real tradition

Winsett was not a journalist by choice. He was a pure man of letters, ultimately born in a world that had no need of letters; but after publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations, of which one hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty given away, and the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers (as per contract) to make room for more marketable material, he had abandoned his real calling, and taken a subeditorial job on a women’s weekly, where fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New England love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.

On the subject of Heath-fires (as the paper was called) he was inexhaustibly entertaining; but beneath his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of a still young man who has tried and given up.  His conversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life, and feel how little it contained; but Winsett’s, after all, contained still less, and though their common fund of intellectual interests and curiousities made their talks exhilarating, their exchange of views usually remained within the limits of pensive dillettantism.

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence

The Comic Who Explores Comedy’s Darkest Side

The New York Times had a fun piece today on one of my favorite podcasts, WTF with Marc Maron. 

The do-it-yourself quality of the podcast — his setup includes only a laptop computer or digital recorder, a mixer and two microphones — puts guests at ease. As Mr. Apatow put it, “You kind of feel like he might lose the tape on the way home.”

The podcast is a series of interviews with famous (and not-so-famous) comics, with guests ranging from Robin Williams to Carlos Mencia to Aziz Ansari.

“He’s a much better talker than me,” Mr. Glass, the radio host, said. “As a performer he’s incredibly bare. And then to bring that bareness to a journalism setting gives you this secret weapon that’s immensely powerful.”

The interviews with Carlos Mencia are like no other interviews I’ve heard (you can read about them in the article as well). If you were looking for something new to listen to on your way to work, WTF is it.

Denis Dutton, A Maecenas for the Internet Age

The appeal of Arts & Letters Daily is in its reliability and lack of fuss. The site has few ads and no bells or whistles. Bucking the Internet habit of spreading content maddeningly over numerous pages—to inflate “page views” and thus appear more attractive to advertisers—ALD is almost entirely contained on a single scrollable page, modeled, Dutton said, on the 18th-century broadsheet. His aim, first and foremost, was to make the site suitable to its purpose. He tried to instill Arts & Letters Daily with the atmosphere of a Victorian reading room or an athenaeum—a place for reading and thinking, free from distractions.

Insulted by Authors

The New York Times a while back did another long piece on the important topic of whether The Technology is eating our kids’ brains. It wasn’t the usual hysterical mess, but it did have a few fundamental problems in its approach:

Like so many articles about what is happening to youth today, this one blurs the distinctions between “distraction” and “attention”—and throws around terms like “addiction” as if they were self-evident. Richtel focuses on a young teen named Vishal who cannot pay attention to his homework because he’s too addicted by video games.   The article suggests he has lost the ability to “pay attention,” that he is always distracted.   That diagnosis of distraction contradicts the physiology of addiction.  Addiction, of course, is the most focused form of attention. That is one problem with the way the question of attention is currently framed in so much of the popular press; it blurs different conditions by simply thinking of them all as “bad.”   That is not helpful.  […]  Until we get the physiology straightened out, we won’t be able to help kids who truly need help— or we’ll assume they all need help (when they do not).

The above is from Cathy Davidson’s really fantastic & thoughtful response, which you can (and should!) read in its entirety here.

She continues:

Do kids pay attention differently now? No. Because they didn’t learn any other way of paying attention. Do they pay attention differently than their parents did? Probably. And their parents paid attention differently than theirs.  The brain is always changed by what it does.  That’s how we learn, from infancy on, and that’s how a baby born in New York has different cultural patterns of behavior, language, gesture, interaction, socialization, and attention than a baby born the same day in Beijing. That’s as true for the historical moment into which we are born as it is for the geographical location.  Our attention is shaped by all we do, and reshaped by all we do.  That is what learning is.  The best we can do as educators is find ways to improve our institutions of learning to help our kids be prepared for their future—not for our past. [Continue reading: http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/why-doesnt-anyone-pay-attention-anymore]

Davidson’s also coming out with a book on the topic this summer, entitled Now You See It:  How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.  I’m looking forward to picking it up!

PS: Anne Collier also has a nice reaction at NetFamilyNews.org, available here.

laurawatkins:

thedailywhat:

A wild Joseph Rutherford Walker appears.

[reddit.]

Guuuuuuuuuuuuh.

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