Here's an analysis of the economy of Second Life. Rapid, artificial inflation of the Linden dollar means a recession is due at some point. It's hard to predict when they'll reach it, but it seems pretty much unavoidable.

Emily Gordon responds to David Denby's essay on modern film romance. Both are worth a good read.

The New York Times has a new tower to work in. "Ultimately, it’s hard not to sense that the Times, so determined to have a building that makes a mark on the sky line, had a failure of nerve when it came to the interior."

Khoi Vinh posted a brief interview with Stephen Coles, one of the fellows who worked on the massive reference, FontBook.

Photographs from the Arkansas State Prison, 1915-1937.

Anil Dash noticed the recent popularity of pixel graphs, citing an awful example in the New York Times and a not-as-bad one in Wired Magazine. I also recall this one from Business Week a while back, and another commenter mentioned one at Curbed today. It'll take some time and trial & error to figure out what kind of data sets works best with the technique. I can appreciate the trend, but the only example I really like is the one from Business Week. Looks like a happy marriage of table and graph.

Kyle Baker's Plastic Man: Rubber Bandits is absolutely hilarious. Pure entertainment, like watching a good Saturday morning cartoon (as in the Fox Kids era of Eek the Cat, the Tick, X-Men, Tiny Toons, Terrible Thunder Lizards, Batman: The Animated Series, etc.). This book, along with Baker's other one, Plastic Man: On the Lam, has some of the best comedic writing I've seen. Plenty of sight gags---it seems like every panel has a little something extra. I love the snappy dialogue and self-aware parody: "Blast you, Trapper! My complex personal ethics force me to allow you to endanger the very fabric of reality to save a single human life!" Interestingly, although the silliness of the characters lend themselves to over-the-top illustration, most of the paneling maintains fairly traditional layouts with hard frames. It's admirable restraint, allowing the colorful, sharp drawings and great characters to keep things exciting. This one and On the Lam are definitely worth a purchase. I just love it.

Recordings from the World Livestock Auctioneer Championships. Amazing.

Photos of abandoned asylums. These in particular were from the Kirkbride era of hospital design, to go along with rehabilitative theories of moral treatment.

Alphabetical artwork emphasizing the spaces between.

The Thing Quarterly: "Each year four artists, writers, filmmakers or musicians are invited to create a household object that somehow incorporates text. Every three months a new object will be hand wrapped in brown paper and string by the editors and mailed to subscribers."[via jb]

Steven Pinker writes in defense of dangerous ideas.

The Paris Review has been popular for years for its interviews with writers, focusing more on the authors' methods and craft, rather than their products. The Paris Review Interviews, Volume I collects 16 of those interviews over the last half-century, a selection of novelists, poets, screenwriters, and even an editor. One of the unique aspects of the Review's approach is that the interviewers review and refine and reconstruct the text in concert with the writers. There's plenty of back-and-forth communication along the way from inception to print. I've never read a book full of interviews before, so one of the best parts was to be an observer of that proceess. I learned bit more about the difference between good interviewing (e.g. Borges & Christ) and bad interviewing (Hemingway vs. Plimpton). Of course, the more obvious privilege is learning from the writers themselves---reading about the ideas of really smart people who do really, really difficult work. You'll find a lot of great moments in this book. To pick just a few...

Robert Stone on the state of American fiction: "You have famous writers, but there's no center. There are the best-seller writers, who are anonymous, almost industrial figures..." I love that! Nora Roberts is like GM, James Patterson is PepsiCo, Danielle Steele like Kraft; I can imagine them and their counterparts hulking along churning out self-similar merchandise.

Saul Bellow was interesting for his occupational humility:

There is such a thing as overcapitalizing the A in artist. Certain writers and musicians understand this. Stravinsky says the composer should practice his trade exactly as a shoemaker does. Mozart and Haydn accepted commissions--wrote to order. In the nineteenth century, the artist loftily waited for inspiration. Once you elevate yourself to the rank of a cultural institution, you're in for a lot of trouble.

Kurt Vonnegut mirrors this attitude: "Trade. Carpenters build houses. Storytellers use a reader's leisure time in such a way that the reader will not feel that his time has been wasted. Mechanics fix automobiles."

Jorge Luis Borges is brilliant and his interviewer, Ronald Christ, seemed to be right up there with him. I expect conducting an interview is a lot easier with such a responsive subject, but I love how he was able to ask, prompt, suggest, hint... and just let Borges carry on. The result is the longest and probably the most engaging transcript in the entire book.

On the other hand, George Plimpton's interview with Ernest Hemingway was simply awful, but in an interesting way. Hemingway comes off as a real jerk. Intelligent, serious, dedicated, but a jerk. For the most part, Plimpton rolls belly-up, yielding ground and changing the subject. It seems like he never really pressed or pursued or challenged. Then again, I wonder how literally accurate the transcription is, after the back-and-forth editing between writer and interview. There has to be some background story there.

I find a certain perfectionist kinship with editor Robert Gottlieb. His perspective:

What is it that impels this act of editing? I know that in my case it's not merely about words. Whatever I look at, whatever I encounter, I want it to be good---whether it's what you're wearing, or how the restaurant has laid the table, or what's going on on stage, or what the president said last night, or how two people are talking to each other at a bus stop. I don't want to interfere with it or control it, exactly---I want it to work, I want it to be happy, I want it to come out right.

There's some other good folks in there: T.S. Eliot, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Billy Wilder, among others. This book probably has the highest educational-value to difficulty-of-reading ratio that I've come across in the past couple years. I would have blown through it in a couple of hours if I didn't have to stop so often to bookmark a worthy exchange or ponder a claim. I hope the rest of the series holds up as well as this volume.

I don't read all that many short stories or claim to be a huge fan of the form... but If I Vanished is one of the best I've read in a couple years. I need to find some more writing by this Stuart Dybek guy.

"Oaxaca. Filming a street demonstration during the teachers’ strike down there. Twice in the chest. Never made it to the hospital. He filmed his own assassination." The print version of the article in VQR also features illustrations from Peter Kuper's Oaxaca Sketchbook.

Mises University is happening this week at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Tune in to the webcasts for some of the best economics learnin' you'll find anywhere.

New York Magazine has a good profile of economist Tyler Cowen and his new book, Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist.

Time may not exist. What will they think of next? It's a really cool article. I'm always glad to hear of interesting theoretical physics outside of stri-*yawn* string theory.

Your spreadsheet has been attacked. Modern office life can be a little like The Oregon Trail.

The enterprising folks at Art House Co-op have launched The Sketchbook Project. Get a sketchbook, fill it up, send it back, and those of us in Atlanta in October can stop by and flip through them all. Proceeds are for a damn good cause, too.