Category Archives: Links

Philip Zimbardo and the ever-changing dynamics of sexual politics

August 16, 2011 By in Culture, ideas, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

A friend sent me a link to Philip Zimbardo’s talk, “The demise of guys?“, which recapitulates and shortens Hanna Rosen’s long Atlantic article, “The End of Men.” Based on the video and reading lots of material on similar subjects recently (like: Baumeister, Is There Anything Good About Men?, although I do not find all of it compelling), I replied to my (female) friend:

1) There is still a very strong preference for males in much of the developing world, including India and China.

2) Barring unpredictable improvements in reproductive technology that bring us closer to Brave New World, I do not see substantial numbers of women wanting to live without men. There are some, have always been some, and will always be some, but they’re in the minority and probably will be for a long time.

3) I wouldn’t be surprised if what’s actually happening is that we’re seeing an increasing bifurcation in male behavior, as we’re seeing in many aspects of society, where the winners win more and the losers lose more than they once did. I suspect you can see more guys getting a larger number of women—a la Strauss in The Game, guys in frats, and guys who want to play the field in major cities—but also more guys who substitute video games and porn for real women, or who are incarcerated, or otherwise unable to enter / compete in mating markets. This makes women unhappy because they have to compete for a smaller number of “eligible” guys, the word “eligible” being one women love to use without wanting to define it. Women on average aren’t punishing men as much as one might expect for playing the field—see, e.g., this Slate article. Notice how Baumeister is cited there too.

4) Guys are more likely to drop out of high school, but they’re also more likely to be in the top 1% of the income distribution. They’re overrepresented in software, engineering, novel writing, and lots of other high-octane fields. They’re also overrepresented in prisons, special ed classes, and so forth. If you concentrate on the far reaches of either end of the bell curve, you’ll find guys disproportionately represented. Feminists like to focus on the right side, Zimbardo is focusing on the left. Both might be right, and we’re just seeing or noticing more extreme variation than we used to.

5) I’m not convinced the conclusions drawn by Zimbardo follow from the research, although it’s hard to tell without citations.

6) If guys are playing 10,000 hours of video games before age 21, no wonder they’re not great at attracting women and women are on average less attracted to them. This may reinforce the dynamic in number 3, in which those guys who are “eligible” can more easily find available women.

7) Most women under the age of 30 will not answer phone calls any more and will only communicate with men via text. If I were on the market, I would find this profoundly annoying, but it’s true. Many women, at least in college, make themselves chiefly available for sex after drinking heavily at parties; this contributes to perceived problems noted by Zimbardo, instead of alleviating them. If women will mostly sleep with guys after drinking and at parties, that’s what guys will do, and guys who follow alternate strategies will not succeed as well. Despite this behavior, many women also say they want more than just a “hookup,” but their stated and revealed preferences diverge (in many instances, but not all). In other words, I’m not sure males are uniquely more anti-social, at least from my perspective. When stated and revealed preferences diverge, I tend to accept evidence of revealed preferences.

EDIT: At the gym, I was telling a friend about this post, and our conversation reminded me of a student who was a sorority girl. The student and I were talking and she mentioned how her sorority was holding an early morning event with a frat, but a lot of the girls didn’t want to go if there wasn’t going to be alcohol because they didn’t know how to talk to boys without it. Point is, atrophied social skills are not limited to one sex.

8) For more on number 7, see Bogle, Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus; I read the interviews and thought, “A lot of these people, especially the women, must experience extreme cognitive dissonance.” But people on average do not appear to care much about consistency and hypocrisy, at least in themselves.

9) In “Marry Him!“, Lori Gottlieb argues that women are too picky about long-term partners and can drive themselves out of the reproductive market altogether by waiting too long. This conflicts somewhat with Zimbardo’s claims; maybe we’re all too picky and not picky enough at the same time? She’s also mostly addressing women in their 30s and 40s, while Zimbardo appears to be dealing with people in their teens and 20s.

10) If Zimbardo wrote an entire book the subject, I would read it, although very skeptically.

