Ira Glass curated this collection of nonfiction. The New Kings of Nonfiction is a selection of favorites that he's had filed away for a while, articles that he keeps passing along to others. The focus is on good storytelling found in original reporting:

I wish there were a catchy name for stories like this. For one thing it would've made titling this collection a lot easier. Sometimes people use the phrase "literary nonfictioni" for work like this, but I'm a snob when it comes to that phrase. I think it's for losers. It's pretentious, for one thing, and it's a bore. Which is to say, it's exactly the opposite of the writing it's trying to describe. Calling a piece of writing "literary nonfiction" is like daring you to read it.

Not only is it a pretty good collection, but almost all of them are available online, in their entirety. Someone is listening to my prayers. My comments on each, roughly listed from Must Read to Don't Bother...

"Losing the War" is easily my favorite work in the book (made obvious by the dog-ears). And I tend to have severe World War II nausea, so I was surprised to like it so much. Lee Sandlin explores the "collective anxiety attack" of the war, the impressions of the war that Americans got through the weak, cheerful reporting from the frontlines, and how we remember and how we forget. Highly recommended.

In one of the better tales in the book, Michael Lewis wrote about "Jonathan Lebed's Extracurricular Activities." Lebed, at 15 years old, was called out by the Securities and Exchange Commission for stock market manipulation and doesn't seem very much phased by it. Fun story.

Jack Hitt's "Toxic Dreams: A California Town Finds Meaning in an Acid Pit" is another good one that covers ballooning litigation over the Stringfellow Acid Pit, a local dumping ground made to spur business. Naturally, with a name like that, you're going to end up with a lawsuit. This one has 4,000 plaintiffs and doesn't look to end anytime soon. Recommended.

Susan Orlean profiles a ten-year-old in "The American Man, Age Ten." Interesting voice in this one.

Michael Pollan bought a cow and writes about its journey from birth to beef in "Power Steer." And he touches on how our food chain all interconnects and the twin scourges of oil and cheap corn.

Though I'm not much for card games, I did like James McManus' story in "Fortune's Smile." McManus learns the ins and outs of no-limit hold'em and enters the World Series of Poker, and walks out with $250,000. A lot of the lingo flew over my head, but the spirit is right and the story is good.

"Tales of the Tyrant" is Mark Bowden's profile of Saddam Hussein. The scale of the vanity and self-delusion are incredible. It makes the guy a lot more human and a lot more disgusting. Pretty good read.

"Crazy Things Seem Normal, Normal Things Seem Crazy" is Chuck Klosterman's profile of Val Kilmer. I'd recommend it, keeping in mind what Ira Glass says about Klosterman in the introduction: When Klosterman does reporting, the superstructure of ideas and the aggressiveness with which he states those ideas are a big part of what makes the stories stand out."

"Shapinsky's Karma" [excerpt] by Lawrence Weschler follows an improbably cheerful, persistent Indian man who has found his calling in promoting the artwork of Harold Shapinksy, an undiscovered peer of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and others, who is in his 80s at the time.

Bill Buford reports on hanging out with a bunch of rowdy Manchester United loyalists in "Among the Thugs." It takes a while to warm up, but the later bits about group psychology and inevitable soccer mob violence are good (and downright scary).

"Host," by David Foster Wallace, is the longest in the book (surprise!). It's a profile of a conservative radio personality in California. I couldn't get much into it, but I do like this bit from one of the many sidebars:

It's hard to understand Fox News tags like "Fair and Balanced," "No-Spin Zone," and "We Report, You Decide" as anything but dark jokes, ones that delight the channel's conservative audience precisely because their claims to objectivity so totally enrage liberals, whose own literal interpretation of the tag lines makes the left seems dim, humorless, and stodgy.

Dan Savage's "My Republican Journey" is about being homosexual and infiltrating a local Republican group. Eh.

"Six Degrees of Lois Weinberg" is Malcolm Gladwell's exploration of one woman's social network. Not recommended.

"The Hostess Diaries: My Year at a Hot Spot" by Coco Henson Scales is okay, but feels out of place here and doesn't measure up to the other writing in the book.

Radiohead Not for Profit gathers live recordings, concert bootlegs, etc.

I watched Old Joy last week (trailer, Ebert) and recommend that you do the same. It's based on a short story by Jonathan Raymond and uses its 70-something minutes very well.

