* Someone found this blog by searching for “Can doctors have hobbies”? The answer is yes. The more interesting thing is that few do.
* L.A. to unleash city-wide gigabit broadband. Awesome.
* Woman from MTV demands free stuff.
* Does bitchiness serve any useful scholarly purpose? Probably.
* Density is the driver of Seattle’s innovation.
* Game, the Art of Archery, and the Business of Selling.
* “What are some of the biggest problems with a guaranteed annual income?“
the [noun] established a way of looking—a habit of projection and model of spectatorship—that informed how [users] experienced daily life and primed them for other forms of glamour. [. . .] every [user] was both an audience and a performer [. . .] ‘everyone is posing, everyone tarts themselves up.’
Innumerable articles, some admiring and some disparaging, use the same sort language about the Internet, or about its connection to young people: the Internet is changing perceptions, or increasing narcissism, or offering a dangerous overlay over reality. But here’s the actual passage, from Virginia Postrel’s The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion:
Beyond the particulars of setting or plot, the theater established a way of looking—a habit of projection and model of spectatorship—that informed how city dwellers experienced daily life and primed them for other forms of glamour. In the commercial metropolis, every urbanite was both an audience and a performer for passersby, and every street a stage. ‘In Paris,’ wrote a nineteenth-century observer, ‘everyone is posing, everyone tarts themselves up, everyone has the air of being an artist, a porter, an actor, a cobbler, a soldier, a bad lot, or extremely proper.’
The 19th and 20th Centuries also saw innumerable screeds about how novels or movies or music were corrupting the minds of the young.
Glamour is consistently interesting if too academic in tone; like Camille Paglia’s Glittering Images and essays it convinces me that surfaces, fashion, aesthetics, and clothes are much more important than I once believed, that they have an extraordinary power over other people, and that attention to them is not wasted attention.
* The unbelievably brilliant ad campaign by Eat24, a food delivery service: “How to Advertise on a Porn Website.” Note that this is safe for work, provided you don’t work in a religious organization or elementary school.
* The most important piece and yet likely to be the least read: “We’ve Reached ‘The End of Antibiotics, Period.’”
* “The Many Betrayals of Paul de Man,” or, why it is sometimes impossible to separate the work from the life.
* Pages 5: An unmitigated disaster.
* “How Texas lost the world’s largest super collider,” a story that is really about the dysfunction and misplaced priorities of American politics.
* Seattle wants gigabit broadband, Mayor McGinn wants to deliver it.
* Francine Prose: “Commerce, fantasy, fetishism: Should we care about fashion?” For a long time I answered no but increasingly I now answer yes. Note especially how she points to the paucity of literary descriptions of fashion, which I have long been blind to.
* Travel is much more boring and aggravating than people give it credit for.
* CDC: Many U.S. Girls Not Getting HPV Vaccine Despite Its Effectiveness.
* Is it modern art or a four year old’s drawing?
* “A bachelor’s degree could cost $10,000 — total. Here’s how.” The short version is, “Unbundling.” I think we are going to see some version of this tried in various places.
* Average Is Over—if We Want It to Be.
* There are few if any new and interesting things to say about Shakespeare.
* Which Job Skills Will Be Most Important In The Coming Years?
* “Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?” As an alternate explanation, see Philip Greenspun, “Women in Science.”
* What we eat affects everything.
* If You Aren’t Technical, Get Technical. One could also replace “technical” with “literate,” although “technical” certainly has more immediate financial returns.
Raymond Chen has a hilarious and quietly insightful post in “I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven’s sake,” which ends this way:
During the development of Windows 3.0, it was customary to have regular meetings with Bill Gates to brief him on the status of the project. At one of the reviews, the topic was performance, and Bill complained, “You guys are spending all this time with your segment tuning tinkering. I could teach a twelve-year-old to segment-tune. I want to see some real optimization, not this segment tuning nonsense. I wrote FAT on an airplane, for heaven’s sake.”
(I can’t believe I had to write this: This is a dramatization, not a courtroom transcript.)
This “I wrote FAT on an airplane” line was apparently one Bill used when he wanted to complain that what other people was doing wasn’t Real Programming. But this time, the development manager decided she’d had enough.
“Fine, Bill. We’ll set you up with a machine fully enlisted in the Windows source code, and you can help us out with some of your programming magic, why don’t you.”
One deeper point: Bill “wrote” FAT on an airplane, but in a sense he’d been learning how to write it for a decade or decades. Any complex thing anyone does is built on a wide, deep, specialized foundation. Writing works that way too—I may “write” a given post or essay or proposal in a few hours or days, but in a sense I’ve been learning how to write for at least a decade. Maybe longer. When a post is executed cleanly and well, it’s not because I have some magical ability. It’s because any time spent at the keyboard is the tip of a spear that extends back through thousands of books and hours spent practicing things I’ve done wrong or seen other people do wrong.
Everyone has or should have a skill like that, or should be developing one. What’s yours?