Keeping Romance Alive in the Age of Questionable Journalism

August 13, 2011 By in Life, Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Keeping Romance Alive in the Age of Female Empowerment is a somewhat dumb article about women who earn more than their partners, or who earn enough to apparently “scare off” guys with inferiority complexes or generalized fear; I started laughing when I read this bit: “Ms. Domscheit-Berg, who is also active in the European Women’s Management Development International Network, has three bits of advice for well-paid women: [. . .] And go after men who draw their confidence from sources other than money, like academics and artists.”

I sent this to a couple friends, one of whom replied, “Perhaps men are simply afraid of someone named Ms. Domscheit-Berg. I bet she yells Achtung! in bed….. just saying.”

Besides, who really cares if one’s partner earns more, as long as you yourself are doing real work (that might, of course, just be the artist in me). The quality of one’s life is seldom measured in dollars, or dollars alone.

Bernard Prieur, a psychoanalyst and author of “Money in Couples,” says men who earn less than their partners struggle with two insecurities: “They feel socially and personally vulnerable. Socially, they go against millennia of beliefs and stereotypes that see them as the breadwinner. And the success of their partner also often gives them a feeling of personal failure,” Mr. Prieur said in the November issue of the French magazine Marie-Claire.

I suspect a couple of things: 1) that, to the extent this is a real problem and not another bogus trend story in the New York Times (well-documented at the link), the women involved aren’t unhappy about money, per se, but that they feel like they’re dating a guy who’s too much of a beta for them. 2) The guys involved are not actually worried about money, per se, but about something else, and are using money as an excuse for something else.

The “bogus trend story” issue, however, is a real one, because the most conspicuous absence in this article is data. Katrin Bennhold writes, “There is a growing army of successful women in their 30s who have trouble finding a mate [. . .]” but cites no evidence that this is true. So romance might be alive, but journalism, on the other hand. . .

Links: Books, Text Slang for Adults, public goods and bads, Qwests’s weak Internet access offerings, Picplum, unlikely secrets, and more

August 12, 2011 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Literary agent Jane Dystel: “All of this makes me think that my colleagues on the publishing side have lost sight of the fact that in these new wild, wild west days in publishing, this is the time for them to take more, not fewer, risks. Taking risks has always been what the business of publishing is all about. There are no sure winners, guys, and the more fearful and cautious you get, the more authors will want to publish on their own—and won’t need you anymore.”

* Reminder: in the age of the death of the book, “Publishers sold 2.57 billion books in all formats in 2010, a 4.1 percent increase since 2008. (See also: Umberto Eco and Jean Claude Carriere, This is Not the End of the Book, which is actually about a wide array of topics ancillary to the death, life, or zombiehood of books.)

* Text Slang for Adults. Sample: “NSR = Need some roughage”; “T4W = Time for whiskey.”

* Lev Grossman on writing The Magician King: “when you’re in a certain phase of novel-making, you’re like a magpie: when something gleams at you funny, you swoop down and grab it and take it back to your nest, because you know, you just know, you’re going to need it later.”

* This may be the most impressive blog comment I’ve ever read (it’s from Cory Doctorow):

Education is a public good. It is best supplied and paid for by the group as a whole, because no individual or small collective can produce the overall social benefit that the nation can provision collectively.

Education doesn’t respond well to market forces because many of the social goods that arise from education — socialization, a grounding in civics, historical context, rational and systematic reasoning — are not goods or services demanded by a market, but rather they are the underlying substrate that allows people to intelligently conduct transactions in a marketplace as well as establishing and maintaining good governance.

There is a long and wide body of evidence that people with wide, solid educational foundations that transcend mere vocational skills produce societies that are more prosperous, more transparent, healthier, more democratic — that attain, in short, all the things we hope markets will attain for us.