Haven't seen the movie and don't plan to, but I like Roger Ebert's assessment here: "Some superheroes speak in a kind of heightened, semi-formal prose, as if dictating to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations... 'Iron Man' doesn't seem to know how seriously most superhero movies take themselves."

An audio slideshow about competing in the Barkley Marathon. Over the 22 years of the 100-mile race, only 7 have finished. It's fondly called "the race that eats its young." [via trails and tribulations]

"Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice."

"Baseball is poetic. It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone." [via fjm]

Fringe just finished up their first season:

The concerts will look something like this: chamber music (classical music played by small groups of musicians) will be the focus of each evening, with performances of some of the most virtuosic music compositions ever written, performed by the best musicians in Atlanta and throughout the country. Unlike the iconic classical music experience of sitting, listening, yawning, and then leaving, each interactive performance will be a swift blend of live music performances, a DJ spinning ambient and electronica, documentary-style videos of the performers and finally, an independent, jury-selected short film.

Atlanta music critic Pierre Ruhe writes:

The most radical shift in all this is how Fringe empowers its audience. People applauded after every movement of a work, no one shushed the occasional whisperer, beer and wine helped take the edge off, and no one gave bathroom visits during the performance a second thought. Also, the music was available for free download the next morning.

In recent decades, when concert rites ossified and the repertoire rarely included music composed after the early 20th century, the performers, by default, held a dominant position. Among other complications, this led to passive audiences who sat quietly, applauded at prescribed times and knew their role as a paying support group for the folks up on stage. This is a bit of a generalization, but I think not so far off the mark.

Fringe’s casual scene means that it is incumbent on the musicians, moment by moment, to earn your rapt attention.

Those ideas came up a lot in my review of the excellent book Highbrow/Lowbrow. Great stuff. Makes me wish I'd heard of Fringe *before* the last concert of the season. Damn. [via alex ross]

George Orwell's essay Poetry and the Microphone talks about broadcasting verse over the radio, but I think there are some internet parallels here, another way to cross distances. People who are interested can find and enjoy just as easily as those who aren't interested can move along. That combination of distance and intimacy affects how you perceive your own work:

It is reasonable to assume that your audience is sympathetic, or at least interested, for anyone who is bored can promptly switch you off by turning a knob. But though presumably sympathetic, the audience has no power over you. It is just here that a broadcast differs from a speech or a lecture. On the platform, as anyone used to public speaking knows, it is almost impossible not to take your tone from the audience. It is always obvious within a few minutes what they will respond to and what they will not, and in practice you are almost compelled to speak for the benefit of what you estimate as the stupidest person present, and also to ingratiate yourself by means of the ballyhoo known as “personality”. If you don’t do so, the result is always an atmosphere of frigid embarrassment. That grisly thing, a “poetry reading”, is what it is because there will always be some among the audience who are bored or all but frankly hostile and who can’t remove themselves by the simple act of turning a knob...

The poet feels that he is addressing people to whom poetry means something, and it is a fact that poets who are used to broadcasting can read into the microphone with a virtuosity they would not equal if they had a visible audience in front of them. The element of make-believe that enters here does not greatly matter. The point is that in the only way now possible the poet has been brought into a situation in which reading verse aloud seems a natural unembarrassing thing, a normal exchange between man and man: also he has been led to think of his work as sound rather than as a pattern on paper. By that much the reconciliation between poetry and the common man is nearer. It already exists at the poet’s end of the ether-waves, whatever may be happening at the other end.

Dan Roam does a pretty good job with this one: The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. One of Roam's main arguments (sometimes belabored) is that we were all comfortable drawing when we were in kindergarten. Somehow we got frigid. We play visually dumb. We don't need to.

Visual thinking is neglected, but luckily we're hard-wired for it. When we see things, we instinctively begin to sort out the essentials and answer a few questions. We can't help it:

• who/what?
• how much/many?
• when?
• where?
• how?
• why?

