Author Archives: Matt Thomas

1. “Trailing a Master Photographer in Los Angeles”

“Unlike the monuments of other cities, those of Los Angeles require you to work for them. Many are not even open to the public. Some that are, are off the beaten path. As a result, when you arrive at some of the city’s greatest architectural masterpieces … you’re often all alone, or touring with a few other people, communing with the building and reliving a photograph.”

2. “The Secret Life of a Society Maven”

“I don’t like the phrase ‘reinvent yourself.’ I think what really happened is that when Alan got to England, whatever he found there allowed him to discover who he already was.”

3. “The New Shades of Feminism?”

“I recently learned about an activist group called Spark in the world of real-life youthful Brooklyn, a collective of girls spanning age 13 to their early 20s who have bound together to fight retrograde sexual and gender stereotyping. Members surreptitiously place Post-it notes in stores, on toys and games they deem questionable. Beginning in late December, when Lego was about to release its first girl-specific building set, called Friends, which succumbed to the familiar purple and pink and heart-shaped fantasia, Spark began a petition that has claimed 55,000 signatures.”

4. “Keeping Body and Image in Shape”

“I do check the Weather Channel, because that determines my wardrobe. I hate it when they’re wrong. Last week I put on my leopard suit, went outside, and it was 63 degrees; I had to come back in and change.”

5. “When a Sugar High Isn’t Enough”

“Everyone here is either making snacks or eating snacks they have just made. Some are snacking as they make snacks.”

6. “Don’t Be Evil, but Don’t Miss the Train”

“Arrogance can come easily to phenomenally well-educated people who have always been at the top of the class.”

7. “The Flight From Conversation”

“Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I’d like to learn how to have a conversation.”

8. “Plato’s Body, and Mine”

“Excessive emphasis on athletics produces an excessively uncivilized type, while a purely literary training leaves men indecently soft.”

9. “Teach the Books, Touch the Heart”

“We cannot enrich the minds of our students by testing them on texts that purposely ignore their hearts.”

10. “In Therapy Forever? Enough Already”

“Ineffective therapy is disturbingly common.”

11. “Why Are We Drugging Our Soldiers?”

“Annual spending on stimulants jumped to $39 million in 2010 from $7.5 million in 2001 – more than a fivefold increase. Additional data provided by Tricare Management Activity, the arm of the Department of Defense that manages health care services for the military, reveals that the number of Ritalin and Adderall prescriptions written for active-duty service members increased by nearly 1,000 percent in five years, to 32,000 from 3,000.”

12. “Everyone’s Lives, in Pictures”

“Maybe, instead of trying to make our new photos look more like old ones, we are trying to make our new photos look like art that looks like old photos.”

13. “Sacking a Palace of Culture”

“My earliest was an awareness that the profile of the guy next to me in the microfilm reading area (nobly illumined by the refraction of an image he had selected, focused and enlarged) was that of Arthur Miller. What might such a distinguished cardholder be studying with such absorption? I passed behind him and sneaked a peek. It was an old news article about Marilyn Monroe. Illustrated, natch. Something about the stillness of his shoulders touched me. Great playwright and aspiring hack, we were searching together in the city’s principal repository of memory.”

14. “Filmmaker’s Newest Work Is About … Something”

“Believers will confront a fiction that purports to tell a truth about their world, without specifically portraying them, at least by the filmmakers’ claim.”

15. “Poe Taunts Filmmakers Evermore”

“Poe’s work – violent, frightening, romantic, and distinctly unwholesome – seemed made for the movies then, and now it still does. Times have changed, but filmmakers’ fascination with his wild, sensation-based art seems destined to linger into eternity.”

16. “Watching Every Click You Make”

“The ghostly forces of the Internet can wreak especial havoc for people who have recently gone through a breakup or divorce.”

17. “The Creator of HBO’s Girls Shares Her Reading Habits”

“If you couldn’t tell, I mostly like confessional books by women.”

18. “Cheerful Debauchery”

“Sluts are the best – hungry for experience and generous with themselves in its pursuit.”

19. “Her Calling”

“In her lexicon, lonesomeness means the opposite of isolation. It envelops the mind and heart in unsullied nature, allowing focused apprehension of the miracle of creation, as when she remembers kneeling alone as a child ‘by a creek that spilled and pooled among rocks and fallen trees with the unspeakably tender growth of small trees already sprouting from their backs, and thinking, there is only one thing wrong here, which is my own presence, and that is the slightest imaginable intrusion – feeling that my solitude, my loneliness, made me almost acceptable in so sacred a place.’”