* If you can get FiOS, you should. Tucson’s Internet access choices are so bad that I effectively have a choice between Comcast, which offers ~12mb / sec down and ~2mb / sec up, and nothing. I saw “nothing” because Qwest offers “DSL” at 1.5mb / sec down, which would’ve been great in, say, 1999, but is terrible now. I actually sent an e-mail to Qwest Arizona president Jim Campbell asking if Qwest was actually going to roll out real competition in my area. To Qwest’s credit, his administrative assistant, Deborah Statt, replied and said there wouldn’t be any improvement in 2010. Also to Qwest’s credit, she’s followed-up consistently. Alas, however, responsiveness doesn’t mean improvement, and I’m still stuck with Comcast.

* Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union comes to life, at least in terms of villains.

* PicPlum calls itself “the easiest way to send photos.” I ordered some; we’ll see how it goes.

* We’ll Show You Ours if You Show Us Yours; “we thought it would be fun to round up the favorite dirty books of some of our most illustrious literary critics at The Times. Below, their spicy replies.”

* Someone found Grant Writing Confidential by searching for “secrets to writing like dan brown.” I would start by being incoherent on the level of the sentence.

Links: Books, Text Slang for Adults, public goods and bads, Qwests's weak Internet access offerings, Picplum, unlikely secrets, and more

August 12, 2011 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Literary agent Jane Dystel: “All of this makes me think that my colleagues on the publishing side have lost sight of the fact that in these new wild, wild west days in publishing, this is the time for them to take more, not fewer, risks. Taking risks has always been what the business of publishing is all about. There are no sure winners, guys, and the more fearful and cautious you get, the more authors will want to publish on their own—and won’t need you anymore.”

* Reminder: in the age of the death of the book, “Publishers sold 2.57 billion books in all formats in 2010, a 4.1 percent increase since 2008. (See also: Umberto Eco and Jean Claude Carriere, This is Not the End of the Book, which is actually about a wide array of topics ancillary to the death, life, or zombiehood of books.)

* Text Slang for Adults. Sample: “NSR = Need some roughage”; “T4W = Time for whiskey.”

* Lev Grossman on writing The Magician King: “when you’re in a certain phase of novel-making, you’re like a magpie: when something gleams at you funny, you swoop down and grab it and take it back to your nest, because you know, you just know, you’re going to need it later.”

* This may be the most impressive blog comment I’ve ever read (it’s from Cory Doctorow):

Education is a public good. It is best supplied and paid for by the group as a whole, because no individual or small collective can produce the overall social benefit that the nation can provision collectively.

Education doesn’t respond well to market forces because many of the social goods that arise from education — socialization, a grounding in civics, historical context, rational and systematic reasoning — are not goods or services demanded by a market, but rather they are the underlying substrate that allows people to intelligently conduct transactions in a marketplace as well as establishing and maintaining good governance.

There is a long and wide body of evidence that people with wide, solid educational foundations that transcend mere vocational skills produce societies that are more prosperous, more transparent, healthier, more democratic — that attain, in short, all the things we hope markets will attain for us.

* If you can get FiOS, you should. Tucson’s Internet access choices are so bad that I effectively have a choice between Comcast, which offers ~12mb / sec down and ~2mb / sec up, and nothing. I saw “nothing” because Qwest offers “DSL” at 1.5mb / sec down, which would’ve been great in, say, 1999, but is terrible now. I actually sent an e-mail to Qwest Arizona president Jim Campbell asking if Qwest was actually going to roll out real competition in my area. To Qwest’s credit, his administrative assistant, Deborah Statt, replied and said there wouldn’t be any improvement in 2010. Also to Qwest’s credit, she’s followed-up consistently. Alas, however, responsiveness doesn’t mean improvement, and I’m still stuck with Comcast.

* Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union comes to life, at least in terms of villains.

* PicPlum calls itself “the easiest way to send photos.” I ordered some; we’ll see how it goes.

* We’ll Show You Ours if You Show Us Yours; “we thought it would be fun to round up the favorite dirty books of some of our most illustrious literary critics at The Times. Below, their spicy replies.”

* Someone found Grant Writing Confidential by searching for “secrets to writing like dan brown.” I would start by being incoherent on the level of the sentence.