Visual thinking borrows from that natural process a bit more intentionally. It starts with looking (collecting & screening data), seeing (selecting & grouping), then imagining (reconfiguring, manipulating, analogizing), and finally showing (cleaning up, putting it all together). And, hey, what do you know... according to Roam's model, the ways we see things and the questions we need to answer match up directly with the tools we have to show things:

• who/what? = portraits
• how much/many? = charts
• when? = timelines
• where? = maps
• how? = flowcharts
• why? = multi-variable plots

That's one of the basic insights that's really nice to be reminded of. We have specific tools to answer specific questions. Roam also has the SQVID, a framework that helps you figure out how to present the information in the most appropriate way for the intended audience, tracing your way through 5 choices:

Simple vs. elaborate Quality vs. quantity Vision vs. execution Individual attributes vs. comparison Delta (change) vs. status quo

And when you cross-reference the SQVID with the model, you get a codex that guides you to whatever pictures you need to make for the problems you need to solve. The acronyms and frameworks sound a bit confusing outside of the book, but Roam ties it together pretty nicely with lots of visuals throughout. And it's actually kind of... practical. That doesn't mean that the products of visual thinking are guaranteed to be easy or simple, no more than writing or talking about the ideas would be:

One of the most important virtues of visual thinking is its ability to clarify things so that the complex can be better understood, but that does not mean that all good visual thinking is about simplification. The real goal of visual thinking is to make the complex understandable by making it visible---not by making it simple.

An obvious weakness for the book: it's really hard to learn something like this from a book. You can learn about it. But it's one of those things that you have to DO, and more examples are always helpful. The long case study that takes up the last 40% of the book lets you see the different frameworks in action, but it's also kind of boring to read about the same fictional software company and its fictional competitors and fictional customers for 100 pages. I imagine this was a tough part of the book to write as well.

I'd still recommend it. Heaven knows it's refreshingly different from most of the other books in the business section, and there's some real meat in there.

"The Birth Clock is a fragile glass object containing a digital clock that is not working; it is designed to help you to come to a decision when you're stuck at a specific point in life. Smash the glass, and the clock will start to work, leaving you with the broken object as a reminder of your dramatic decision. Leave the object as it is, and you remain out of time, having the beautiful object as a reminder of your resistance to change." Cool idea. I can feel the anticipation just thinking about having one. Not sure what I'd use it for, though.

For one year I worked at a regular nine to five job, and I remember well the strange, cozy feeling that comes over one during meetings. I was very aware, because of the novelty, that I was being paid for programming. It seemed just amazing, as if there was a machine on my desk that spat out a dollar bill every two minutes no matter what I did. Even while I was in the bathroom! But because the imaginary machine was always running, I felt I always ought to be working. And so meetings felt wonderfully relaxing. They counted as work, just like programming, but they were so much easier. All you had to do was sit and look attentive. Meetings are like an opiate with a network effect.

Writers really do die young, especially poets, based on research in The Cost of the Muse [$, or use your library's access]. [via maud newton]

"David Rakoff, who swore off TV in college, returns to it in dramatic fashion: he attempts to watch the same amount of television as the average American---29 hours in one week."

Austin Kleon found the Gerd Arntz Web Archive, dedicated to the work of the German designer:

Otto Neurath had developed a method to communicate complex information on society, economy and politics in simple images. For his ‘Vienna method of visual statistics’, he needed a designer who could make elementary signs, pictograms that could summarize a subject at a glance.

Arntz’s clear-cut style suited Neurath’s goals perfectly, and so he invited the young artist to come to Vienna in 1928, and work on further developing his method, later known as ISOTYPE, International System Of TYpographic Picture Education. During his career, Arntz designed around 4000 different pictograms and abstracted illustrations for this system.

"Holy crap!" indeed.

Rob Giampietro is blogging via postcard this week. I got my first one this afternoon:

If Charles Joseph Minard were following the Clinton/Obama superdelegate battle. Nice connection.

In 1800s America, Shakespeare productions had juggling and singing amidst the acts, and theatergoers would cheer the heroes, boo the villains, shout out lines along with the actors, even walk about on the stage. Opera divas would sing "Yankee Doodle," "Home Sweet Home," Irish ballads and other folk songs, and take requests from the audience. Orchestras would choose a few excerpts from Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and mix them in with popular reels, jigs, and other dance tunes. It was a different world:

GRAND CONCERT OF MUSIC... An African Monkey and several CHINESE DOGS Come One Come All

I dog-eared Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America more heavily than any book in recent memory. Lawrence Levine doesn't argue that the old ways of interacting with art were necessarily better. But it is important to know that it was different. The book gives a whole different history and perspective on our inherited rituals, kind of like hearing a whole new arrangement of a familiar melody.

