
An exceptional piece of reporting in The New Yorker.
Steven Holl on Museum Architecture
From a profile of the architect in ArtNews’ 09/12 issue:
There’s the neutral white box. We see that, if you take that too far, it sucks the light out of art. Then there’s the super-expressionist building by the signature architect. But if you take that too far, it totally squashes the art, so you can’t have a great feeling for any art experience in a building like that.
And we believe there is a third way, where the sense of space in which you’re going to experience the art is silent and poetic, but when you move from one gallery to another you’re engaged by the sequence. The building draws you through and doesn’t frustrate the movement. You sense that someone wrote a musical score — that this is the way you flow through spaces.