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.”

—Josh Wimmer

Related post: “An Important Lesson.”

—David Ogilvy

(Via Letters of Note.)

(Via Jeffrey Wells.)

“The debate about academic writing has given rise to new terminology: ‘old literacy’ refers to more traditional forms of discourse and training; ‘new literacy’ stretches from the blog and tweet to multimedia presentation with PowerPoint and audio essay.”

2. “How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work”

“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”

3. “True to His Abstraction”

“Ellsworth has been fearless in his commitment to the limitless possibilities of abstraction.”

4. “The Energy of New York Still Seduces Jackson”

“Jackson does meditate, but a sign on his desk reads: ‘There are no Zen masters. There is only Zen.’”

5. “A Clash of Media Worlds (and Generations)”

“Technology types don’t see this as a battle between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. They see it as a battle between old and new.”

6. “A Better Tax System (Assembly Instructions Included)”

“Here are four principles of tax reform that most of those economists would endorse.”

7. “Her Key to Efficiency: Arrive Late, Leave Early”

“As an academic, I’m lucky: I can come and go as I please as long as I keep publishing my work. I wish that there were a way to extend this flexibility to more men and women.”

8. “Do Drones Undermine Democracy?”

“I do not condemn these strikes; I support most of them. What troubles me, though, is how a new technology is short-circuiting the decision-making process for what used to be the most important choice a democracy could make. Something that would have previously been viewed as a war is simply not being treated like a war.”

9. “Why World War I Resonates”

“Imagine an officer in the United States Army – in his 50s, say – on the Argonne front in 1918. As a young soldier he could conceivably have fought, 30 years earlier, in the last of the wars against the Plains Indians in the late 1880s. Yet now he stands surveying a different world. The tactics were 19th century – advance on the enemy. But the enemy had weapons of mass destruction – the battlefield was dominated by tanks, machine guns, howitzers, aircraft and poisonous gas. Some 117,000 American servicemen died in the 19 months of United States participation in World War I – more than twice as many as in Vietnam, nearly 20 times as many as in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

10. “Cracking Teenagers’ Online Codes”

“Children today, she said, are reacting online largely to social changes that have taken place off line.”

11. “How Americans Have Reshaped Language”

“Prosecutable hate speech in 17th-century Massachusetts included calling people ‘dogs,’ ‘rogues’ and even ‘queens’ (though the last referred to prostitution); magistrates took serious umbrage at being labeled ‘poopes’ (‘dolts’).”

12. “Guidebooks to Babylon”

“There is no more vivid means of evoking the shadowy back streets, raucous taverns and perfumed boudoirs of a vanished city than to pore over a prostitute directory’s brittle, yellowed pages.”

13. “Renaissance Man”

“For two and a half years, Mr. Gleick, a sophomore majoring in bioengineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, has devoted an hour a day to learning something new. His rule: It can’t be related to schoolwork, or merely reading a novel.”

14. “David Helfand’s New Quest”

“Quest has no departments, no tenure and no classes larger than 20. It uses the block system, in which students take one course at a time for a month. Students get a grade, plus a faculty assessment of whether they are ‘contributing to, and benefiting from, the intellectual life of the classroom.’ And students spend their last two years focused on a single question of their choosing.”

15. “A Sharper Mind, Middle Age and Beyond”

“Education seems to be an elixir that can bring us a healthy body and mind throughout adulthood and even a longer life.”

16. “How Big-Time Sports Ate College Life”

“We’ve reached a point where big-time intercollegiate athletics is undermining the integrity of our institutions, diverting presidents and institutions from their main purpose.”

17. “What You (Really) Need to Know”

“Suppose the educational system is drastically altered to reflect the structure of society and what we now understand about how people learn. How will what universities teach be different?”

18. “One Percent Education”

“Just as the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans gobble up a disproportionate share of the nation’s economic resources and rejigger our institutions to funnel them benefits and power, so too do our educational 1 percent suck up a disproportionate share of academic opportunities, and threaten to reconfigure academic culture so that it both mimics and serves their values.”

19. “A Mess on the Ladder of Success”

“The U.S. has always been a remarkably itinerant country, but new data from the Census Bureau indicate that mobility has reached its lowest level in recorded history.”

