Suppose you wanted to go live at a luxury resort for four years. You’d expect that to cost, wouldn’t you? (No one is going to write an editorial raging about how if you wanted to live at Club Med it would cost you at least $50,000 a year – probably more.) So why are people surprised that it costs a lot – really a lot – to send a kid to college for four years? College is the sort of thing that seems like it should cost a lot: beautiful buildings on nice land, nice gym, nice green spaces, expensive equipment, large staff that have to be well-paid because they provide expert services. If you want to be puzzled about something, figure out how and why it was ever cheap, not why it costs now.
Author: Mark
An essential aspect of a painter’s canvas and a musical instrument is the immediacy with which the artist gets something there to react to. A canvas or sketchbook serves as an “external imagination”, where an artist can grow an idea from birth to maturity by continuously reacting to what’s in front of him.
Learnable Programming. Also:
As a child, you probably had the experience of playing with a construction kit of some kind – Legos, or Erector Sets, or even just blocks. As a first act before starting to build, a child will often spread out all of the parts on the floor. This provides more than simply quick access. It allows the child to scan the available parts and get new ideas. A child building a Lego car might spot a wide flat piece, and decide to give the car wings.
Yelp Hates on Museums | Los Angeles County Museum on Fire | ARTINFO.com
A critic who thought the Frick Collection “sucked” would not have a job. Yelp’s reviews are infinitely more democratic, written by anyone who cares to write them. That includes not a few masochists who hate museums and go anyway. There might be something to that. If a certain percentage of Yelpers find LACMA or the Frick boorrriinnnnggg, it might be worth knowing—to others who are thinking of going and worry they might be bored stiff. Serious critics almost never address that audience or that concern.
Cf. The Onion: Whole Museum Visit Spent Feeling Guilty About Moving On From Paintings
Yelp Hates on Museums | Los Angeles County Museum on Fire | ARTINFO.com
How a Smart Conservative Would Reform FEMA – Jordan Weissmann – The Atlantic
We’ve nationalized so many of the events over the last few decades that the federal government is involved in virtually every disaster that happens. And that’s not the way it’s supposed to be. It stresses FEMA unnecessarily. And it allows states to shift costs from themselves to other states, while defunding their own emergency management because Uncle Sam is going to pay. That’s not good for anyone.
How a Smart Conservative Would Reform FEMA – Jordan Weissmann – The Atlantic
Dark Shadows
Dark Shadows. DNF. It’s terrible.
50/50
A Bet is a Tax on Bullshit
Two-Lane Blacktop
Two-Lane Blacktop. There’s not a lot of explicit plot motivation or dramatic arc. The characters are enigmatic drifters, and with one exception, don’t really talk a lot (there’s definitely some Western genre flavor here). I can totally see how someone might hate it. But not me. Besides the novelty of seeing James Taylor and Dennis Wilson acting, it’s got: surprisingly great photography, Warren Oates playing one of my new favorite movie characters, a nice slice-of-life/picture-of-an-era thing going, and the commitment to do its thing all the way through.
Study Hacks » Blog Archive » The Joys and Sorrows of Deep Work
The very type of deep work that provides the nutriment for remarkable results also defies all our instincts for how a productive day should feel. I don’t have a specific set of strategies to suggest here. Instead, I just want to point out that when it comes to our understanding of how to build towards something important in our working life, there is a lot that our current conversation about work — which focuses on themes like courage, passion and productivity — seems to be missing.
Study Hacks » Blog Archive » The Joys and Sorrows of Deep Work
Joe Queenan: My 6,128 Favorite Books – WSJ.com
A case can be made that people who read a preposterous number of books are not playing with a full deck. I prefer to think of us as dissatisfied customers.
You Learn From People Who Mostly Agree With You | Ben Casnocha
Some of my best, most mind-expanding conversations have occurred with good friends who agree with me on almost everything––but not quite everything. Bottom Line: Want to learn and get smarter by talking to people? Seek out those who agree with you on 99.9% of things, and then push, push, push at the niche-y, hyper-specific areas of disagreement. It’s not about groupthink; it’s not about confirmation bias. It’s about learning on the margin.
Cf. William Deresiewicz.
Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person.
You Learn From People Who Mostly Agree With You | Ben Casnocha
Famous First Lines | Submitted For Your Perusal
AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies is a list of the 100 best American movies, as determined by the American Film Institute from a poll of more than 1,500 artists and leaders in the film industry who chose from a list of 400 nominated movies.
I’ve seen a little over half of the updated list. Interesting to see how the rankings changed between the first list in 1998 and the revision in 2007. Vertigo, City Lights, and The Searchers each jumped over 50 spots. Doctor Zhivago and The Birth of a Nation, originally list in the top 50, failed to make the cut the second time around. But The Sixth Sense did!
AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now. Um. Epic.
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It really is really good. Best of the Star Treks I’ve seen so far, for sure. Parable aside, one thing I’m growing to appreciate in this universe is the space battles. There aren’t always hordes of TIE fighters and X-wings buzzing in frantic clouds. Just a couple gigantic-ass ships lumbering around. You’ve got torpedoes, phasers, shields, and engines. Pick one, because you can’t go full power on everything. Every choice has a cost.
I find two things especially noteworthy about these things that Everyone Knows: first, they tend to be really nasty-minded; and second, they tend to be equally tidy-minded — that is, they make the world a neat, simple place in which there are ever so many people one needn’t take seriously, or treat with anything other than immediately reflexive contempt, because one knows in advance of any particular encounter exactly what they’re like.
Art.sy Is Mapping the World of Art on the Web – NYTimes.com
And they’ve got a tumblr.
“The Help” by Kathryn Fleishman
Okay, definitely feeling some confirmation bias when I read this, but I was glad to see this criticism about a movie I never saw.
The Help fails to challenge us now, instead creating an easy, rather than troubling, space, in which we can laugh at the “pastness” of our past, especially its prejudices.
Thunder Road
Thunder Road. It’s not amazing, but it’s fun, funny and memorable, which is close to the same thing. Good music. Nice engine roars. There’s one car crash that’s just amazing. Lemme spoil it: the car spins out, and skids off the road. Okay, no big deal. Then, wait, now it’s going downhill. And gaining speed. And then it catches fire! And tumbles end over end! And THEN it plunges into a waterfall! Exhilarating. Also, how could Mitchum’s character not go for Roxy?
The Long Goodbye
The Long Goodbye. It’s all mood and meandering. I’m often okay with that sort of thing, but this one didn’t totally click with me. Gould is an excellent Marlowe, though. I think this is the only Robert Altman movie I’ve seen.
Mark Larson 