20. “Race, the Remix”

“Black life has taught America how revolutionary pleasure is against the capitalism of the Pilgrim, the plantation and plagiarism. ‘Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain.’”

21. “Who Made That Pie Chart?”

“Playfair’s graphic innovations went beyond the pie chart: he also invented the bar graph.”

21. “Can You Make Yourself Smarter?”

“What long-term memory is to crystallized intelligence, working memory is to fluid intelligence. Working memory is more than just the ability to remember a telephone number long enough to dial it; it’s the capacity to manipulate the information you’re holding in your head – to add or subtract those numbers, place them in reverse order or sort them from high to low. Understanding a metaphor or an analogy is equally dependent on working memory; you can’t follow even a simple statement like ‘See Jane run’ if you can’t put together how ‘see’ and ‘Jane’ connect with ‘run.’ Without it, you can’t make sense of anything.”

23. “How Exercise Could Lead to a Better Brain”

“Exercise seems to make neurons nimble.”

24. “Post-Prozac Nation”

“Our modern conception of the link between depression and chemicals in the brain was sparked quite by accident in the middle of the last century. In the autumn of 1951, doctors treating tubercular patients at Sea View Hospital on Staten Island with a new drug – isoniazid – observed sudden transformations in their patients’ moods and behaviors. The wards – typically glum and silent, with moribund, lethargic patients – were ‘bright last week with the happy faces of men and women,’ a journalist wrote. Patients laughed and joked in the dining hall, as if a dark veil of grief had lifted. Energy flooded back and appetites returned. Many, ill for months, demanded five eggs for breakfast and then consumed them with gusto. When Life magazine sent a photographer to the hospital to investigate, the patients could no longer be found lying numbly in their beds: they were playing cards or dancing in the corridors.”

25. “The Maniac in Me”

“It starts with a thought – a what if or a should have been or a never will be or a could have been – and metastasizes from there, sparking down the spine and rooting out into my body in the form of clamminess, fatigue, palpitations and a terrible sense that the world in which I find myself is at once holographically insubstantial and grotesquely threatening. On more than one occasion my anxiety has paralyzed me over something as inconsequential as the choice between blue cheese and vinaigrette on a salad.”

26. “How the Comedy Nerds Took Over”

“A real comic can’t stand the idea of not being funny or of an audience he can’t win over.”

27. “The Ripped, Bikini-Clad Reverend”

“Despite our belief that both sexes can serve the church, it seems there’s still something unnerving about a priest who is a woman. It has to do with having a woman’s body.”

1. “Robert Caro’s Big Dig”

“There was never a plan. There was just a series of mistakes.”

2. “Increasingly in Europe, Suicides ‘by Economic Crisis’”

“Researchers have found that severe economic stress corresponds to higher suicide rates.”

3. “The Chic, Lethal Salons on the Screens of France”

“We ask you to share your story, and then we try to destroy you.”

4. “How the Tech Parade Passed Sony By”

“Sony makes too many models, and for none of them can they say, ‘This contains our best, most cutting-edge technology.’ Apple, on the other hand, makes one amazing phone in just two colors and says, ‘This is the best.’”

5. “The Rise of the Independent Work Force”

“I am 36 years old and a 21st-century employee.”

6. “A Veteran’s Death, the Nation’s Shame”

“An American soldier dies every day and a half, on average, in Iraq or Afghanistan. Veterans kill themselves at a rate of one every 80 minutes.”

7. “The Downside of Cohabiting Before Marriage”

“Couples who cohabit before marriage (and especially before an engagement or an otherwise clear commitment) tend to be less satisfied with their marriages – and more likely to divorce – than couples who do not.”

8. “Lefties Aren’t Special After All”

“After reviewing hundreds of such studies for a book on left-handers, I found that the evidence of positive qualities associated with left-handedness was anecdotal at best, while the scores of studies associating left-handedness with all manner of afflictions were generally too unreliable to have any practical consequence.”

9. “The Provocateur”

“He cut an odd figure for a conservative, holding forth with lectures on political theory that name-dropped Michel Foucault and other leftist thinkers. He could also be mordantly funny. (His Twitter avatar was an echo of the apocryphal Jesus imprint on a piece of toast.) … He was conversant in pop culture – the Cure and New Order were particular musical favorites – and thought nothing of wearing in-line skates, his longish hair trailing behind him, as he confronted protesters at a rally outside a conservative event hosted by David and Charles Koch in Palm Springs, Calif., in 2011. Once he was done berating the protesters, he took some of them to dinner at Applebee’s.”

10. “No Scrolling Required at New Dating Sites”

“They’re trying to combine the power of the Internet with the best of retro dating, with singles parties so big they are organized through Web sites, and real-life matchmakers who use Klout scores to help match couples.”