20. “The Hand-Held Highlighter”

“By the 1970s, highlighting was already overtaking underlining as the dominant way to refer back to something important, or just kind of important.”

21. “George Lucas Is Ready to Roll the Credits”

“Lucas has decided to devote the rest of his life to what cineastes in the 1970s used to call personal films. They’ll be small in scope, esoteric in subject and screened mostly in art houses.”

From “Revisiting ‘Zork’: What We Lost in the Transition to Visual Games.”

—Richard Mitchell, The Graves of Academe

(Via Michael Leddy.)

—Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

“Solitude has long been associated with creativity and transcendence.”

2. “Among the Wealthiest One Percent, Many Variations”

“Most 1 percenters were born with socioeconomic advantages, which helps explain why the 1% is more likely than other Americans to have jobs, according to census data. They work longer hours, being three times more likely than the 99% to work more than 50 hours a week, and are more likely to be self-employed. Married 1 percenters are just as likely as other couples to have two incomes, but men are the big breadwinners, earning 75% of the money, compared with 64% of the income in other households.”

3. “Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to Amazon’s Lost World”

“The deforestation that has stripped the Amazon since the 1970s has also exposed a long-hidden secret lurking underneath thick rain forest: flawlessly designed geometric shapes spanning hundreds of yards in diameter.”

4. “Spend, Spend, Spend. It’s the American Way.”

“We tend to think it’s OK for people to go into debt to buy gadgets or take vacations.”

5. “When You’re the Worker Who Can’t Say No”

“In situations like this, people often automatically say ‘yes’ out of fear.”

6. “It’s Still the ‘Age of Anxiety.’ Or Is It?”

“According to the National Institute of Mental Health, anxiety disorders now affect 18 percent of the adult population of the United States, or about 40 million people. By comparison, mood disorders – depression and bipolar illness, primarily – affect 9.5 percent. That makes anxiety the most common psychiatric complaint by a wide margin, and one for which we are increasingly well-medicated. Last spring, the drug research firm IMS Health released its annual report on pharmaceutical use in the United States. The anti-anxiety drug alprazolam – better known by its brand name, Xanax – was the top psychiatric drug on the list, clocking in at 46.3 million prescriptions in 2010.”

7. “Fruit Flies and Love”

“During fruit fly courtship, the male, lured by a full larder, extends one mandolin-like wing and serenades the female, then engages in a style of oral sexual foreplay many humans enjoy. Then he mounts her and copulates for 20 minutes or so. Here’s the sly part. The last male she has sex with will sire most of her many offspring, and she chooses the father only after lots of romps in the orchard or lab, based on his flair for courtship.”

8. “Mourning in a Digital Age”

“Old customs no longer apply, yet new ones have yet to materialize.”

9. “Perfectly Happy, Even Without Happy Endings”

“She analyzed box-office hits and critically acclaimed movies on the American Film Institute’s favorites lists. She broke down their emotional components, isolated the elements of mood elevation and tested her findings against those of market researchers. She concluded: Positive movies do not necessarily have happy endings; their characters’ personal relationships trump personal achievements; and male and female viewers differ in how they define a character’s accomplishments.”

10. “Renovate Renovate Baby. Need Help?”

“When we pull up to Lowe’s, he takes a VIP parking spot, which is to say he drives his SUV right up to the door and hops out. Mostly we’re hunting for decorative moldings to give the staircase a quick hit of faux dignity. After scavenging through the store, he finally finds a handful of light wood ones – the better to curve with the staircase – and scoops them up.”

11. “William Gibson’s Future Is Now”

“In Distrust That Particular Flavor, Gibson pulls off a dazzling trick. Instead of predicting the future, he finds the future all around him, mashed up with the past, and reveals our own domain to us as a science-fictional marvel.”

12. “What It Means to Be Middle Aged”

“It began in 1918 when, Cohen reports, ‘a doctor at San Quentin prison … transplanted the testicles of an executed man into a senile 60-year-old inmate.’”

