Category Archives: Links

Links: Drunk idiots, helping guys with sex and women, the great douchebag non-mystery, Japan, and more

April 15, 2014 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

* “On the Positive Features of Drunken Idiots“—another response to the Flangan frat piece; mine is “If you want to understand frats, talk to the women who party at them.”

* Tucker Max: “It’s Time To Help Guys Understand Sex, Dating And Women, Part 1.” I needed this book when I was 14.

* “One big reason we lack Internet competition: Starting an ISP is really hard.” If I had Zuckerbergian money I’d fund ISPs.

* “Judge says prosecutors should follow the law. Prosecutors revolt.” File this as another example of insiders being unhappy when they’re held to the same standards everyone else is.

* “Is an internship worth more than majoring in business?” I’ve often expressed skepticism about majoring in business: How many large companies want someone who knows generic “business?” What is a random 22-year-old going to know about someone’s business that a person working in said business for 20 years isn’t going to know already?

* A hilarious anti-Game of Thrones screed. I find the books uneven but not quite as bad.

* “The Great Douchebag Mystery,” solved, or, “People respond to incentives.”

* “What Does the Book Business Look Like on the Inside?” Apparently it’s about as crazy as it looks from the outside.

* How Japan Copied American Culture and Made it Better, which seems like it should be stupid but isn’t; has craftsmanship returned as a value?

Links: Happiness Advice, Writing Tips, Nymphomaniac, Legal Drugs, “Rape Culture” Hysteria, and more

April 4, 2014 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* “The dream-crushing grind of the academic job market;” I really ought to stop reading (and posting) articles like this but the same almost subconscious impulse that draws the eye to car crashes and nude photos draws mine to them.

* “Advice for a Happy Life by Charles Murray: Consider marrying young. Be wary of grand passions. Watch ‘Groundhog Day’ (again). Advice on how to live to the fullest,” most of which may apply most to the author than to everyone.

* “101 Practical Writing Tips From Hollywood Screenwriter Brian Koppelman.”

* “Lars’s Real Girl: Charlotte Gainsbourg on Nymphomaniac and Working With von Trier.” Unfortunately, the movie adds up to very little.

* My Amazon review of Madison Young’s surprisingly dull book, “Daddy: A Memoir.”

* “The Drugging of the American Boy: By the time they reach high school, nearly 20 percent of all American boys will be diagnosed with ADHD.” Most diagnoses are probably wrong.

* “The Value Of An Engineering Degree.”

* Someone found this blog by searching for “swear word count in book asking anna by jake seliger.” I can’t imagine why anyone would want to know this. Someone else found this blog by searching for “gandalf sex,” which may make even less sense.

* Crowd funding is market research.

* “It’s Time to End ‘Rape Culture’ Hysteria.”

The dead teach the living, keep it short, social porn (maybe), high school as dystopia

March 26, 2014 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Regrets of the dying.

* Keep it short.

* “Social porn: why people are sharing their sex lives online.” (Maybe.)

* A review of the Nicholas Basbanes book On Paper, which is precisely the sort of book I really want to read without having previously realized that want.

* “‘Words on Paper Will Outlast Us’: How Claire Messud Distills Her Life;” it’s true that words on paper will literally outlast us but maybe not by much when contemplated via a cosmic perspective: “Of course, almost none of this will last in the long term,” but paper “will be carbonized, any book will be a black oblong object, the contents will be lost forever.” Also:

writing leaves behind a visceral sense of what it was like to be alive on the planet in a particular time. Writing tells us what it meant for someone to be human.

This is a long-running pet peeve of mine but publishers really ought to be using better paper.

* “Why teens love dystopias;” short answer: high school has dystopic elements, which I will note is not the same as saying it is a dystopia.

* Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything Is a Crime. In other words, virtually anyone can be arrested for something in the contemporary United States.

Links: Wink Books, the LBR, prostitution prohibition and its effects, the LBR, and more

March 19, 2014 By in Links Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

* Wink Books; “there should be a place that recommends and introduces books that belong on paper. There wasn’t one, so we created it: Wink Books. Wink is a website similar to Cool Tools that recommends and reviews one remarkable paper book each weekday.” I haven’t spent much time on it but the idea is promising.

* An interview with the brilliant Peter Watts, the same author whose assault was detailed in the last links post.

* “Is the LRB the best magazine in the world? The London Review of Books has become the most successful – and controversial – literary publication in Europe. Just what is Mary-Kay Wilmers, its 75-year-old editor, getting so right?” This article convinces me to subscribe; I’ve been a periodic New York Review of Books subscriber but I find too many (predictable) articles about politics and too few about books.

* The Numbers Behind America’s Mass Transit Resurgence.

