Business on the back of the napkin, a slideshow of basic doodling frameworks: portraits, charts, maps & timelines.

A list of obsolete skills.

The Story of Stuff, a big-picture overview of consumption. The animation is surprisingly good at times and there's some clever sound, too (shaky economics and eco-paranoia aside). "You cannot run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely."

Scott Rosenberg is giving away paperback editions of his book, Dreaming in Code. I liked it---no reason not to snag a copy.

A three-year-old summarizes the original Star Wars movie.

"Email apnea is temporary absence or suspension of breathing, or shallow breathing, while doing email." [via collision detection]

Bill Withers explains the origin of "Ain't No Sunshine":

Women can say stuff like, "I loved him, I really, really loved him. But he just left. Why'd he leave like that?"

Men, given the same situation, usually say something like, "I'm glad the old jive broad split, man," knowing all the time that it's really killing them inside.

The drummer is probably having too much fun. The guy on bass is like, "I'm not getting up." [via megfowler on twitter]

I rediscovered Chuck Klosterman this week. Even when I don't buy a word he writes, it's usually just plain fun to read. From a good review of his book I'm reading now, Chuck Klosterman IV:

Younger generations of Americans urgently need to learn to refuse their culture at face value, lest the stories sold by media conglomerates and advertising firms come to define them individually (more than they already do). I’m not arguing that a North Dakotan with a stack of KISS albums and a bong is going to single-handedly change the country. But he might be an enzyme for some sort of progression...

One interesting twist to all this may be Klosterman’s own melee with celebrity. Chuck Klosterman IV will serve as a benchmark on Klosterman’s own celebrity arc---he’s that much closer to the falling action on this ride to success. What personal crisis must follow? What could becoming a celebrity mean to someone whose purpose is to decipher the spaces inhabited by celebrities and their metaphors?

If you've ever worked in a library (I've put in a couple years), or if you just like libraries and spend inordinate amounts of time there (I've put in a couple dozen years), Don Borchert's book may give you a bit of d?©j?† vu. Somehow he got the same customers I got, even though he works in Los Angeles and I worked in suburban Georgia. One of my favorite lines in the book appears when he's talking about a custodian in his branch. Mr. Weams is hard-working, old, ornery, given to speeches about the injustice of the whole system. One night he was called in to do some emergency cleaning and shared some rants with Borchert the next day:

"Mr. Weams is so close to retirement that it makes absolute sense to him that the city deliberately puts him in harm's way. His anger is like a big multivitamin for his immune system."

His anger is a multivitamin. Ha! Love that. Borchert is a hardened librarian, beleaguered but still feisty. As he describes himself, "I know I could be a better human being, but I am an old dog content with my many shortcomings. I do not automatically try to cheer up small children because they are pouting, nor do I pander to adults because they are petulant and acting like small children."

But he's able to share the absurdities of modern public libraries with some heart. Not all of the stories are disaster scenarios. In one story he finally gets to know a little bit more about a regular troublemaker. Turns out the kid is from a crappy home situation. "Damn this stupid kid, I thought. He is no longer two-dimensional."

Quick read. Good stuff.

Live performance in the age of supercomputing, a good essay on the past & present of electronic music, and how we make it happen:

The more operations that a computer in the bedroom studio was able to carry out, the more complex the musical output could be, and the less possible it was to re-create the results live. A straight techno piece made with an Roland TR-808 and some effects and synth washes can be performed as an endlessly varying track for hours. A mid 90s drum&bass track, with all its timestretches, sampling tricks and carefully engineered and well-composed breaks is much harder to produce live, and marks pretty much the end of real live performance in most cases. To reproduce such a complex work one needs a lot of players, unless most parts are pre-recorded. As a result, most live performances became more tape concert-like again, with whole pieces played back triggered by one mouse click and the performer watching the computer doing the work...

Fame puts the performer on stage, away from the audience. Miniaturisation puts the orchestra inside the laptop. Fame plus miniaturisation works very effectively as a performance killer.

Each chapter of Faint Praise features a measured, workmanlike argument about topics like book selection, or matching reviewers and books, or the ethical minefields of the industry. Surprisingly thoughtful but not exciting. Gail Pool doesn't work up much outrage or seem very enthusiastic about the status of the book reviewing trade. She doesn't spend a lot of time critiquing (or celebrating) review per se; the focus is more on the industrial machinery and how book reviews get squeezed. But occasionally in this "towering achievement" she does offer "compelling" indictments of modern reviewing crutches, rendered in "luminous prose" that "leaves the reader breathless" (for example). The final verdict is that book reviewing is important, it's needed, and it's under-valued, but that won't change until... uh, things change.