13. “What Friedrich Nietzsche Did to America”

“Emerson anticipated many of Nietzsche’s most famous utterances. There is a direct line from Emerson’s ‘oversoul’ to the ‘overman.’ Several decades before Nietzsche wrote, ‘What does not kill me makes me stronger,’ Emerson wrote, ‘In general, every evil to which we do not succumb, is a benefactor.’ More profoundly, Emerson foreshadowed Nietzsche’s concern with the ubiquity of flux and power, and the value of overcoming the past. ‘Life only avails,’ Emerson once wrote, ‘not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transitions from a past to a new state.’”

14. “My Berlin Airlift”

“‘Americans like e-books because they’re easier to buy.’ A performance artist said, ‘They’re also easier not to read.’”

15. “What Does Wall Street Do for You?”

“Wall Street’s core function is to perform a sort of financial alchemy, an incredibly complicated method of giving a lot of people what they want.”

16. “The Chinese-Takeout Container Is Uniquely American”

“The structure has come to represent the idea of Eastern cuisine in Western society even though this packaging is not used for food containment in Chinese culture.”

17. “‘Why Write Novels at All?’”

“The central question driving literary aesthetics in the age of the iPad is no longer ‘How should novels be?’ but ‘Why write novels at all?’”

—Matt Zoller Seitz

“I decided to ask as many talented designers I knew (or didn’t know) to create a resolution for the new year as an iPhone background.”

(Via Coursekit.)

“Many authors have little use for the pretension of hermetic distance and never accepted a historically specific idea of what it means to be a writer. With the digital age come new conceptions of authorship. And for both authors and readers, these changes may be unexpectedly salutary.”

3. “The Critics Rave … for Microsoft?”

“It looks like nothing we’ve seen before from Microsoft.”

4. “Sifting the Professional From the Personal”

“My Facebook friends are all my real friends.”

5. “Building the Team That Built Watson”

“Scientists, by their nature, can be solitary creatures conditioned to work and publish independently to build their reputations. While collaboration drives just about all scientific research, the idea of ‘publishing or perishing’ under one’s own name is alive and well.”

6. “Paved, but Still Alive”

“As the critic Lewis Mumford wrote half a century ago, ‘The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is the right to destroy the city.’ Yet we continue to produce parking lots, in cities as well as in suburbs, in the same way we consume all those billions of plastic bottles of water and disposable diapers. What to do?”

7. “From the Cage to the Screen, With Fists Flying”

“The first thing you need to do is just immediately get back to work.”

8. “Wary of Energy Drinks in an Adrenaline Sport”

“We’re saying, ‘Do whatever you want, but you can drink water and be just as cool.’”

9. “Be It Resolved”

“People with the best self-control, paradoxically, are the ones who use their willpower less often. Instead of fending off one urge after another, these people set up their lives to minimize temptations. They play offense, not defense, using their willpower in advance so that they avoid crises, conserve their energy and outsource as much self-control as they can.”

10. “The Myth of Japan’s Failure”

“The Japanese are dressed better than Americans. They have the latest cars, including Porsches, Audis, Mercedes-Benzes and all the finest models. I have never seen so many spoiled pets. And the physical infrastructure of the country keeps improving and evolving.”

11. “Theater for Twits”

“The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra has tweet seats from which patrons can carry on what organizers call ‘digital conversations’ during concerts. In Florida, the Palm Beach Opera set up a tweet section for a performance of Madama Butterfly. Last month, The Public Theater in New York said via Twitter: ‘We think we may be the first of the large theaters to do some Tweet Seats, don’t know about smaller theaters.’”

12. “Get a Midlife”

“The most recent research on middle age has looked at gains as well as deficits.”

13. “Return to a Darker Age”

“Artificial illumination has arguably been the greatest symbol of modern progress.”

14. “Alone Again, Naturally”

“Most men seem unable to live alone for longer than, say, at the outside … three months. Most single women I know really love their lives.”

15. “My Back Pages: Digital Diary Traces Memories”

“We are beginning to see ourselves not just from the inside, as an actor doing something on a daily basis, but from the outside — understanding what we look like to the world around us and developing a kind of hybrid identity.”

16. “Striking on the Modern Matchbook”

“By the 1940s, it was estimated that more than one million Americans had become phillumenists, or matchbook collectors. During World War II, Gen. Douglas MacArthur had matchbooks bearing the words ‘I shall return’ dropped behind enemy lines in the Philippines.”