* Bike parking in NYC.

* “In-Depth Report Details Economics of the Sex Trade;” the funniest thing is the way pimps are filling a niche created by prohibition.

* “The responsibility of adjunct intellectuals: Academics write for the public more than ever before but are hampered by precariousness of their profession,” which is almost too obvious to post but I like Corey Robin on Crooked Timber too much not to.

* Have liberal arts degree, will code.

* Someone found this blog by searching for “gandlaf sex,” which I find as puzzling as I hope you do.

Links: Covers, beauty, mega-brothels, Peter Watts, True Detective, Getty Images and the quest for knowing everything

March 12, 2014 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

* Hack the Cover!; I find especially appealing this:

It wouldn’t be until years later that I realized this sense of rationality stemmed from a respect for readers. The books were sized perfectly for your back pocket or bag. Giant volumes were split into smaller tomes. The paper was elegant. The binding strong. Bookmarks glued in.

To the extent American publishers want to protect their paper business, they should be making physically awesome books. Too rarely they do.

* Germany’s mega-brothels, news to me.

* Peter Watts assaulted by U.S. border guards for no discernible reason other than asking questions.

* Getty Images and making “free” photos into a business. This makes more sense than any other analysis I’ve seen; certainly the value of stock photos is approaching zero. In my own small way I’m part of that effort since all my photos are “creative commons” licensed and friends have seen them on random places around the web. I’m not a professional or even a highly skilled amateur, so any expert photographers can restrain their opinions about my shortcomings. Despite those shortcomings I can hit some shots and very good cameras and lenses are now very cheap by historical standards; a couple hundred dollars can buy equipment better than what pros spent thousands on ten years ago.

* Good news if true (and long overdue whether true or false): “Shaking Up the Classroom: Under an increasingly popular system called competency-based learning, students are promoted after they master material—not just because they have spent a year in a class.”

* “Wonders of the Invisible World,” or, the True Detective finale.

Humanities, writers, money, and sex, which could all be seen as the same subject

March 5, 2014 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Stop defending the humanities.

* What is Dark Matter?

* “How much my novel cost me: Writing my first book got me into debt. To finish the next one, I had to become solvent,” in which the author learns many things that seem like they ought to be obvious and also mis-prioritizes things in a way that most people grow out of by 30.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA* “Q&A: The Duke Freshman Porn Star,” which is interesting and yet I 1) can’t help by marvel that anyone today thinks they can appear in porn and, given the contemporary appetite for it, not eventually be recognized and 2) think that anyone going to a school costing more than $50,000 a year ought to expect it to be filled with rich kids. In addition, I don’t see the appeal of schools like Duke or USC; yes, they have big sports teams, but the basic experience and structure is similar to that of most public schools costing half to a quarter as much.

* “Goodbye Academia,” which is part of a growing genre and I agree with this comment: “I feel liberated and happy, and this is a very bad sign for the future of life sciences in the United States.”

* “What good are children?”

* “The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics,” probably overwrought but interesting nonetheless.

* Why Google Fiber will never come to Seattle; this is both important and depressing.

* “From bestseller to bust: is this the end of an author’s life? The credit crunch and the internet are making writing as a career harder than it has been for a generation.” Except I’m not sure I’d call it “harder;” I’d call it “different.” Weirdly, neither “self-publishing” nor “Amazon” are explicitly mentioned.

The number and percentage of writers who have ever been able to make a full-time, middle-class living at writing novels is small and has always been small. That’s one reason so many get gigs at MFA programs: for all but the most popular writers, there’s more money in teaching writing than writing.

Links: Jeff Sypeck’s Looking Up, sex and writing, the latest Duke girl, Charles Simic, A Star in a Bottle

February 25, 2014 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

* Jeff Sypeck’s book Looking Up: Poems from the National Cathedral Gargoyles, which I enjoyed despite being the totally wrong audience; usually I don’t enjoy poetry and especially contemporary poetry but Looking Up works.

* “A Star in a Bottle: An audacious plan to create a new energy source could save the planet from catastrophe. But time is running out.” This is one of the best articles I’ve read recently.

* “Why Is It So Hard for Women to Write About Sex? Because it’s easier to titillate, shock, and lie than to get at the messy truth about female desire.” I disagree with the premise of the headline, but fortunately the article is more interesting than the headline implies.

* “I’m The Duke University Freshman Porn Star And For The First Time I’m Telling The Story In My Words,” a story that ought not to be a story. I’ll also note that if she really wrote this she’d be among the top 3% of students I taught, although I don’t buy her blaming of things on “the patriarchy;” in my experience and the experience of many women, other women are much worse to women in situations like hers than men are.

