If you’re the kind of reader who doesn’t intend to give up on a Great Big Important Novel no matter how inhumanely it treats you, then there’s a sense in which Joyce or Pynchon or Gaddis (or whoever your captor happens to be) owns you for the duration of that captivity. In order to maintain your sanity, you may end up being disproportionately grateful for the parts where they don’t threaten to bore you to death, where there seems to be some genuine empathic connection between reader and writer.
Links
Abebe: Why Frank Ocean’s Coming-Out Was Unique
It’s become, I think, a straight American commonplace to want to dignify same-sex relationships by treating them the same way we would heterosexual ones — which means that when someone tells us, for instance, that he’s gay, some of us who are straight might silently assume his relationships are not just as valid as ours but fundamentally the same as ours. As habits go, it’s politically useful and often accurate, but it also means we don’t see much mainstream discussion of the way that figuring out a sexual identity, via any one of the million different paths we all manage it, influences a person’s experience of love itself and the stories they have to tell about how it feels.
Nitsuh Abebe, as thoughtful as ever.
LeBron James Is a Sack of Melons – NYTimes.com
James has always been harder to place. On the court, he’s a whole anthology of players: an oversize, creative point guard like Magic Johnson; a bodybuilder-style space-displacer like Karl Malone; a harassing, omnipresent defender like Scottie Pippen; a leaping finisher like Dr. J. He does everything that a human can possibly do on a basketball court; he is 12 different specialists fused, Voltron-style, into a one-man All-Star team.
Somehow this doesn’t quite track. Even as we admire James’s unique skill set, we’re always forced to think about the tension that holds all of the disparate parts together — the contradictory philosophies of the game that all of those different skills imply.
Online fraud: Blatancy and latency | The Economist
Blatancy is a means of weeding out all but the most credulous respondents. (…) A big cost for [spammers] is the time they spend coaxing fully into their net those who show initial interest. So they need to select the most promising targets, rather than timewasters or the wary. “By sending an e-mail that repels all but the most gullible, the scammer gets the most promising marks [victims] to self-select.”
Thinking Backwards — The Brooks Review
What would you rather have: a digital replica of a magazine — perfect replica — or would you rather have a completely new concept of what a magazine is. For me my magazine is Instapaper — and it’s the best one I have ever had.
Yep.
Why My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless is the greatest rock album of our greatness-averse age – Grantland
What good are touchstones in an era where consensus seems to actively annoy people?
The Believer – Beat Boutique
On library music and the idea of “selling out”.
“Are you OK with making compromises with your art, or is it just better off for you to have your big compromise be walking into an office every day and getting to do whatever you want?” she says, without a fleck of judgment in her voice. “I think there’s arguments to be made for both.”
The Medication Generation: Teenagers and Antidepressants – WSJ.com
In my own case, talk therapy was vital. Though it didn’t make the pain go away, it did enable me to do something medication hadn’t, which was to talk and think about myself. It gave me a chance to have someone else confront my pain not as disorder but as part of the human experience. And that made it bearable.
The Medication Generation: Teenagers and Antidepressants – WSJ.com
The IRL Fetish – The New Inquiry
We are far from forgetting about the offline; rather we have become obsessed with being offline more than ever before. We have never appreciated a solitary stroll, a camping trip, a face-to-face chat with friends, or even our boredom better than we do now.
UC Berkeley Classics Department: 2009 Commencement Address by Daniel Mendelsohn
What can it mean to devote oneself to a discipline that likes to think that it is timeless, that it has cheated the centuries, the millennia?
UC Berkeley Classics Department: 2009 Commencement Address by Daniel Mendelsohn
What Nora Ephron Taught Me About Love In The Movies : Monkey See : NPR
Have you never said that “the rest was history,” which implies that a moment happened, and then history just followed, like you were letting out the kite string but the wind was doing the work?
I love that image.
What Nora Ephron Taught Me About Love In The Movies : Monkey See : NPR
It Happens – David Fleming – ESPN.com
Do I stop? Or go?
Does Wes Anderson hate dogs?: The New Yorker
Maiming and death are just as central to Anderson’s vision of things as are all the precise costumes that his characters wear. Misfortune comes just as suddenly to dogs as it does to humans. By including the beloved dog in this condition of life, he reminds us that no one is safe. […] Another way to look at it is that these dogs are most often punished as collateral damage of the moral and practical ineptitude of adults.
Great Air Conditioners | The Wirecutter
I don’t need a window air conditioner, nor do I expect to, but I’ll be damned if this isn’t worth reading anyway. Cf. The Wirecutter is on to something good.
The Four Deadly Fallacies, Pathetic and Otherwise
The Service Patch – NYTimes.com
Many people today find it easy to use the vocabulary of entrepreneurialism, whether they are in business or social entrepreneurs. This is a utilitarian vocabulary. How can I serve the greatest number? How can I most productively apply my talents to the problems of the world? It’s about resource allocation.
People are less good at using the vocabulary of moral evaluation, which is less about what sort of career path you choose than what sort of person you are.
In whatever field you go into, you will face greed, frustration and failure. You may find your life challenged by depression, alcoholism, infidelity, your own stupidity and self-indulgence. So how should you structure your soul to prepare for this? Simply working at Amnesty International instead of McKinsey is not necessarily going to help you with these primal character tests.
[…] It’s worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero. Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheets, more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job.
I missed this last month, so many thanks @davidbhayes for the post!
Which old sayings are true and which are false? – Barking up the wrong tree
Let’s go ahead and insert the “studies say” caveat, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff here. Selections:
“All _____ people look alike”
For all of us, whenever people are a different race it’s harder to tell them apart.
“The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long”
“You can tell a lot about a man by his handshake”
Absolutely. “Results showed that HGS was correlated with SHRs, aggressive behavior, age at first sexual intercourse, and promiscuity in males but not in females. HGS appears to be an honest signal for genetic quality in males.”
“Happy wife, happy life”
When the husband is happier than the wife, couples are more likely to divorce.
“Gaydar”
Yes.
“Attractive women make men stupid”
True. In fact, just thinking about attractive women makes men dumb.
“It’s the booze talking”
No, actually, that’s you talking.
“Spanking is bad for kids”
Kids who were spanked behave better as teenagers.
Which old sayings are true and which are false? – Barking up the wrong tree
I analyzed the chords of 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found. | Blog – Hooktheory
I’m interested to see what the @hooktheory folks come up with down the line.
I analyzed the chords of 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found. | Blog – Hooktheory
Zing!: What the New Science of the New Sciences Tells Us About Our Unquenchable Craving for the Illusion of Scientifically-Validated Insight | The Moral Sciences Club | Big Think
Popularizations that hold up are most likely penned by actual experts who happen to write well.
Mark Larson 