17. “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body”

“Black has come to believe that ‘the vast majority of people’ should give up yoga altogether. It’s simply too likely to cause harm.”

18. “How Many Stephen Colberts Are There?”

“There used to be just two Stephen Colberts, and they were hard enough to distinguish. Lately, though, there has emerged a third Colbert. This one is a version of the TV-show Colbert, except he doesn’t exist just on screen anymore. He exists in the real world and has begun to meddle in it.”

(Via.)

“In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them – often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.”

2. “F.D.A. Is Finding Attention Drugs in Short Supply”

“Medicines to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are in such short supply that hundreds of patients complain daily to the Food and Drug Administration that they are unable to find a pharmacy with enough pills to fill their prescriptions.”

3. “In Washington, Large Rewards in Teacher Pay”

“I know they value me.”

4. “Apropos Appropriation”

“To look at the work of younger artists, especially of those who don’t remember a time before the Web, is to get a true sense of the velocity, and changing nature, of appropriation.”

5. “Fugue for History and Memory”

“The Tree of Life is like a piece of music. Its sections are more like movements than the conventional ‘acts’ of a screenplay. It discloses its meanings through the layering and recasting of themes rather than the linear presentation of action. And it depends on the contrapuntal arrangement of contrasting ideas: time and eternity; past and present; masculine and feminine; innocence and experience.”

6. “In Pennsylvania, a Quick Shot of Peace, on a Budget”

“Sister Barbara listened closely and then said, ‘What I hear you saying, Susan, is that you feel forsaken.’”

7. “Defining Words, Without the Arbiters”

“Automatic programs search the Internet, combing the texts of news feeds, archived broadcasts, the blogosphere, Twitter posts and dozens of other sources for the raw material of Wordnik citations.”

8. “Your Recycled Resolutions Are a Boon for Business”

“Our collective failure to keep our resolutions represents an annuity of sorts for health clubs, weight-loss centers and other enterprises that make up what you might call the self-improvement industry. It’s an industry that thrives on our failure to change: recidivism is good for the bottom line.”

9. “The Year of the Multitaskers’ Revenge”

“As workers add more electronic devices, Web sites, software programs and apps to their arsenals, there is a point at which efficiency and satisfaction suffer. More devices can lead to more multitasking, which, though viewed by many as a virtue, has been shown to interfere with concentration.”

10. “Bob Parsons Doesn’t Do Subtle”

“I made $5 million that year, and I went ahead and had my ear pierced. And anytime something good happened, I would get a bigger diamond. The problem now, brother, is I’m running out of ear.”

11. “The Fat Trap”

“For years, the advice to the overweight and obese has been that we simply need to eat less and exercise more. While there is truth to this guidance, it fails to take into account that the human body continues to fight against weight loss long after dieting has stopped. This translates into a sobering reality: once we become fat, most of us, despite our best efforts, will probably stay fat.”

12. “Let’s Start Paying College Athletes”

“This glaring, and increasingly untenable, discrepancy between what football and basketball players get and what everyone else in their food chain reaps has led to two things. First, it has bred a deep cynicism among the athletes themselves. Players aren’t stupid. They look around and see jerseys with their names on them being sold in the bookstores. They see 100,000 people in the stands on a Saturday afternoon. During the season, they can end up putting in 50-hour weeks at their sports, and they learn early on not to take any course that might require real effort or interfere with the primary reason they are on campus: to play football or basketball. The N.C.A.A. can piously define them as students first, but the players know better. They know they are making money for the athletic department. The N.C.A.A.’s often-stated contention that it is protecting the players from ‘excessive commercialism’ is ludicrous; the only thing it’s protecting is everyone else’s revenue stream.”

13. “A View From the Margins”

“Sam Anderson, the magazine’s critic at large and resident marginalia obsessive, selects highlights from a year in reading – and scribbling.”

“A programmer’s need to explore, freely and openly, is powerful. That is what I and others like me understood the first time we opened The C Programming Language and were magnetically drawn into the world Dennis Ritchie created. We were closer to the machines, yes, but also interconnected. We had the sense of being asked to join a heady conversation in which what could be said was limited by only talent, energy and imagination.”