11. “Truly Food for Thought”

“This new academic field, taking shape in an expanding number of colleges and universities, coordinates the food-related instruction sprinkled throughout academia in recognition that food is not just relevant, but critical to dozens of disciplines. It’s agriculture; it’s business; it’s health; it’s the economy; it’s the environment; it’s international relations; it’s war and peace.”

12. “How My Aunt Marge Ended Up in the Deep Freeze …”

“The big things, the weirdest things, the things you’d assume would have to be made up, happened exactly as the movie says they did. The trial lawyers really did wear Stetsons and cowboy boots and really were named Danny Buck Davidson and Scrappy Holmes. Daddy Sam’s barbecue and bail bonds, just a few blocks from the courthouse in Carthage (population: 6,700), really does have a sign that says, ‘You Kill It, I’ll Cook It!’ And they really did find my Aunt Marge on top of the flounder and under the Marie Callender’s chicken potpies, wrapped in a Lands’ End sheet. They had to wait two days to do the autopsy. It took her that long to thaw.”

1. “A Man. A Woman. Just Friends?”

“Friendship between the sexes was more or less unknown in traditional society.”

2. “Trying to Find a Measure for How Well Colleges Do”

“We used to hear a lot more of, ‘The value of college can’t be measured,’ and now we hear more of, ‘Let’s talk about how we can measure.’”

3. “Berkeley Group Digs In to Challenge of Making Sense of All That Data”

“Making sense of Big Data is, in fact, a holy grail of computer science these days – and technology companies, academic institutions and the federal government are investing heavily in the endeavor.”

4. “Actor Rushes to Aid of Damsel in Pink Wig”

“Mr. Gosling has not commented publicly on the incident. No visual evidence of a good deed has surfaced, as it did last August after Mr. Gosling broke up a fight on Astor Place over a painting. And yet the legend has grown.”

5. “A Radical Female Hero From Dystopia”

“One reason Katniss may be speaking to so many is that she doesn’t just seem to be a new kind of female character but also represents an alternative to an enduring cultural type that the literary critic R. W. B. Lewis described as the American Adam. Lewis saw this type as ‘an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources.’”

6. “The Phones Are Out, but the Robot Is In”

“To me, being a C.E.O., being a manager, was really a direct extension of being a programmer, which I think explains some of the things I’m good at and some of the things I’m bad at. When you’re programming, you have a very specific goal that you want to accomplish, and you do it by basically pulling together blocks of code. When I became a C.E.O., I was basically doing the same thing, except I was working with people who needed to accomplish some stuff, and it was still kind of very functional.”

7. “Taking a Chance on Love, and Algorithms”

“At the end of the day, the human algorithm – neural tissue in our cranium called a brain – has evolved over a long period of time to size up people efficiently.”

8. “What 23 Years of E-Mail May Say About You”

“Computers are good at spotting patterns, and Dr. Wolfram thought an analysis of his own personal data might reveal patterns in his life – for example, when he was most likely to come up with new ideas, ‘preferably good ones.’”

9. “In Defense of Superstition”

“To believe in magic – as, on some deep level, we all do – does not make you stupid, ignorant or crazy. It makes you human.”

10. “Making Crime Pay”

“‘Never walk across a wet floor,’ Mr. Mulholland advised, saying you might mess up the work of the prisoner manning the mop. And then he might kill you.”

11. “The Mystery of the Flying Laptop”

“When is a laptop a laptop?”

12. “Inventing the Future”

What causes innovation? Why does it happen, and how might we nurture it?

13. “What’s the Easiest Way to Cheat on Your Taxes?”

“Who is the greatest accountant of all time? Many consider Luca Pacioli, a 15th-century Italian bookkeeper who hung out with Leonardo, as their standard-bearer.”

14. “Just One More Game …”

“Stupid games are rarely occasions in themselves. They are designed to push their way through the cracks of other occasions. We play them incidentally, ambivalently, compulsively, almost accidentally. They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day; less a pursuit than a distraction from other pursuits. You glance down to check your calendar and suddenly it’s 40 minutes later and there’s only one level left before you jump to the next stage, so you might as well just launch another bird.”

15. “Jack Outside the Box”

“On his desk sat a cowbell, a pocketknife, a George Orwell reader and an antique ice-cream scoop. There was also a stack of business cards that read: ‘John A. White III, D.D.S. – Accidentist and Occidental Archaeologist.’”

16. “Why the Old-School Music Snob Is the Least Cool Kid on Twitter”

“There is no longer any honor in musical obscurity.”