“These days, among the tattered covers may be the occasional Kindle, but since most trains are still devoid of Internet access and cellphone reception, the subway ride remains a rare low-tech interlude in a city of inveterate multitasking workaholics. And so, we read.”
2. “Center Tries to Treat Web Addicts”
“Mr. Alexander, 19, needed help to break an addiction that he called as destructive as alcohol or drugs. He found it in Fall City, where what claims to be the first residential treatment center for Internet addiction in the United States just opened its doors.”
3. “College Advice, From People Who Have Been There Awhile”
“What the most successful college students do, in my experience, is cut through the clutter of jargons, methods and ideological differences to locate the common practices of argument and analysis hidden behind it all.”
“More than a few brainy Cambridge brows began to furrow last month after word trickled out that Harvard had entered into a 10-year licensing agreement for a line of preppy clothing modeled after the type that Mr. Fitzsimmons encountered four decades ago. A New England patchwork of tartan, seersucker and old-school plaids, the collection is to arrive in national department stores beginning in February, under the name Harvard Yard.”
5. “Welcoming the New, Improving the Old”
“Aiming to help companies innovate, design thinking starts with an intense focus on understanding real problems customers face in their day-to-day lives — often using techniques derived from ethnographers — and then entertains a range of possible solutions.”
6. “Texting? No, Just Trying to Read Chapter 6″
“Yes, the textbook can be digitized and displayed on gadgets that students can carry everywhere. But the iPhone version is painfully limited in its usefulness.”
7. “When Publishing Had Scents and Sounds”
“Then came the ’90s — the age of the computer, the atomic bomb that wiped out typewriters as well as typewriter ribbon, Wite-Out, carbon paper, in and out boxes and a serious percentage of stamps, Scotch Tape, stationery, staplers, paper clips, clocks, adding machines and, ultimately, paper itself. Palm Pilots phased out calendars, address books and calculators.”
8. “All Together Now: Play the Game, Mom”
“The Beatles: Rock Band is nothing less than a cultural watershed, one that may prove only slightly less influential than the band’s famous appearance on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ in 1964. By reinterpreting an essential symbol of one generation in the medium and technology of another, The Beatles: Rock Band provides a transformative entertainment experience. In that sense it may be the most important video game yet made.”
9. “Long and Winding Road, Newly Repaved”
“The most striking and consistent improvements are a heftier, rounded, three-dimensional bass sound, and drums that now sound like drums, rather than something in the distance being hit. But because each album has its own sonic character, due partly to developments in recording technology during the Beatles’ career, and partly to the growing complexity of their work, some discs are improved more radically than others, and some are hardly improved at all.”
10. “Taking Back the Knife: Girls Gone Gory”
“This basic appeal for female viewers was given a sophisticated reading by the film theorist Carol J. Clover in Men, Women and Chain Saws (1992), in which she refers to a lone young woman who either escapes or overthrows a killer as the ‘final girl.’ More comfortable watching a woman in peril than a man, young, male audiences — initially slasher movies’ core viewers — get the best of both worlds, identifying first with the predator and then with the would-be prey. That women also identify with the scrappy heroine is something of a happy accident.”
11. “The University’s Crisis of Purpose”
“Higher education is not about results in the next quarter but about discoveries that may take — and last — decades or even centuries. Neither the abiding questions of humanistic inquiry nor the winding path of scientific research that leads ultimately to innovation and discovery can be neatly fitted within a predictable budget and timetable.”
“In serving these niche audiences with their microgenres, YouTube has solidified its slot as a home for the vernacular avant-garde.”
“After a monumental building boom, the United States now has 2.3 billion square feet of self-storage space. (The Self Storage Association notes that, with more than seven square feet for every man, woman and child, it’s now ‘physically possible that every American could stand — all at the same time — under the total canopy of self-storage roofing.’)”
14. “Bringing Where the Wild Things Are to the Screen”
“Catherine Keener, who was nominated for an Oscar for her work in Being John Malkovich and who plays a divorced mother in Where the Wild Things Are, told me that her 10-year-old son, Clyde, once asked her why Jonze didn’t live with his parents; apparently Clyde didn’t realize that Jonze was an adult.”
What is insane is that I know that man in the picture and here I find him rather unintentionally finding his way into my feed reader.
What a fortunate stroke of serendipity. Thanks for sharing. Who is he?
The top picture, I mean.