* Charles Simic: What’s Left of My Books.

* The Endangered Art of the Movie Novelization.

* Wisconsin tires of public-sector union rent-seeking and offers a model for other states.

Links: The writer, the adjunct, the technology

February 21, 2014 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Professors, we need you! (Maybe.)

* This is probably fake but definitely hilarious and true to my own teaching experience.

* “Do We Really Need Negative Book Reviews?” I tend to answer “Yes, with qualifications,” and indeed I write many fewer negative reviews than I once did. Then again I write many fewer reviews in general than I once did.

* “Is Paying Adjuncts Crap Killing Technological Innovation?” Hat tip and further commentary: Dean Dad.

* Technological Progress Isn’t GDP Growth and, relatedly, Tyler Cowen: “Robert Gordon’s sequel paper on the great stagnation.”

* Inside DuckDuckGo, Google’s Tiniest, Fiercest Competitor, which I use as my primary search engine:

How could DuckDuckGo, a tiny, Philadelphia-based startup, go up against Google? One way, he wagered, was by respecting user privacy. Six years later, we’re living in the post-Snowden era, and the idea doesn’t seem so crazy.

* “Why Is Academic Writing So Academic?“, which is to say, bad?

Links: James Wood, news and fiction, sexuality and narrative, the paperback, bars and babysitting

February 16, 2014 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* James Wood: “On Not Going Home.”

* “Is the News Replacing Literature?” Unlikely, but high-quality analysis of the news often has a literary quality. But quantity still has a quality all its own and writing 800 words, 8,000 words, and 80,000 words are all very different beasts and having written pieces of all three lengths I can say that what works at one length won’t at another.

I’m also fond of saying that not-very-good nonfiction can still be useful while not-very-good fiction rarely is.

* Someone on Reddit “capture[s] the vagaries of sexual consent through a series of personal stories;” many people have such stories but few share them widely, for obvious reasons. See also “The power of conventional narratives and the great lie.”

* The tooth fairy and the traditionality of modernity.

* “How Paperbacks Transformed the Way Americans Read;” ebooks are now doing something analogous.

* Smartphone sales growth slows, presumably for obvious reasons: when I first got one I used it for the same stuff everyone else does: maps, looking up random stuff, sending/receiving naked pictures, listening to music, and maybe one or two other things. With the model I have now I do basically the same stuff, as well as find Citi Bike locations and coffee shops. The new version does some of those things slightly better / faster, but were it not a business expense I doubt I’d bother.

* “Bars are too loud and cafes too quiet.” Mostly, bars are too loud.

* “My bad baby sitters year;” mostly a lost world, especially when it comes to finding forbidden objects / photos.

Links: Schools, TSA voyeurs, parenting, and more

February 10, 2014 By in Links Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

* “The end of higher education’s golden age” (maybe; if the problems Shirky discusses have existed since 1975, why can’t they exist for another 40 years?)

* In “Hit ’Em Where It Hurts: The solution to the higher-ed adjunct crisis lies in the U.S. News rankings,” Rebecca Schuman proposes that colleges be discouraged from hiring adjuncts by having U.S. News and similar college raters penalize colleges for hiring adjuncts. But I see two big problems: I haven’t seen any conclusive evidence that adjuncts are worse teachers than full-time faculty; yeah, we can provide a lot of anecdotes for either side, and, based on a very minor study, the answer so far appears to be “no.”

The second problem: how many colleges care about rankings, or play rankings games? Maybe 300 or 400 out of 3,000. Matthew Reed over at Confessions of a Community College Dean is fond of pointing out that everyone in the media focuses obsessively on those 300 or 400 colleges and especially on the ones perceived as elite, despite them representing a tiny portion of the college population or market.

* “TSA Agent Confessions;” these are the people “keeping you safe.”

* “Fight Over Effective Teachers Shifts to Courtroom.” Brilliant maneuver.

* “How the left’s embrace of busing hurt the cause of integration;” file under “unintended consequences.”

* “Is Parenting Really All Joy and No Fun? A Happily Childless Reviewer Investigates Jennifer Senior’s Book.” I read the book and find the behavior of many of the women in it bizarre. There is an interesting long-form magazine article to be written about All Joy and No Fun, Esther Perel’s Mating in Captivity, Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and a few other of the baby-crazy-backlash books (perhaps the one about French parenting). It does seem that the more children are objectively safer, the more parents and especially mothers worry.

* Humans of New York: The Dating Coach. Fiction has for the most part not written about individuals like John Keegan.

* The terrifying surveillance case of Brandon Mayfield.

* “Mooconomics,” a terrible title for a fascinating piece about how we might get to online education works (or it may already be here).