Hip-hop artists are musicologists, and sampling is one way histories are folded into the present.
Tag: newyorker
My Visit to the World’s First Gym for Your Face
Self-improvement imperatives always offer the seductive notion of untapped potential: it’s a bummer to feel like you have to change, but a thrill, sometimes, to imagine that you can. The trouble is that there is no feasible end to this process.
And this, too:
Today, young female professionals have an unprecedented amount of economic and social capital; at the same time, our adulthood has been defined by constant visual self-surveillance, a market-friendly feminism that favors any female acquisitive behavior, and an overwhelming redirection of anxiety into the “wellness” space.
Why Walking Helps Us Think
When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps. Likewise, writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands. Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts.
– Ferris Jabr.
In “Collateral Beauty” and “Passengers,” Two Tales of Gaslighting – The New Yorker
Fantasy, even when it’s rooted in practical details and doesn’t involve any metaphysical impossibilities, is the hardest genre to pull off, for the simple reason that life is interesting. A drama or a comedy that sticks close to experience has the intrinsic virtue of documentary—and, as with documentary itself, less is usually more.
In “Collateral Beauty” and “Passengers,” Two Tales of Gaslighting – The New Yorker
Man on the Street – The New Yorker
In 1966, a photographer Cunningham knew gave him an Olympus Pen D half-frame camera. “It cost about thirty-five dollars,” Cunningham wrote. “He said, ‘Here, use it like a notebook.’ And that was the real beginning.”
The Efficiency Trap
People don’t read these books to find out how to be better human beings. People read them to figure out how to become the kind of human being the workplace is looking for.
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.
Finally, A Non-Embarrassing Classical-Music Scene in a Blockbuster Movie – The New Yorker
The tendency to associate classical music with murderous insanity is a curious neurosis of the American pop-cultural psyche.
Finally, A Non-Embarrassing Classical-Music Scene in a Blockbuster Movie – The New Yorker
Enlightenment on Your iPhone
To pluck some things from the list, while ignoring others, strikes many Buddhists as absurd. McMahan said, “It would be as if somebody went to the Catholic Church and said, ‘I don’t buy all this stuff about Jesus and God, but I really dig this Communion ritual. Would you just teach me how to do that bit? Oh, and I want to start a company marketing wafers.’
A Bewildering Crash – The New Yorker
To be told that a scene of mass death is the result of an accident or terrorism is to be given not only an explanation of the cause but also an idea of how to reckon with the consequence.
Jonathan Ive and the Future of Apple – The New Yorker
Even if you don’t give a shit about tech, or profiles of wealthy people, stick around for the lovely little bits of colorful writing. Ian Parker is great:
Ive’s career sometimes suggests the movements of a man who, engrossed in a furrowed, deferential conversation, somehow backs onto a throne.
The Meaning of “Culture”
It goes without saying that “culture” is a confusing word, this year or any year.
Living the GoPro Life
When the agony of missing the shot trumps the joy of the experience worth shooting, the adventure athlete (climber, surfer, extreme skier) reveals himself to be something else: a filmmaker, a brand, a vessel for the creation of content.
We make ourselves lists in order to know if we think what we think.
There is no finality in a list, just a promise that we will argue about everything listed, adjust our thoughts, and watch our feelings change over time.
Serena Williams Is America’s Greatest Athlete
When the culture at large grants athletic adoration to women, it is often of a temporary, fleeting kind directed toward teen-age American sweethearts at the Olympics. Williams has never been America’s sweetheart. […] The failure to fully appreciate her importance is perhaps evidence of our inability to appreciate the stubbornly unfamiliar narrative arc of her career. Williams is underloved because, at times, she has been unlovable and, in the end, mostly unrepentant about it
The U.S. Open’s Federer-less Final – The New Yorker
So what is happening here? Other players are winning tennis matches. They are doing so by playing better than their opponents, even the ones, like Federer and Djokovic, who usually win. A couple of new guys, who are likable, hard-working, and talented, get their shot at the big fancy trophy and the giant check. Many fans will have a hard time accepting this. It requires a categorical adjustment, a recognition that a tournament is merely a process of narrowing down a pool of athletes to the one who beats the rest, rather than an expression of the Form of the Good.
Against “Against [X]” – The New Yorker
“Against [X]” is often not just an effective rhetorical form but also a canny career move: against X as an implicit argument for the polemicist.
Structure
Almost always there is considerable tension between chronology and theme, and chronology traditionally wins. The narrative wants to move from point to point through time, while topics that have arisen now and again across someone’s life cry out to be collected.
Filed under: John McPhee.
Anorexia, the Impossible Subject
If you want to be a beautiful writer, not wanting to connect your illness to your brilliance is nearly impossible.
Two New Books About Jorge Luis Borges : The New Yorker
Borges’s fictional universe is relentlessly, oppressively male. He wrote very few female characters, and there is a vision of masculinity—violent, fearless, austere—that exists in his work as a counterpoint to its obsessive bookishness, and neither ideal has much room for the presence of women, writers or otherwise. His abstraction meant, among other things, a removal from the heat and chaos of human relationships. There is very little love in his work, very little emotional intensity; its richness and complexity is that of philosophical problems, of theology and ontology, not of human relationships.
Mark Larson 