Wednesday, May 9, 2012
The Catholic writer, in a post at the New York Review of Books blog: Those who do not want to let gay partners have the sacredness of sacramental marriage are relying on a Scholastic fiction of the thirteenth century to play with people’s lives, as the church has done ever since the time of Aquinas. The myth of the sacrament should not let people deprive gays of the right to natural marriage, whether blessed by Yahweh or not.
Saturday, May 5, 2012
Terrific piece by Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker’s website. Yauch’s transition from celebrated youthful knucklehead to enlightened (and hugely productive) grown-up was admirable. I can still remember listening to “Licensed to Ill” in 1987 for the first time, on a tape my 8th-grade classmate Chris made me. My parents were away at the time, and I was staying at my grandparents’ apartment here in St. Louis. I listened to the tape on headphones before falling asleep on the sofa in their den.
Friday, April 20, 2012
The Bookworm host has previously referred to Gass as “our greatest living writer of prose in America.” Here, he calls him "one of my true living heroes.” Speaking of admiration, I love this interview bit from Gass about Henry James: James’ world is not to be found anywhere in the world. It’s too wonderful for that.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
At NYMag.com: First, to understand this deal it’s important to understand Facebook. Unfortunately everything about Facebook defies logic. In terms of user experience (insider jargon: “UX”), Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever — a chaotic mess of products designed to burrow into every facet of your life.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R1Eb92HfbQ?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=https://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]
Great new addition to YouTube: William Gass reads from The Tunnel and discusses literature and philosophy. Recorded at The Village Voice Bookshop in Paris, February 6, 2007 (by Villagevoice75).
Sunday, April 8, 2012
A surprising and interesting passage from Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, which I’m reading now: There was only one exception to [Montaigne’s] “question everything” rule: he was careful to state that he considered his religious faith beyond doubt. He adhered to the received dogma of the Catholic Church, and that was that. This can come as a surprise to modern readers.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
As thoughtful and personal as his previous pieces.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
I was actually in the early stages of writing a post about this same subject — that, contrary to what intelligent people like Jonathan Franzen and Tyler Brûlé have been saying or implying about Twitter (which they don’t use, and therefore don’t really know), it’s often not a replacement for reading, say, long-form journalism or high-quality fiction. It’s an enabler of it. I have those I follow on Twitter to thank for many meaty essays and recommended books I’ve now taken in.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Great piece in The New York Times, with clear-eyed (and entertaining) commentary from a writer and book critic about how technology has improved his reading life. This bit comes from his section on the smartphone: Keep an audio book or two on your iPhone. Periodically I take the largest of my family’s dogs on long walks, and I stick my iPhone in my shirt pocket, its tiny speaker facing up. I’ve listened to Saul Bellow’s “Herzog” this way.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
A fascinating New Yorker piece — subtitled “Who listens to a President?” — about the limits, and even potential drawbacks, of even the most finely shaped rhetoric amid our two-party system.
The Guardian’s special report, “The Assad Emails,” is here.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
A behind-the-scenes post about how The New York Times Magazine chooses its covers (which are exceptional).
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Great profile of Jonny Greenwood in today’s New York Times Magazine. Greenwood’s soundtrack for “There Will Be Blood” has been a favorite of mine on Rdio for the past year.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
The hard-working, well-known, and friendly St. Louis dining, theater, and movie critic died Friday at age 81. The Post-Dipatch has an appropriately detailed obituary, and my friend George Mahe has a very nice post at his Relish blog, noting that Joe was at work the night before on five — five — movie reviews. I met Joe and his wife (and writing partner) Ann during my St. Louis Magazine days, when George brought both of them into the contributors’ family.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
By Jennifer Homans, Judt’s widow, and published in The New York Review of Books. Lovely and sad.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Brilliant.
Saturday, March 3, 2012
I can’t say enough about this episode of Radiolab: We kick things off with a true escape artist — a man who’s broken out of jail more times than anyone alive. We try to figure out why he keeps running… and whether he will ever stop. Then, the ingeniously simple question that led Isaac Newton to an enormous intellectual breakthrough: why doesn’t the moon fall out of the sky? In the wake of Newton’s new idea, we find ourselves in a strange space at the edge of the solar system, about to cross a boundary beyond which we know nothing.
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Hey, that’s my father-in-law. Well done, Omer!
Friday, March 2, 2012
Part of The Atlantic’s “What I Read” series, which I’m always interested in. Two notable bits: His props for Twitter as the go-to, pre-any-kind-of-publication morning media spot (he’s taken to it in a big way) and his description of Newsweek as “very underrated.” That second bit surprised me — will have to look again.
Monday, February 27, 2012
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 years to days or even hours.