Levine opens the book with a focus on Shakespeare in American cultural life. Shakespeare was really popular. At home, in books (like Mark Twain's parodies in Huckleberry Finn), on the road, in the theaters. Even the illiterate mountain man Jim Bridger knew it was worth hiring someone to read it to him enough that he could recite long passages.

In performance, this popularity and relevance made it fairly common for the actors to shorten or lengthen the monologues as they saw fit, and companies would commonly rewrite the endings. In a typical account from a local newspaper, when the audience disapproved, "Cabbages, carrots, pumpkins, potatoes, a wreath of vegetables, a sack of flour and one of soot, and a dead goose, with other articles, simultaneously fell upon the stage." What's cool is not only that the audience was carrying vegetables to the show, but also that they knew Shakespeare well enough to know the difference when changes were made to voice their opinion. And audience and performers alike weren't just mutely receiving the Greatness of Shakespeare, but participating and engaging with it.

Events like the Astor Place Riot in 1849 helped mark the growing division between the audiences for art (the Cultured and the Masses), and the "sacralization" of the works themselves. A lot of it was tied to the economics of the art industry. Amateur actors and musicians were gradually replaced with professional payrolls. Wealthy patrons became the primary financial support for the organizations, so the programming was less reliant on popular approval and ticket sales at the door. With the Masses weeded out, the new superstar conductors began to program entire works, instead of just excerpts.

And along with that came programs of behavioral control (dimming the lights, refusal to encore, training audiences in when to clap, etc.). Levine ties in "the taming of the audience" to a broader cultural change that separated public and private space, and public and private behavior. As art became more hierarchical, the classes weren't attending the same types of performances or sharing the same spaces. The cultural institutions were active in "teaching their audiences to adjust to the new social imperatives, in urging them to separate public behavior from private feelings." By the early 1900s,

the masterworks of the classic composers were to be performed in their entirety by highly trained musicians on programs free from the contamination of lesser works or lesser genres, free from the interference of audience or performer, free from the distractions of the mundane; audiences were to approach the masters and their works with proper respect and proper seriousness, for aesthetic and spiritual elevation rather than mere entertainment was the goal.

In other words, it changed to the modern, frosty atmosphere that lingers in performance halls and museums today. No more audience outrage, no more spontaneous celebrations. The groups were transformed "strove to concentrate on the music rather than the performance." The orchestra plays, the audience receives. You see a similar transformation in museums and libraries at the same time. They change from the fantastic freak shows and cabinets of curiosity to sacred archives, filled with carefully curated items for preservation or quiet contemplation.

One really interesting bit that Levine touches on is how knowledge of these cultural manners (like knowing when to clap) helps classes distinguish themselves. In this way, knowledge becomes both a status symbol and a barrier to entry:

Thorsten Veblen constructed his concept of conspicuous consumption, he included not only the obvious material possessions but also the "immaterial" goods---"the knowledge of dead languages and the occult sciences; of correct spelling; of syntax and prosody; of the various forms of domestic music... of the latest proprieties of dress, furniture, and equipage"; of the ancient "classics"---all of which constituted a conspicuous culture that helped confer legitimacy on the newly emergent groups. This helps explain the vogue during this period of manuals of etiquette, of private libraries and rare books, of European art and music displayed and performed in ornate---often neoclassical---museums and concert halls.

It's a really fantastic book. Levine to close it out:

When the art forms that had constituted a shared culture for much of the nineteenth century became less accessible to large segments of the American people, millions of them satisfied their aesthetic cravings through a number of the new forms of expressive culture that were barred from high culture by the the very fact of their accessibility to the masses: the blues, jazz or jazz-derived music, musical comedy, photography, comic strips, movies, radio, popular comedians, all of which though relegated to the nether world culturally, in fact frequently contained much that was fresh, exciting, innovative, intellectually challenging, and highly imaginative. If there is a tragedy in this development, it is not only that millions of Americans were now separated from exposure to such creators as Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Verdi, whom they had enjoyed in various formats for much of the nineteenth century, but also that the rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them.

I tracked down John Haines' poem, Return to Richardson, Spring 1981, which I first came across in the recent profile of composer John Luther Adams.

Michael Pollan talked with Google last month about his latest book, In Defense of Food. He's funnier than I expected. My doodles: