Burt Reynolds – then 36 years old and soon to be seen in Deliverance – appeared, cigarillo dangling from his lips, as the centerfold in the April 1972 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.
1. “One’s A Crowd”
“More people live alone than at any other time in history.”
2. “Taking More Seats on Campus, Foreigners Also Pay the Freight”
“The influx affects more than just the bottom line – campus culture, too, is changing.”
3. “To Combat Modern Ills, Korea Looks to the Past”
“Centuries ago, carefully selected boys from across Korea lived secluded lives on this campus surrounded by pine trees, a creek and a pond. They read Confucian classics and recited poems about nature. They began and ended their days by visiting a shrine where Confucian sages were venerated. They bowed twice, head touching the floor, before answering their teacher’s questions on the day’s reading. In their heyday, more than 700 such academies dotted Korea, training applicants for the civil service and serving as guardians for the Confucianism that provided the ruling ideology of the Yi dynasty (1392-1897).”
4. “You’ve Won a Badge (and Now We Know All About You)”
“For companies, the premise of gamification is that it engages people in the kind of reward-seeking behaviors that lead to increased brand loyalty, not to mention increased profits. By tracking the online activities of people who sign up for such programs, companies can also amass more detailed metrics about each user – the better to identify the most active customers.”
5. “When Life Is a Bunch of Carrots”
“What does it mean to treat human behavior as if everyone has a price?”
6. “The Death of the Cyberflâneur”
“Hardly anyone ‘surfs’ the Web anymore.”
7. “Should Personal Data Be Personal?”
“Personal data is valuable.”
“The bits and bytes about your life can easily be used against you. Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital doppelgänger – and you may never know why you’ve been turned down.”
“The more we rely on technology to find our way, the less we build up our cognitive maps.”
10. “Still Creating Otherworldly Adventures”
“Since the silent era the industry standard has been 24 frames a second. Peter Jackson is shooting The Hobbit at 48; James Cameron may well make Avatar 2 at 60. Mr. Trumbull is talking 120.”
11. “A Foot in the Door in Silicon Valley”
“In a land where the uniform – jeans, hoodies and flip-flops – is purposefully nonchalant, and where no one would be caught dead in a tie, wearing flashy socks is more than an expression of your personality. It signals that you are part of the in crowd. It’s like a secret handshake for those who have arrived, and for those who want to.”
12. “Open Marriage’s New 15 Minutes”
“Online culture brings new opportunities to engage with other partners outside the traditional bounds of monogamy, whether they are hookups on Craigslist or flirtatious ‘direct messages’ on Twitter.”
13. “Power Point”
“The tailored topcoat is reappearing on men interested in stylish dressing.”
14. “Back on the Case”
“For those still unfamiliar with Raylan Givens, he’s a United States marshal known for his ever-present cowboy hat and his quick draw. He also has good manners, is deferential toward women and demonstrates a certain reticence about speaking any more than is necessary. ‘I haven’t thought of anything worth saying,’ he tells one character, who replies: ‘You just did it again. You make one-line declarations. You sort of mope around, so to speak, while your mind is flicking lines at you.’”
15. “Three Books Explore the Reality Behind the World of ‘Downton Abbey’”
“Until ‘Downton Abbey,’ I never realized how many of my deepest desires involved ironing. True, it would also be nice to have a great deal of furtive sex with my social inferiors, preferably in crinolines. But at this point, I’d settle for a crisp newspaper.”
16. “One Man’s History”
“He argues that it is an intellectual’s duty to ‘speak truth to power’ no matter what, and there is no doubt of his willingness to endure withering castigation for his own views. In return, he skewers many people – Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Michael Mandelbaum, Judith Miller, Leon Wieseltier, Michael Ignatieff, myself included – for being ignorant at best and willing dupes of power at worst, never conceding that his opponents could be honestly wrong or that his own views might deserve more introspection.”
17. “Going to the Mats”
“The yogis of old, Broad notes, ‘were often vagabonds who engaged in ritual sex or showmen who contorted their bodies to win alms – even while dedicating their lives to high spirituality.’ They read palms, interpreted dreams and sold charms; they promoted yoga as the way to sexual ecstasy (‘yoga,’ Broad tells us, means ‘union,’ and not just the spiritual kind).”
18. “Smoldering Subversive”
“At the current cultural moment, when women diet and exercise to achieve a boyish form, and don girdles – hiply rebaptized as Spanx – to heighten this effect, it’s jarring to see Taylor, with her nipped-in waist, straining bosom and generous hips, flirt and rage without apparent anxiety that she may be ‘bulging’ in both fleshly and emotive terms. Camille Paglia has called Taylor ‘prefeminist,’ believing that she expresses ‘woman’s ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm.’”
19. “Joe Eszterhas Sure Cleaned Up”
“At one of the early meetings, Adam Fogelson, Universal Pictures’ chairman, said to him, ‘Why do you want to do this story?’ Mel said, ‘Because I think I should.’ I liked that answer very much.”
20. “It Is Safe to Resume Ignoring the Prophets of Doom … Right?”
“For nearly a decade, it turns out, the most accurate forecasts have come from the fringe. So it’s upsetting to learn that many of those same Cassandras now believe, for different reasons, that we are on the brink of another catastrophe that may be far worse.”
21. “The Kids Are More Than All Right”
“Today’s teenagers are growing increasingly conservative.”
22. “The NBA Is Missing Its Shots in China”
“When the N.B.A. revealed its ambitious plans for China, it was pursuing the logical next step to expand its already successful business there. But the logic of the Chinese state was very different.”
23. “Stand-Up Comedy Without the Stand-Up. Or the Comedy.”
“The paradox of the podcast explosion among comics is that it’s at once a minirenaissance for comedy and a retreat by comics further into themselves – a sort of talking cure for a group of people who suffer from something not yet covered, I don’t believe, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: a need, when not formally doing comedy, to talk about how and why one does comedy.”
Posted in new york times
“David Imus worked alone on his map seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total.” And it’s amazing.
I got mine in the mail today and I couldn’t be more pleased. Recommended.
1. “Privacy, Technology And Law”
“Every day, those of us who live in the digital world give little bits of ourselves away.”
2. “Private Snoops Find GPS Trail Legal to Follow”
“Sales of GPS trackers to private individuals may have already surpassed more than 100,000 per year, some experts believe. The marketing is just getting started.”
3. “The Bookstore’s Last Stand”
“It was Nick Carraway who told Jay Gatsby, ‘You can’t repeat the past.’ That warning seems to hang over these offices.”
4. “The Yin and the Yang of Corporate Innovation”
“In business, as in jazz, the interaction of those two sides, the yin and the yang of innovation, fuels new ideas and products. The mixture varies by company.”
5. “The BlackBerry, Trying to Avoid the Hall of Fallen Giants”
“The road of progress is littered with the corpses of fallen titans.”
6. “Ritalin Gone Wrong”
“In 30 years there has been a twentyfold increase in the consumption of drugs for attention-deficit disorder.”
7. “Are We Ready for a ‘Morality Pill’?”
“If continuing brain research does in fact show biochemical differences between the brains of those who help others and the brains of those who do not, could this lead to a ‘morality pill’ — a drug that makes us more likely to help?”
8. “The Perils of ‘Bite Size’ Science”
“In recent years, a trend has emerged in the behavioral sciences toward shorter and more rapidly published journal articles. These articles are often only a third the length of a standard paper, often describe only a single study and tend to include smaller data sets. Shorter formats are promoted by many journals, and limits on article length are stringent — in many cases as low as 2,000 words. This shift is partly a result of the pressure that academics now feel to generate measurable output. According to the cold calculus of ‘publish or perish,’ in which success is often gauged by counting citations, three short articles can be preferable to a single longer one.”
9. “Cracking the Code in ‘Heeere’s Johnny!’”
“It’s really about the Holocaust, one interviewee says, and Mr. Kubrick’s inability to address the horrors of the Final Solution on film. No, it’s about a different genocide, that of American Indians, another says, pointing to all the tribal-theme items adorning the Overlook Hotel’s walls. A third claims it’s really Kubrick’s veiled confession that he helped NASA fake the Apollo Moon landings.”
10. “Why Men Always Tell You to See Movies”
“In one study conducted at Stanford two versions of the same video of a woman were presented to subjects: one had the low frequencies of the woman’s voice increased and the high frequencies reduced, the other vice versa. Consistently subjects perceived the deep voice to be smarter, more authoritative and more trustworthy.”
