Tag Archives: bookstores

Links: Bookstores, cars, the online economy, sexual economics, humanities, and more!

December 20, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , 2 Comments

* Waterstone’s, the U.K.’s biggest bookstore, is thriving. What could Barnes & Noble learn from it? A lot, evidently.

* “You can have millions of views on YouTube and still be broke.” People often have misconceptions about my finances. 99% of my income comes from consulting or teaching, and even within that split 80% or more comes from consulting. The so-called “new economy” is still, frequently, a brutal place to actually make actual money.

* “Millennials Don’t Care About Owning Cars, And Car Makers Can’t Figure Out Why: Driving numbers are down for younger people and the auto industry hasn’t found a way to respond. It’s because they don’t understand why millennials could possibly not want to drive.” This describes me but not, interestingly, my siblings.

* “Drunk with Power: What was Prohibition really about?” See also my post on Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.

* I’m not a mathematician yet this report on the ABC Conjecture and a workshop on it fascinates.

* “Why won’t guys grow up? Sexual economics.”

* “Rise of the humanities: Professors worry about the ‘crisis in the humanities’. But more people than ever, especially women, are studying them.” Except Mandler should look in the graphs that are part of Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas, which show the number of humanities majors as being essentially flat. He does note, “[R]elative to business, both the sciences and the humanities have fallen behind since 1971, and the sciences much further.” But the humanities haven’t grown, and they haven’t grown intellectually. The job market for humanities PhDs is terrible, and there have been no real “public” humanists since Harold Bloom. Today the public intellectuals are almost all Edge.org-type social scientists and scientists. Think Steven Pinker.

* Something I hadn’t considered:

So, you know, our moral intuitions and indeed our laws today are that you shouldn’t discriminate against someone because of their race, because of their gender, their sexual preference or other issues. But for odd reasons, it’s perfectly OK to discriminate against someone because they were born somewhere else. You can, in fact, put up walls and machine guns and prevent someone from moving simply for the reason that they were born somewhere else.

Mid December Links: Marriage plots and incest, Seattle's tunnels, coffee and economic development, and Amazon.com and independent book stores

December 14, 2011 By in Links Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

* “How Much Is Too Much Incest on TV?” I suspect TV and movie writers want to engage incest plots because there aren’t many taboo sexual relationships of the kind that fuel narrative fiction left. Until recently, it was pretty easy for narrative fiction (mostly novels, but eventually movies and TV) to fuel their plots by taking two people who weren’t supposed to be together and finding out what happens when they get together, especially in the face of families and societies that disapprove of their shocking actions.

When no one was supposed to have sex outside of marriage, this was really easy. Today, most people over 18 can do it with (pretty much) whomever they want, as often as they want. So you have to stretch a lot further for taboo subjects: hence the many novels dealing with student-teacher sex or age-of-consent boundaries. When even adultery isn’t that transgressive any more, you have to look further afield to fuel a plot.

* “It’s not an accident that the age of reason accompanies the rise of caffeinated beverages.” This is a video, but it’s mercifully short. I can’t find an equivalent essay by Steven Berlin Johnson and a cursory flip through Where Good Ideas Comes From doesn’t reveal a section about coffee, though I may have simply missed it.

* [Bill] O’Reilly Gets Ambushed, just like he does to other people. One definition of a bully might be someone who can’t accept what they do to others or say about them.

* Tunnels: Seattle’s boring past filled with thrills:

In a world where most work is done with a keyboard and dispersed into electronic ether, their work is refreshingly real, lasting, utilitarian. Workers seem also to share a frontier can-do spirit. Masters of a subterranean universe, not for nothing is their line of work called heavy civil: a good name for a grunge band, or a workforce that stops at pretty much nothing.

I’m not convinced work “done with a keyboard” isn’t necessarily “refreshingly real,” mostly because I tend to use badass keyboards that are tactiley satisfying.

* Speaking of tactiley satisfying, I got an e-mail about Design.Y notebooks, which are made by a Mr. Hiroshi Yoshino and are also exceedingly, insanely expensive but also look like the Platonic ideal of a notebook. I’m currently using the perfect fountain pen full-time—it’s a Sailor 1911, for those of you wondering—and I’ve lost interest in other pens since finding it.

Sailor and Design.Y are both Japanese companies and both websites linked in the preceding paragraph look straight out of 1998. That might be a kind of inverse marketing: our products are so good we don’t need or want to hire slick website designers. I wonder if both companies also suffer from Baumol’s cost disease, which may explain their prices.

* What Do Low Income Communities Need?:

Public policy can modestly improve the incentives and choice sets that poor people face–and it should do those things. But it cannot remake people into something more to the liking of bourgeois taxpayers. And it would actually be pretty creepy if it could.

* Don’t Support Your Local Bookseller: Buying books on Amazon is better for authors, better for the economy, and better for you. A couple thoughts:

1) Authors like indies because indies are more likely to promote quirky or offbeat books than Barnes and Noble, even if they choose self-consciously quirky and offbeat books that have been marketed as such.

2) In the medium to long term, Amazon’s dominance will backfire on authors if the company becomes in effect a monopoly and/or gatekeeper. Everyone paying attention to these things has seen how shittily Apple treats developers who write software for its “app store;” Amazon will treat writers the same way if it can. Amazon only looks so good right now because the company looks so good compared to conventional/legacy publishers. It is not fun to have no leverage: ask medical residents, PhD candidates, and unpublished or mid-list writers.

3) Current, famous writers like Russo have a vested interest in print books because he and similar writers are already being published by legacy publishers; this means that, the more people choose physical bookstores, the less likely they are to find random writers on the Internet.

4) I like independent bookstores. See also Megan McArdle on bookstores.

* This is a good time of year to read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning; consider its ideas during mandatory family gatherings.

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