January 2012
1 post
“Educational practices that seem eternal, such as letter grades, started hardly...”
– Invisible Gorillas Are Everywhere - The Chronicle of Higher Education
February 2011
1 post
2 tags
Winsett was not a journalist by choice.
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...
January 2011
4 posts
2 tags
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...
1 tag
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...
1 tag
Insulted by Authors →
3 tags
paying attention, revisited
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...
February 2010
1 post
January 2010
5 posts
Blue Roses - Golden Slumbers
“We live life [as though] it’s business. Even our social life is lived as...”
– Paul Ekman Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley, part 5
“When I went to California at seventeen, I wrote back to my sister saying, These...”
– One of many wonderful things from this interview with Mary Karr in the Paris Review.
IMG MGMT: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View →
This tension between meaning and non-meaning is especially evident in those images that seek out the significance of the human, even if it is by illustrating its absence.
in case you were wondering
Kanye West reads Sea of Shoes.
December 2009
4 posts
Snapshots of Inner Lives →
It may be that turning introspection into a science is as impractical as “trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks,” as William James wrote in 1890.
But Dr. Hurlburt remains hopeful. Maybe, he said, “it is possible with our modern technology to take a flash picture in the dark.”
Using Menu Psychology to Entice Diners →
Mr. Rapp, of Palm Springs, Calif., also says that if a restaurant wants to use prices that include cents, like $9.99 or $9.95 (without the dollar sign, of course), he strongly recommends .95, which he said “is a friendlier price,” whereas .99 is “cornier.” On the other hand, 10, or “10 dollars,” has attitude, which is what restaurants using those price formats are selling.
On the Appeal of Static →
Walkie Talkie Static
We were kids in the woods with walkie talkies exploring alone but together just out each other’s of visual range. The static was the tether that kept us safe.