I read some of both halves of Beautiful Mutants and Swallowing Geography: Two Early Novels, and didn’t finish either one. Maybe too rough or biting for me at the time.
Sympathy for the Devil by Lorrie Moore
The ability on a camera-laden set to inhabit a character without a twitch of distraction or preoccupation or visible hint of the internally or externally irrelevant is a scary but brilliant feat. Ordinary people cannot do it. But I have seen great actors do it even at cocktail receptions full of cell phones. In a world where major writers have announced that they cannot focus on their work without extracting or blocking the modems in their laptops, this kind of thespian concentration is worth noting. (One thinks of the writer Anne Lamott’s remark on her own maturing undistractibility: “I used to not be able to work if there were dishes in the sink,” she has said. “Then I had a child and now I can work if there is a corpse in the sink.”)
My Writing Education: A Time Line - The New Yorker
George Saunders is a gem.
There’s this theory that self-esteem has to do with getting confirmation from the outside world that our perceptions are fundamentally accurate. What Doug does at this meeting is increase my self-esteem by confirming that my perception of the work I’d been doing is fundamentally accurate. The work I’ve been doing is bad. Or, worse: it’s blah. This is uplifting–liberating, even—to have my unspoken opinion of my work confirmed. I don’t have to pretend bad is good. This frees me to leave it behind and move on and try to do something better.
Why cabin fantasies shut out reality
The trend for digital detox holidays and other fashionable manifestations of spare, minimalist, decluttered living: what if they’re at least partly motivated by avoidance?
The Martian
The Martian. What’s most refreshing here is that it’s a fairly gentle, nice movie. Perfectly pleasant, always positive. I don’t think there’s anythig here for me to come back to, but it was really fun to watch. I didn’t finish the book.
Primal Fear
Primal Fear. Ugh.
Why I Quit Ordering From Uber-for-Food Start-Ups
Sprig-type operations drain agency and expertise out of the world. They centralize, aiming to build huge hubs with small spokes; their innermost mechanisms are hidden. They depend on humans behaving as interchangeable units of labor.
Absolute Power
Absolute Power. A jewel thief witnesses the President murdering his mistress. I’d put this in the upper middle-class of movies Eastwood has directed.
Living and Dying on Airbnb — Matter
Startups that redefine social and economic relations pop up in an instant. Lawsuits and regulations lag behind.
Why is English so weirdly different from other languages? by John McWhorter — Aeon
English is a mutt and it’s the best thing. I love dives like this, into the history of a language. Well, at least this one.
Why is English so weirdly different from other languages? by John McWhorter — Aeon
In the Line of Fire
In the Line of Fire. Cat, mouse. Better than I’d hoped. I still can’t jive with Malkovich, though.
Can a Trip Ever Be ‘Authentic’? - The New York Times
Our notion of places — which is to say the romances and images we project onto them — are always less current and subtle than the places themselves. […] That disconnect is even more acute because so many travelers have been everywhere (if only on-screen), which in turn means that reality — all that is unmediated and nonvirtual — holds a greater premium than ever.
Collateral
Collateral. I keep trying to re-rank Mann movies and running out of #1 slots.
Getting along isn’t luck, it’s a skill
Getting along isn’t luck, it’s a skill.
Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas
Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas.
On The Knick Set With Steven Soderbergh, Binge Director
Resonant Frequency: A Glitch in Time: How Oval’s 1995 Ambient Masterpiece Predicted Our Digital Present
By virtue of being atmospheric, ambient music tends to make the listener aware of the hardware involved in reproducing it, so it’s always, in a sense, about technology.
The restriction of trailers to a few carefully edited minutes
The restriction of trailers to a few minutes of carefully selected and edited shots and scenes endows what we do see, from faces to car crashes, with a kind of pregnancy or underdeterminacy that allows audiences to create an imaginary (as-yet-unseen) film out of these fragments—we desire not the real film but the film we want to see.
Lisa Kernan, quoted in Matt Thomas’ The Following Post Has Been Approved for All Audiences.
Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers
There are over a billion Chinese people. If even one in a thousand is a robber, you can provide one million examples of Chinese robbers to appease the doubters. Most people think of stereotyping as “Here’s one example I heard of where the out-group does something bad,” and then you correct it with “But we can’t generalize about an entire group just from one example!” It’s less obvious that you may be able to provide literally one million examples of your false stereotype and still have it be a false stereotype. If you spend twelve hours a day on the task and can describe one crime every ten seconds, you can spend four months doing nothing but providing examples of burglarous Chinese – and still have absolutely no point.
If we’re really concerned about media bias, we need to think about Chinese Robber Fallacy as one of the media’s strongest weapons. There are lots of people – 300 million in America alone. No matter what point the media wants to make, there will be hundreds of salient examples. No matter how low-probability their outcome of interest is, they will never have to stop covering it if they don’t want to.
Save for Later
The Bookmark represents what we wish for. It’s the earliest indicator of intention, and the most vulnerable; by definition, the act of saving something for later means that whatever we hope for hasn’t happened yet. Bookmarks are placeholders for the future. By thumbing through them, we can start to see what might happen next.