2. “The Book of Books: What Literature Owes the Bible”

“A number of the great works of Western literature address themselves very directly to questions that arise within Christianity. They answer to the same impulse to put flesh on Scripture and doctrine, to test them by means of dramatic imagination, that is visible in the old paintings of the Annunciation or the road to Damascus. How is the violence and corruption of a beloved city to be understood as part of an eternal cosmic order? What would be the consequences for the story of the expulsion from Eden, if the fall were understood as divine providence? What if Job’s challenge to God’s justice had not been overawed and silenced by the wild glory of creation? How would a society within (always) notional Christendom respond to the presence of a truly innocent and guileless man? Dante created his great image of divine intent, justice and grace as the architecture of time and being. Milton explored the ancient, and Calvinist, teaching that the first sin was a felix culpa, a fortunate fall, and providential because it prepared the way for the world’s ultimate reconciliation to God. So his Satan is glorious, and the hell prepared for his minions is strikingly tolerable. What to say about Melville?”

3. “Before Recruiting in Ivy League, Applying Some Math”

“While the Academic Index, referred to as the A.I., is a routine part of life in an Ivy League athletic department, outside those offices, it is frequently treated like the most furtive of secret fraternity handshakes. The specifics on how the Academic Index is calculated or how it is evaluated from university to university are not made public. The formula for calculating individual A.I. numbers is not available on the league Web site or in any other official public forum – even if there are dozens of such calculators listed online (nearly all of them inaccurate).”

4. “Bourbon’s All-American Roar”

“Bourbon is one product America still makes better than anyone else.”

5. “Leadership Lessons From the Shackleton Expedition”

“Real leaders, wrote the novelist David Foster Wallace, are people who ‘help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.’”

6. “Publishers vs. Libraries: An E-Book Tug of War”

“Worried that people will click to borrow an e-book from a library rather than click to buy it, almost all major publishers in the United States now block libraries’ access to the e-book form of either all of their titles or their most recently published ones.”

7. “Is It Bigger Than a Breadbox?”

“No man wants to wear a watch smaller than a woman has on.”

8. “Challenging Hip-Hop’s Masculine Ideal”

“How long will it be until some blonde – or any white woman – rises to fame through hip-hop?”

9. “Rye Is Back, With Flavors of Americana”

“At the time of his death, in 1799, George Washington’s estate was the largest producer of whiskey in the country, turning out 11,000 gallons a year.”

10. “Why We Lie”

“Trivers calls deceit a ‘deep feature’ of life, even a necessity, given genes’ brutal struggle to prevail. Anglerfish lure prey by dangling “bait” in front of their jaws, edible butterflies deter predators by adopting the coloring of poisonous species. Possums play possum, cowbirds and cuckoos avoid the hassle of raising offspring by laying their eggs in other birds’ nests. Even viruses and bacteria employ subterfuge to sneak past a host’s immune systems. The complexity of organisms, Trivers suggests, stems at least in part from a primordial arms race between deceit and deceit-detection.”

11. “Paul Nelson: Bad Boy Rock Critic”

“The mythic American hero is a man, almost always womanless, who has somehow been trapped in that curious nether­world between comic innocence and tragic experience; unable or unwilling to make a choice, he can at best (or worst) embrace either adjective, neither noun. He has known happiness once, lost it, and now nothing will help.”

12. “The Enlightenment’s True Radicals”

“Israel traces the lineage of this Radical Enlightenment to Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century philosopher who serves here as the father of all atheists and ‘one substance’ materialists who rejected the suspiciously spiritualist dualism of mind and body.”

13. “Their Noonday Demons, and Ours”

“These days, when we try to get a fix on our wasted time, we use labels that run from the psychological (distraction, ‘mind-wandering’ or ‘top-down processing deficit’) to the medical (A.D.H.D., hypoglycemia) to the ethical (laziness, poor work habits). But perhaps ‘acedia’ is the label we need. After all, it afflicted those whose pursuits prefigured the routines of many workers in the postindustrial economy. Acedia’s sufferers were engaged in solitary, sedentary, cerebral effort toward a clear final goal – but a goal that could be reached only by crossing an open, empty field with few signposts. The empty field is the monk’s day of spiritual contemplation in a cell besieged by the demon acedia – or your afternoon in a coffee shop with tiptop Wi-Fi.”

