1. “Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective”
“Readers have much to learn from Gladwell the journalist and essayist. But when it comes to Gladwell the social scientist, they should watch out for those igon values.”
“In his review, Pinker outlines some of the pitfalls faced by journalist-popularizers like Gladwell. But Pinker, the author of How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate, acknowledges that academic explainers have their own faults. ‘Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue “no,” because it’s an oblate spheroid,’ he said. ‘They suffer from “the curse of knowledge”: the inability to imagine what it’s like not to know something that they know. That makes them underestimate the sophistication of readers and write in motherese rather than explaining concepts from the ground up.’”
3. “Selling Lessons Online Raises Cash and Questions”
“Thousands of teachers are cashing in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare.”
4. “Universities Turn to Consultants to Trim Budgets”
“Shrinking endowments and cuts in state financing have forced many colleges and universities, public and private, to turn to hiring freezes, layoffs and furloughs. But for long-term solvency, many will need to find longer-term ways to trim their budgets without damaging their academic mission.”
“The urge to name moments and eras, he said in an interview, is an affliction common to historians, but one that is best attempted with a certain sobriety.”
6. “43 Minutes Not Spent Watching TV”
“A lot of it goes to watching television: the current average for Americans 2 years old and up is 4 hours 49 minutes a day, a record.”
7. “Madness or Method? Tough to Tell”
“What makes Mr. Cage such an unusual screen presence and an even more atypical movie star is that he’s habitually very good and very bad from movie to movie, and sometimes scene to scene in a single film.”
“Alongside the official pantheon occasionally incarnated in lists offered up by institutions like the American Film Institute and The New York Times, every film lover carries around a more subjective canon, an ever-shifting, impressionistic personal cinematheque. That horror movie that gave you nightmares as a child. The love story you saw on your first date with the love of your life. The dramas that ended or started friendships, soothed you in your lonely moments or made the loneliness more acute. The westerns that taught you something about courage or treachery, the comedies that schooled you in sex, the epics and biopics that overshadowed what you learned in history class.”
“As the technology of television changes, so, too, does the experience of watching it. In the past, TVs often served as the focal points of communal gatherings. Families or groups of friends would collect around the set to watch the prime-time shows or the weekend games. They would laugh at the sitcom slapstick, cheer for their local teams, chat through commercials and, during the duller stretches, keep one another from nodding off. TV may have been a vast wasteland, as Newton Minow, the F.C.C. chairman in the Kennedy administration, said in a speech in 1961, but at least it was a wasteland we shared.
“The communal mode of TV viewing isn’t gone, but it’s becoming less common. As screens proliferate and shrink, and as the Web allows us to view whatever we want whenever we want, we spend more time watching video alone. That’s one funny thing about the Internet: it’s an extraordinarily rich communications system, but as an information and entertainment medium, it encourages private consumption. The pictures and sounds served up through our PCs, iPods and smart phones absorb us deeply but in isolation. Even when we’re together today, we’re often apart, peering into our own screens.”
“Fictional character he identifies with: Ethan Edwards from The Searchers, the John Wayne character. He is too savage to live in society yet too cultured to live in the wilderness, so he straddles the two worlds. I feel related to him a little bit, even though he’s kind of a deranged character.”
11. “The Self-Manufacture of Megan Fox”
“Women tear each other apart. Girls think I’m a slut, and I’ve been in the same relationship since I was 18. The problem is, if they think you’re attractive, you’re either stupid or a whore or a dumb whore. The instinct among girls is to attack the jugular.”
12. “Can D.I.Y. Supplant the First-Person Shooter?”
“‘Other media are capable of masterpiece-level works of art,’ Rohrer said. Behind him, a slide showed Picasso’s ‘Guernica,’ a poster for the movie Blue Velvet and the cover of Lolita. ‘The question we have to ask is: How can we follow in their footsteps?’”
“As it turned out, we had in fact come to prefer the atmosphere around the house without the Web to get caught up in. We eBayed less, sure. Moreover, our mornings were free and clear. We seemed to go into the day and our work with more focus, as if that should have been a surprise.”
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