Read more in James Wolcott's better review:

If Faint Praise has a virtuous flaw, it's that it thinks too small, is too practical-minded, and doesn't make ample room for the occasional healthy rampage. It lays so much stress on the stringencies of book reviewing, the shortfalls and iron deficiencies of the form, that it is hard to understand why anyone other than a masochist, a worker drone, or an antennae-quivering opportunist would take it up except to notch a byline. Its funky sense of battle fatigue reflects the mood in the editorial trenches, where nothing beckons on the horizon except more bad news. Even the title, Faint Praise, sounds wan and droopy, as if the most that reviews can achieve now is to rack up small yardage, provide a useful service. We're going to have to make do with making do, is the book's sober message.

It's sober, all right. Where is the swashbuckling fun, the exploding scoreboard, the whisking pirouettes? So focused is Faint Praise on institutional woes, incremental change, and improvements in quality control that it scants the virtuoso individuality that makes book reviewing a more interesting activity than, say, raking leaves.

"The reality is that democracy is a very blunt instrument, and in today’s environment we are choosing between ways of muddling through. We may hear that the election is about different visions for America’s future, but the pitches may be more akin to selling different brands of soap."

When characters in books get hit, they tend to get hit in the solar plexus. [via vqr]

Each chapter of The Party of the First Part: The Curious World of Legalese takes on a broad topic, like criminal law, tort, money, or sex. Author Adam Freedman brings up the main vocabulary (habeas corpus, misdemeanor, legal tender) and some of the more obscure ideas (per stirpes, res ipsa loquitur), exploring their roots along the way, and most importantly, grappling with why in the world we accept such tortured language.

The legal system and lawyers are convenient punching bags (I would be more surprised if Freedman had a difficulty finding things to puzzle over), but I didn't expect the book to be quite so funny. He often seems like a stand-up comic: introduction, development, punchline. It seems like every paragraph had some bit of goofiness. Plenty of the jokes were just corny, but much of it was good. I also like that Freedman keeps a few running gags across sections and chapters of the book, like the recurring "four-hour erections" bit from an early chapter on legal disclaimers.

I don't expect to buy it or ever read it again, but it was perfect for a few mornings on the train to work. You can read an excerpt from the first chapter to get a feel for it, or take a look at Freedman's blog of the same title, The Party of the First Part.

Selections from the 1962 Sears Christmas catalog.

Stuff White People Like---I find this highly amusing. [via funkaoshi]

Chigurh vs. Plainview. I like Javier Bardem's comments about letting go of the backstory for his role:

Maybe the character's mother didn't feed him when he was 5 years old, or something like that.... I started to do that [imagining a "backstory" for Chigurh], but then I realized... in this case, it would be much more helpful if I didn't know where he was coming from. The challenge was to embrace a symbolic idea and give it human behavior. It wasn't about how his mother didn't feed him.

That reminds me of Rebecca Mead writing on Nico Muhly's recent comments about new music in last week's New Yorker:

He devises an emotional scheme for the piece—the journey on which he intends to lead his listener. Muhly believes that some composers of new music rely too heavily on program notes to give their work a coherence that it might lack in the actual listening. "This stupid conceptual stuff where it's like, 'I was really inspired by like, Morse Code and the AIDS crisis.'"

You can lose a lot of creative punch when trying to over-think and over-explain the roots. Embrace an idea and give it behavior. See if it sticks. I like that a lot.

A couple years ago, Alex Ross rounded up some literature on applause during concerts:

Up until the beginning of the twentieth century, applause between movements and even during movements was the sign of a knowledgeable, appreciative audience, not of an ignorant one. The biographies of major composers are full of happy reports of what would now be seen as wildly inappropriate applause.

Blame for the move to silence eventually falls on the conductors, beginning especially with Leopold Stokowski:

To refrain from applause heightens focus on the personality of the conductor. Silence is the measure of the unbreakable spell that Maestro is supposedly casting on us. A big ovation at the end salutes his mastery of the architecture of the work, or whatever... By the way, I’ve noticed a new trend —Thoughtful Celebrity Conductors holding their arms motionless for ten or fifteen seconds after the end of some vast construction by Bruckner or Mahler. “Do not yet applaud!” those frozen arms say. “Do not profane the moment!”

He goes on further to touch on the influence of recording technology on the individual & concert listening experience, the rise of classical performance as a high-brow cultural event, and the communal aspect of concert attendance.

An economic perspective on long-distance relationships. In addition to the financial side, economist Tyler Cowen says "There's also the problem of pressure. You get on a flight or you drive for a few hours, and then it's like, 'Gee, we need to have a lot of fun right now.' You don't get to experience much down time."