July 2011 links: Internet privacy, plot, Charlie Stross, Academia, typos, and more

August 4, 2011 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Has plot driven out other kinds of story? The market’s stress on keeping stories moving means we’re in danger of losing some truer fictions. If anything, it seems like the opposite to me.

* The Legislation That Could Kill Internet Privacy for Good.

* The only way to know how good you might be at something is to fail trying it. This is one reason I keep writing fiction: I do not wish to be 40, look back, and wonder why I didn’t try. Really try, which is much different than most people’s definition of “try.”

* Academic English Is Not a Club I Want to Join; may be behind a paywall.

* Charlie Stross, interesting as usual:

In the period 1997-2010, in the UK, Parliament created an average of one new criminal offence for every day the House of Commons was in session. I asked a couple of legal experts how many actual chargeable offences there were in the English legal system; they couldn’t give an exact answer but suggested somewhere in the range 5,000-20,000. The situation in the USA is much, much worse, with different state and federal legal systems and combinations of felonies; the true number of chargeable felonies may be over a million, and this situation is augmented by a tax code so large that no single human being can be familiar with all of it (but failure to comply is of course illegal).

Now, most of the time most of these laws don’t affect most of us. But there’s a key principle of law, that ignorance is no defence: I’m willing to bet that most human beings are guilty of one or more crimes, be it smoking a joint or speeding or forgetting to declare earnings or failing to file the paperwork for some sort of permit we don’t even know exists. We are all potentially criminals.

* He Sexts, She Sexts More, Report Says, this from the NYT.

* Why I will never pursue cheating again, which resonates too much with me and explains a lot of what’s wrong with contemporary school culture, which is itself a reflection of larger cultural forces.

* From a Scrivener case study: “Like serial killers (whom they in many ways resemble) writers tend to fall into one of two broad camps – organised and disorganised. Although I try not to, I work in a spectacularly disarranged manner. I keep a lot in my head, and in my head it kind of makes sense, in a hazy and optimistic way. But during the actual composition I’m all over the place.”

I tend towards disorganized, with the American spelling.

From an interview with Neil Cross.

* The Price of Typos, which also includes the “price” of their removal.

* How Cisco’s “unmitigated gall” derailed one man’s life.

Early July Links: Neal Stephenson’s Remade, Amanda Knox, procrastination, sex / violence double standard, marriage (with infidelities), the Rolling Stones and art, and more

July 15, 2011 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

* How did I miss this?! Neal Sephenson has a new novel coming out in September, this one called Remade. I only discovered it through Amazon’s see-also feature from The Magician King‘s page.

* The Neverending Nightmare of Amanda Knox: How a naive kid from Seattle was coerced into confessing to a brutal murder and wound up sentenced to 26 years in an Italian jail. The story of justice gone wrong is, frankly, bizarre.

* From “What does procrastination tell us about ourselves?”

. The philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: “Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.” In that sense, it might be useful to think about two kinds of procrastination: the kind that is genuinely akratic and the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point. The procrastinator’s challenge, and perhaps the philosopher’s, too, is to figure out which is which.

* Court reaffirms: Sex much worse than violence, and Americans are afraid of sex. Not that you needed a court to point this out.

* Browse the Artifacts of Geek History in Jay Walker’s Library.

* Marriage, with Infidelities, an NYT discussion of Dan Savage.

* The bicycle dividend, which may occur in part because there’s lots of low-hanging fruit, so to speak, in creating bike lanes, while pretty much every area that could be efficiently paved for car traffic already has been.

* Transformers negs delivered by critics are hilarious; my possible favorite: “To [Bay’s] credit, during the first hour and a half or so of this two-and-a-half-hour epic, there are several lucid stretches … At times, the chaos he creates within the film frame is so abstract and exaggerated — think of him as Action Jackson Pollock — it can feel exhilarating, but the relentlessness is exhausting.”

* Cisco helps China spy on its citizens. I wonder what it would’ve done during the Holocaust.

* Another critique of a dumb WSJ editorial.

* Robin Hanson:

[. . . ] movies usually focus more on whether characters have the strength of will to do what is obviously right than on whether they have the wisdom to discern what is right. And movies usually show key associates as supporting the moral action, so characters rarely have to choose between praise of associates and doing the right thing.

* Final thought: is the culture of spurious credentialism is toxic to intellectual exploration? Discuss. Charlie Stross, hilarious.

* There’s a fascinating WSJ article about the Rolling Stones that’s really about the artistic temperament. I noticed two bits:

As for Mr. Richards, he wasn’t much interested in toying with history. “My point of view on the new stuff,” he said, “is I didn’t want to repaint the smile on the Mona Lisa.”

In other words, you’re not beholden to the past, even if you should be aware of it. The other:

“Once the band got to work,” he said, “it never mattered to me or the other guys.”

Working through the night, recording songs, partial songs and riffs that had the potential to develop into a song, the Nellcôte sessions dragged on. Said Mr. Chess, “The way the Rolling Stones works is the opposite of deliberate.” Reconnecting with their musical influences at times provided a sort of focus. “They were reacting to soul music. All of their influences are in there.”

In other words, be productive. If you keep doing whatever your art is, you might be surprised by what you find in your own work.

* Apartment developers bypass suburbs, target Seattle.

* CIA’s ‘Facebook’ Program Dramatically Cut Agency’s Costs.

Early July Links: Neal Stephenson's Remade, Amanda Knox, procrastination, sex / violence double standard, marriage (with infidelities), the Rolling Stones and art, and more

July 15, 2011 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

* How did I miss this?! Neal Sephenson has a new novel coming out in September, this one called Remade. I only discovered it through Amazon’s see-also feature from The Magician King‘s page.

* The Neverending Nightmare of Amanda Knox: How a naive kid from Seattle was coerced into confessing to a brutal murder and wound up sentenced to 26 years in an Italian jail. The story of justice gone wrong is, frankly, bizarre.

* From “What does procrastination tell us about ourselves?”

. The philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: “Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.” In that sense, it might be useful to think about two kinds of procrastination: the kind that is genuinely akratic and the kind that’s telling you that what you’re supposed to be doing has, deep down, no real point. The procrastinator’s challenge, and perhaps the philosopher’s, too, is to figure out which is which.

* Court reaffirms: Sex much worse than violence, and Americans are afraid of sex. Not that you needed a court to point this out.

* Browse the Artifacts of Geek History in Jay Walker’s Library.

* Marriage, with Infidelities, an NYT discussion of Dan Savage.

* The bicycle dividend, which may occur in part because there’s lots of low-hanging fruit, so to speak, in creating bike lanes, while pretty much every area that could be efficiently paved for car traffic already has been.

* Transformers negs delivered by critics are hilarious; my possible favorite: “To [Bay’s] credit, during the first hour and a half or so of this two-and-a-half-hour epic, there are several lucid stretches … At times, the chaos he creates within the film frame is so abstract and exaggerated — think of him as Action Jackson Pollock — it can feel exhilarating, but the relentlessness is exhausting.”

* Cisco helps China spy on its citizens. I wonder what it would’ve done during the Holocaust.

* Another critique of a dumb WSJ editorial.

* Robin Hanson:

[. . . ] movies usually focus more on whether characters have the strength of will to do what is obviously right than on whether they have the wisdom to discern what is right. And movies usually show key associates as supporting the moral action, so characters rarely have to choose between praise of associates and doing the right thing.

* Final thought: is the culture of spurious credentialism is toxic to intellectual exploration? Discuss. Charlie Stross, hilarious.

* There’s a fascinating WSJ article about the Rolling Stones that’s really about the artistic temperament. I noticed two bits:

As for Mr. Richards, he wasn’t much interested in toying with history. “My point of view on the new stuff,” he said, “is I didn’t want to repaint the smile on the Mona Lisa.”

In other words, you’re not beholden to the past, even if you should be aware of it. The other:

“Once the band got to work,” he said, “it never mattered to me or the other guys.”

Working through the night, recording songs, partial songs and riffs that had the potential to develop into a song, the Nellcôte sessions dragged on. Said Mr. Chess, “The way the Rolling Stones works is the opposite of deliberate.” Reconnecting with their musical influences at times provided a sort of focus. “They were reacting to soul music. All of their influences are in there.”

In other words, be productive. If you keep doing whatever your art is, you might be surprised by what you find in your own work.

* Apartment developers bypass suburbs, target Seattle.

* CIA’s ‘Facebook’ Program Dramatically Cut Agency’s Costs.

On writing young-adult fiction

June 22, 2011 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

On writing young-adult fiction, much of which is euphemistic and fascinating:

It’s hard to find the same reader gratification as a writer of literary fiction. You have to be thankful to get reviewed at all, even if they pan you. And literary fiction readers are tough. We’ve both had some really appreciative fans, and when they tell us nice things, we want to make out with them. But readers of literary fiction are also very excited to judge you. Like the woman who turned to Katie at a reading and said: “Your writing is really coming along! Your voice is not really developed yet, but keep at it!”

This is another way of saying that readers of literary fiction have a strong sense of history and have spent a lot of time both reading and considering what good writing is. If your reader is someone who’s read thousands of books ranging from, say, The Iliad to Cryptonomicon, you’re going to have a fundamentally different experience than someone whose reading ranges from a handful of young adult novels to today’s Facebook messages. The authors write that they like teenagers because “No one’s forced them to sit through college lit courses yet, so they’re still fresh and unjaded.” That might be another way of saying, “They have no taste.”

By the way, this isn’t a post designed to slander books that have been marketed as “young adult.” The marketing of a book isn’t an indicate of its quality. Novels like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy, which is marketed as young adult, or Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind, which isn’t but deals with teenagers, retain their power regardless of their labels. A lot of throwaway young adult novels won’t.

This is also not to deny that self-consciously literary people can be patronizing, stupid, dense, or various other things. They can also miss the point of novels that offer something new but don’t conform to the pieties of literary fiction. But I still get the impression that the problem is more often that a lot of people writing young adult fiction are happy to write young adult because you don’t have the same standards for quality and insight that you would writing for those persnickety adult literary readers. For writers, I think the real question is how well you’re going to write regardless of your target audience: having fidelity to the craft means writing well, or as well as you can, even when no one is looking.

Week 36 Links: A Jane Austen Education, what Facebook is like, The Longform.org Guide to the Porn Industry, A Game of Thrones as comedy, and more

June 18, 2011 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Who put a bikini on this poor statue?

* Reading this review of William Deresiewicz’s A Jane Austen Education is bizarre because it’s like reading about myself, right down to the love for Madame Bovary:

In 1990, William Deresiewicz was on his way to gaining a Ph.D. in English literature at Columbia University. Describing that time in the opening pages of his sharp, endearingly self-effacing new book, “A Jane Austen Education,” Deresiewicz explains that he faced one crucial obstacle. He loathed not just Jane Austen but the entire gang of 19th-century British novelists: Hardy, Dickens, Eliot . . . the lot.

At 26, Deresiewicz wasn’t experiencing the hatred born of surfeit that Mark Twain described when he told a friend, “Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shinbone.” What Deresiewicz (who has considerable fun at the expense of his pompous younger self) was going through was the rebel phase in which Dostoyevsky rules Planet Gloom, that stage during which the best available image of marriage is a prison gate.

Sardonic students do not, as Deresiewicz points out, make suitable shrine-­tenders for a female novelist whose books, while short on wedding scenes, never skimp on proposals. Emma Bovary fulfilled all the young scholar’s expectations of literary culture at its finest; Emma Woodhouse left him cold. “Her life,” he lamented, “was impossibly narrow.” Her story, such as it was, “seemed to consist of nothing more than a lot of chitchat among a bunch of commonplace characters in a country village.” Hypochondriacal Mr. Woodhouse, garrulous Miss Bates — weren’t these just the sort of bores Deresiewicz had spent his college years struggling to avoid? Maybe, he describes himself conceding, the sole redeeming feature of smug Miss Woodhouse was that she seemed to share his distaste for the dull society of Highbury.

