real tradition

"Susan Carpenter, the town supervisor, said she was amazed by Mr. Clinton’s awareness of specific..."

Wed, 30 May 2012 13:14:21 -0400

“Susan Carpenter, the town supervisor, said she was amazed by Mr. Clinton’s awareness of specific efforts to bring in new businesses and by his interest in helping. She got the impression, she said, that he must be watching local cable access television of town board meetings.”

- “Clintons Make ‘Great Neighbors,’ but for How Long?” - NYT

Can Code for America Save Our Broke Cities? - Jen Pahlka on dumb bureaucracy, government as a vending machine, and Silicon Valley sexism.

Wed, 30 May 2012 13:13:30 -0400

Can Code for America Save Our Broke Cities? - Jen Pahlka on dumb bureaucracy, government as a vending machine, and Silicon Valley sexism.

"Just as a tiny percentage of people who learn math go on to be mathematicians or engineers, teaching..."

Thu, 17 May 2012 14:34:52 -0400

“Just as a tiny percentage of people who learn math go on to be mathematicians or engineers, teaching people basic code doesn’t mean they’ll all go off to be developers, and we don’t need them to. But we do need more people to stop segregating coding as something that only “techie” people do and they can remain willfully ignorant of.””

- Reid Dossinger - Please learn to code

"The importance of learning to code isn’t so that everyone will write code, and bury the world..."

Thu, 17 May 2012 14:27:33 -0400

“The importance of learning to code isn’t so that everyone will write code, and bury the world under billions of lines of badly conceived Python, Java, and Ruby. The importance of code is that it’s a part of the world we live in. I’ve had enough of legislators who think the Internet is about tubes, who haven’t the slightest idea about legitimate uses for file transfer utilities, and no concept at all about what privacy (and the invasion of privacy) might mean in an online space. I’ve had enough of patent inspectors who approve patents for which prior art has existed for decades. And I’ve had enough of judges making rulings after listening to lawyers arguing about technologies they don’t understand. Learning to code won’t solve these problems, but coding does force engagement with technology on a level other than pure ignorance.”

- Mike Loukides, A federal judge learned to code

"Sometimes writing has to be forced. In starting out, the shape and timbre and texture of what is to..."

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:10:54 -0400

“Sometimes writing has to be forced. In starting out, the shape and timbre and texture of what is to come is an uncertain chimera shimmering from behind a veil. You must not wait, loiter, dilly-dally. You must force your way painfully through. And then, but only then, the thing will go on its own power, it will hold the reins, and you need do nothing but hang on.”

- Cynthia Ozick

"When, as a critic, I call something literature, I mean that it expands the field of what literature..."

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:11:12 -0400

“When, as a critic, I call something literature, I mean that it expands the field of what literature can be. David Foster Wallace is literature. Jonathan Franzen just tried to write a literary novel.”

- Stuart Kelly

"Learning how to program over a period of five-six years was without a doubt the most important thing..."

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 11:44:13 -0400

“Learning how to program over a period of five-six years was without a doubt the most important thing I’ve done in my career.”

- DailyWorth CEO Amanda Steinberg (interview)

"Tax Resolution Firm in Columbus, OH, Hires Online Marketing Company to Promote Its Services"

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 14:03:59 -0400

“Tax Resolution Firm in Columbus, OH, Hires Online Marketing Company to Promote Its Services”

- The is the actual title of an actual press release.

"The proper response to someone who says they like comics and has only read Scott Pilgrim is to..."

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 14:02:53 -0400

“The proper response to someone who says they like comics and has only read Scott Pilgrim is to recommend some more comics for them. The proper response to someone who appears to be faking enthusiasm is to ignore them and not project their actions on an entire gender or community. The proper response to someone who appears to want to be a part of your community is to welcome them in. End of story.”

- On the “Fake” Geek Girl - The Mary Sue

"Do we even have to say that physical beauty is beside the point when discussing the work of a major..."

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 12:46:00 -0500

“Do we even have to say that physical beauty is beside the point when discussing the work of a major author? Was Tolstoy pretty? Is Franzen? Wharton’s appearance has no relevance to her work. Franzen perpetuates the typically patriarchal standard of ranking a woman’s beauty before discussing her merits, whether she is an intellectual, artist, politician, activist, or musician.

Franzen writes of The House of Mirth, “The novel can be read … as a sadistically slow and thorough punishment of the pretty girl she couldn’t be.” Wharton wasn’t, in fact, preoccupied with her own looks. Her looks were not the driving force behind The House of Mirth. Her appearance wasn’t problematic, even in her New York society upbringing. The “problem” (that which made her less marriageable) was that she was “too shy and intellectual.” Wharton used Lily Bart’s beauty as a fictional tool to emphasize women’s ornamental role in American society. In the end, Lily refuses to barter her diminishing beauty for status or money, or even love, and her downfall forces readers to confront the fact that her story cannot have a happy ending because, in this society, she has no other power.”

- Victoria Patterson’s great response to Franzen’s weird NYer meditation on how Edith Wharton wasn’t pretty. And +1 on this: “And I’d like to add: I don’t give a shit what she looks like.”

mills: Bill Waterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, from Frank Chimero....

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 11:02:13 -0500

mills:

Bill Waterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, from Frank Chimero. Alternatively: “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

"A TED talk, at this point, is the cultural equivalent of a patent: a private claim to a public..."

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 11:01:16 -0500

“A TED talk, at this point, is the cultural equivalent of a patent: a private claim to a public concept. With the speaker, himself, becoming the manifestation of the idea. And so: In the name of spreading a concept, the talk ends up narrowing it. Pariser’s filter bubble. Anderson’s long tail. We talk often about the need for narrative in making abstract concepts relatable and impactful to mass audiences; what TED has done so elegantly, though, is to replace narrative in that equation with personality. The relatable idea, TED insists, is the personal idea. It is the performative idea. It is the idea that strides onstage and into a spotlight, ready to become a star.”

- Megan Garber - How TED Makes Ideas Smaller - The Atlantic

"A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him."

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 12:28:33 -0500

“A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.”

- William James, in The Principles of Psychology (1890)

"I want to wear stiletto heels and write jQuery, sometimes at the same time."

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:24:09 -0500

“I want to wear stiletto heels and write jQuery, sometimes at the same time.”

- Laura Klein, “STFU About What Women Want”

"Educational practices that seem eternal, such as letter grades, started hardly more than a century..."

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:00:05 -0500

“Educational practices that seem eternal, such as letter grades, started hardly more than a century ago; they paralleled a system imposed on the American Meat Packers Association in the era of The Jungle. (At first the meatpackers objected because, they argued, meat is too complex to be judged by letter grades.)”

- Invisible Gorillas Are Everywhere - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Winsett was not a journalist by choice.

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 19:17:00 -0500

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

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 10:03:31 -0500

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

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 10:00:06 -0500

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

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 16:00:06 -0500

Insulted by Authors

paying attention, revisited

Sat, 08 Jan 2011 09:57:11 -0500

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.