11. “Dissected Long Before Her Debut”
“Ms. Del Rey generates so much anger precisely because she does so little.”
12. “Final Reckonings, a Tuneful Fedora and Forgiveness”
“It’s probably not a good idea to do an autopsy on a living thing.”
13. “It’s Not Me, It’s You”
“Even though research shows that it is natural, and perhaps inevitable, for people to prune the weeds from their social groups as they move through adulthood, those who actually attempt to defriend in real life find that it often plays out like a divorce in miniature — a tangle of awkward exchanges, made-up excuses, hurt feelings and lingering ill will.”
14. “Hollywood Fixer Opens His Little Black Book”
“It is a lurid, no-detail-too-excruciating account of a sexual Zelig who (if you believe him) trawled an X-rated underworld for over three decades without getting caught.”
15. “The Dangers of Sharing”
“What if most people are willing to surrender their privacy in exchange for coupons, free music and videos, or simple book recommendations? This seems to be Facebook’s preferred strategy, an instance in which the mere right to privacy — even if enshrined in a constitution — is not going to be enough. Someone also needs to make a powerful argument about the dangers of sacrificing that right.”
16. “The Influence of the Inquisition”
“Looking at the Inquisition, one sees the West crossing a threshold from one kind of world into another. Persecution acquired a modern platform — the advantages afforded by a growing web of standardized law, communications, administrative oversight and controlled mechanisms of force. It was run not merely by warriors but by an educated elite; not merely by thugs but by skilled professionals. And in its higher dimensions it was animated not by greed or hope of gain or love of power, though these were never absent, but by the fervent conviction that all must subscribe to some ultimate truth.”
17. “Our Favorite Weapon”
“Reaching beneath his jacket, he quickly unholstered, unloaded and handed me his Glock 9 millimeter — this was in Kentucky, land of permissive concealed-carry laws. ‘I always carry this, and I always will.’”
18. “‘A Wrinkle in Time’ and Its Sci-Fi Heroine”
“In 1962, when A Wrinkle in Time, after 26 rejections, was acquired by John Farrar at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, science fiction by women and aimed at female readers was a rarity.”
19. “Is There Anything Marc Newson Hasn’t Designed?”
“Newson’s career as arguably the most influential industrial designer of his generation and the leading exponent of the so-called design-art movement may stand as much on the quasi-moral power of design to affirm the social virtues of wit, proportion, elegance and simplicity, as on his obsession with futuristic forms and modernist aesthetics. Not that he has any overt agenda as a design evangelist. His motivation, apart from the business of it all, is the spirit of personal discovery, not civic edification. Each project is a fresh encounter with the material world.”
20. “The Dilemma of Being a Cyborg”
“We’re collectively engaged in a mass conversion of what we used to call, variously, records, accounts, entries, archives, registers, collections, keepsakes, catalogs, testimonies and memories into, simply, data.”
Posted in new york times
“If you don’t take the money, they can’t tell you what to do. That’s the key to the whole thing.”
What NASA is calling “Blue Marble 2012”:
Of the original Blue Marble photo, Leonard Shlain had this to say:
“Like a Chinese ideograph, NASA’s photograph of our blue marble conveyed multiple values simultaneously, values more intuitive than rational. The masculine perception of nature and the Earth itself as ‘things’ to be conquered made the space program possible. The photo it generated began to instill in everyone who saw it an understanding that the Earth must be honored, protected, and loved. That many environmentalists are men confirms this change in orientation. NASA’s photograph of the Earth floating in space provided people with ‘the big picture.’ One sees the big picture with the entire retina and the combined hemispheres. The inviting, mute image of the home planet floating in dark space did more to change the consciousness of its residents than the miles of type concerning the subject generated by the world’s writers.”
Posted in books, photography, quotes
“In a rotten economy, or really in any economy, how many people with PhDs in American cultural studies do you think we actually need?”
Related post: “An Important Lesson.”
“I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.”
—David Ogilvy
(Via Letters of Note.)
I’m usually a staunch opponent of colorization, but I really enjoyed looking at these.
(Via Jeffrey Wells.)
Posted in photography
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