The major difference is that I’m 27 and he describes himself at 26.

* A description of Facebook: “It seemed too much like tv, in reverse. Everybody transmits and nobody watches.” This is why I read Hacker News comments.

* Slate.com posted “The Longform.org Guide to the Porn Industry, which has a bunch of fascinating essays that are safe for work in the sense that they don’t have explicit photos on them. None are quite as good as David Foster Wallace’s “Big Red Sun” in Consider the Lobster, but that’s like accusing a basketball player of not being Michael Jordan. As I read the essays, I kept thinking of Philip K. Dick in some inchoate, ill-defined fashion—perhaps because he’s done so much to shape my thinking about reality and unreality.

Anyway, the next couple links stem from the Slate links:

* “Larry Flynt used to defend Hustler by calling the nude photo layouts “art.” I would come to joke that the porn video is indigenous Southern California folk art. The cheesy aesthetic — shag-carpet backdrops, tanning-salon chic, bad music, worse hairdos — and the everyman approach to exhibitionism are honest expressions of life in the land of mini-malls, vanity plates and instant stardom.” Evan Wright.

* “Those who enjoy whatever private pleasure is to be gained from receiving physical pain publicly would appear not to overlap at all with those who enjoy whatever private pleasure is to be gained from inflicting shame collectively.” From an article nominally about Sasha Grey and the porn industry, but really about expectations in cultural narratives of shame and redemption.

* “I’d call your right now, but I think you’re attending a retrograde ceremony for the artificial binding of two people in a legal contract regarding their sexual and financial behavior. I hope said ceremony at least has an open bar.”

* “Publishing—at least in general, and at least below the very top echelons of management—is not a fast-paced business, and the sense of urgency and desire for efficiency you might find in the offices of an investment bank or law firm don’t generally exist, simply because publishing doesn’t generally attract the sorts of people you often find in those fields.” This may bode ill for the future of the industry as it exists now.

* “I don’t know exactly what the future [of publishing] will look like, but I’m not too worried about it. This sort of change tends to create as many good things as it kills. Indeed, the really interesting question is not what will happen to existing forms, but what new forms will appear.”

* This is pretty funny: “A Game of Thrones” (the TV show) as a buddy comedy.

Week 35 Links: College life, sex scandals (these two are not linked, this time), student reflections, memoirs, coding, and more

June 9, 2011 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Top Colleges, Largely for the Elite, mostly overlook low-income students. File this under, “Seems obvious, nice to have proof.”

* From a student’s reflection memo: “Thank you for all your humor in class and thank you so much for not being boring because if you were I probably would have died.” Uh, you’re welcome?

* Penelope Trunk: “The Joys of Adult Sexting.”

* From the New Yorker, appropos of recent events: [. . . L]et’s also take a moment to remember nine women in politics who have caused ripples with their sexual exploits.

* The dying of the light, on why so many movies in theaters look like crap. This a) explains something I’ve noticed but never actually spoken about and b) should be mandatory reading for movie studio executives. He writes:

I began by asking if you notice, really notice, what a movie looks like. I have a feeling many people don’t. They buy their ticket, they get their popcorn and they obediently watch what is shown to them. But at some level there is a difference. They feel it in their guts. The film should have a brightness, a crispness and sparkle that makes an impact. It should look like a movie! — not a mediocre big-screen television.

I hadn’t—but I felt it in my guts.

* Tailor Made:

Anderson’s memoir, Bespoke: Savile Row Ripped and Smoothed, has been called the Kitchen Confidential of the tailoring world, an insider’s look at the industry and one that exposes a certain amount of its foibles and eccentricity.

* Naked Binders sound appealing. Already ordered two; shipping is steep.

* Why GM Couldn’t Be Apple, According to a Former GM Exec. This is actually about creativity and corporate culture.

* The global war on drugs has failed.

* How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at Learning How to Code.

* Helping Teachers Help Themselves. This seems like the kind of thing that will only work in a school system that is already functional.