(Chen wrote a similar follow-up post.)
That evening, as he was returning home, Charles took up again one by one the words she had used, trying to recall them, to complete their meaning, in order to re-create for himself the portion of her life that she had lived during the time when he did not yet know her. But he could never see her, in his mind, differently from the way he had seen her the first time, or the way had just left her.
We all become close readers in romance, where words matter so much and yet are never sufficient. Charles is speaking early in Madame Bovary, which feels shockingly modern (especially read in conjunction with How Fiction Works); most capital-C Classics don’t. Lydia Davis’s introduction is helpful.
Novels in which I root for everyone and no one at the same time are rare, and rarer still in a novel in which most characters express commonplace sentiments like Charles’s. Those ideas work in the context of Madame Bovary. I wonder how and maybe always will.
All of us have had the moments of trying to take “up again one by one the words she had used,” although the gender pronoun will change based on orientation, and all of us have had those words feel inadequate as we try to “complete their meaning”—an infinite amount of commentary can’t complete meaning. In romance and art this is especially painful until it is accepted.
Claudia Roth Pierpont’s “The Book of Laughter: Philip Roth and his friends” is unfortunately hidden behind a paywall, but one section stood out to me: she writes that Philip Roth and John Updike met around 1959, when both were getting their first publishing successes, and, “A decade later, they profitably scandalized the country with ‘Couples’ (1968) and ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ (1969).” Times change: I saw them not as scandalous but as slightly tedious in their obsession with the transgressions of their era. Is the three-way in Portnoy really so shocking?
I thought not. In the context of the novel I understand the Monkey’s fuss, which is primarily a play for power over Portnoy, and one that she sort of wins because he lets her, or doesn’t know any better (the Monkey: “What do I care what happens to her? . . . She’s the whore! And all you really wanted to do was to fuck her! You couldn’t even wait until I was out of the john to do it!”, and then the Monkey threatens to leave. I heard lots of conversations like this in college, when melodrama ran high). Portnoy does have the sense to start disentangling himself: “Then in Athens she threatens to jump from the balcony unless I marry her. So I leave.”
In Portnoy, however, the voice persists even though what seems to have been a shocking scandal has gone away. In Couples I found it merely hard to care about who sleeps with who and why. There were numerous beautiful sentences put to little good use. Updike makes me want to write better sentences but also to construct more interesting plots. I lack his and his characters’s religious sense, which often makes me feel like he’s writing about a foreign culture. Battles over religious feelings are like battles over Communism: important in their day but long-since decided.
* The Nefarious Ways Sprawl Begets Sprawl.
* The short story survives because of its utility to the MFA.
* We are in denial about catastrophic risks.
* “Why Haven’t Humanities Ph.D. Programs Collapsed? The job prospects for new Ph.D.’s in fields like history and English are miserable, yet students keep signing up for their shot at the ivory tower. Readers, tell us what you think is going on.”
* A follow-up to the previous link: “Why Haven’t Humanities Ph.D. Programs Collapsed? 21 Answers From Readers,” including one from yours truly.
* “Sexting, Shame and Suicide: A shocking tale of sexual assault in the Digital Age.”
* NASA’s Plutonium Problem Could End Deep-Space Exploration.
* A geek’s tour of Sigma’s Aizu lens factory: Precision production from the inside out.
* Why It’s Never Mattered That America’s Schools ‘Lag’ Behind Other Countries.
* “How Anthony Weiner Exposed the Insecurities of the 1960s Generation: A half-century after the sexual revolution, the make-your-own-rules folks are no longer quite so sold on free love.” This has Camille Paglia-esque overtones.
* Dating app Tinder catches fire.
* Conversations with John le Carré.
* “An Aspiring Scientist’s Frustration with Modern-Day Academia: A Resignation.”
* “The Tech Intellectuals;” perhaps I am one?
* “The Patriarchy Is Dead Feminists, accept it.”
* More on the fight between science and philosophy, except that science wins so soundly that characterizing the debate as a “fight” is silly.
* ‘Think About Characters Like a Sphere’: How John Cheever Wrote Inner Turmoil.
* “The U.S. patent system inhibits cancer vaccine development.”
“‘It’s a circle of hell there’s just no way out of,’ Schochet said. ‘I paid it as long as I could.’”
* “Spy Kids,” and the fate of spy apparatuses that depend on cultural concepts long dead in most of American and Western life.
* “The Gender Wage Gap Lie: You know that “women make 77 cents to every man’s dollar” line you’ve heard a hundred times? It’s not true.” Is anyone surprised?
* “If it were cheaper to build apartments the rent would be lower.” This is obvious but bears repeating.
* “DJ Taylor: ‘I set out with every intention of just being a novelist. But then I got diverted …’”
* “The Jong and the Restless: Fear of Flying, forty years on.”
* The Turpentine Effect, a brilliant post with an unfortunate title that makes it less likely you’ll read.
The Story's Story 