14. “Nate Dogg, b. 1969″

“These days, singers drizzling R & B syrup over incongruous lyrics are a familiar, even hackneyed comedic premise. But Nate Dogg never seemed to be joking.”

(Via Awesome People Reading.)

“The concept has been around for years, sometimes called the Internet of Things or the Industrial Internet. Yet it takes time for the economics and engineering to catch up with the predictions. And that moment is upon us.”

2. “As Wars End, Young Veterans Return to Scant Jobs”

“In Afghanistan, Cpl. Clayton Rhoden earned about $2,500 a month jumping into helicopters to chase down improvised explosive devices or check out suspected bomb factories. Now he lives with his parents, sells his blood plasma for $80 a week.”

3. “Rules to Stop Pupil and Teacher From Getting Too Social Online”

“Some teachers have set poor examples by posting lurid comments or photographs involving sex or alcohol on social media sites. Some have had inappropriate contact with students that blur the teacher-student boundary. In extreme cases, teachers and coaches have been jailed on sexual abuse and assault charges after having relationships with students that, law enforcement officials say, began with electronic communication.”

4. “Reframing the Debate Over Using Phones Behind the Wheel”

“Distracted driving is like smoking.”

5. “The Price to Play Its Way”

“The United States churns out roughly 45,000 lawyers a year, but survey after survey finds enormous unmet need for legal services, particularly in low- and middle-income communities.”

6. “Making Science Leap From the Page”

“The pages have some pizazz: they are replete with punchy, interactive electronic features — from dynamic illustrations to short quizzes meant to involve students rather than letting them plod, glassy-eyed, from one section to the next. Audio and video clips are woven into the text.”

7. “Are We Not Man Enough?”

“Do we really want to feed a business culture that increasingly elevates cocksure confidence and pushiness above all else, especially if it filters into everyday life?”

8. “The Dismal Education”

“Learning about the shortcomings as well as the successes of free markets is at the heart of any good economics education, and students — especially those who are not destined to major in the field — deserve to hear both sides of the story.”

9. “Once a Star, Always a Star”

“The crucial but impossible-to-quantify factor of stardust was not included in the equation.”

10. “Friending the New York Scene”

“He favors Tom Ford suits and Dior jeans, though he lamented to this reporter that the pair he was wearing was too snug. And in 2005, Mr. Parker said he was booked in North Carolina on suspicion of cocaine possession when he was president of Facebook (no cocaine was found on him and he was never charged). But Mr. Parker is also a self-educated polymath who decided as a teenager to liberate himself from what he called ‘the shackles of conventionality’ and found himself at the forefront of two of technology’s most important trends: the digital distribution of entertainment, and social media.”

11. “Remember Me From Yesterday?”

“Social networking has robbed us of our nostalgia.”

12. “Old-Fashioned Glories in a Netflix Age”

“It is also an argument for cinema, for cinema as a constituent part of modern life, which means it’s also a way of telling the truth.”

13. “Riding Off Into Civilization’s Sunset”

“This eschatological mood seems the natural outgrowth of the ‘we’re all connected’ school of movies like Crash and Babel several years ago that anticipated the hyperconnectivity of the new social media. But it is one short step from ‘we’re all connected’ to Tom Lehrer’s grimly jolly fantasy of nuclear annihilation.”

14. “Peace While Traveling? Not Impossible.”

1. Accept the reality that most of what causes stress in travel is out of your control. In fact, you have much less control of things in general than you might like to believe.
2. Feeling rushed is one of the leading causes of stress. Go to airports and bus and train stations extra early. While others may be rushing frantically, you can be strolling leisurely.
3. Check in with yourself. Notice what you are feeling in a particular moment. If it’s annoyance, frustration or fatigue, don’t get all caught up in it. Don’t cling to the sensations.
4. Travel lightly. When I arrive at my destination for the holidays I announce to everyone, ‘I hope you like this sweater I’m wearing because you’re going to see it a lot.’ And mail rather than carry gifts. Even one shopping bag is a nuisance.
5. Those around you are doing their best. Offer a smile that says, ‘Yes, I know it’s difficult, but we’ll all get there.’ Perhaps a little later than scheduled, but you’ll get there. Let someone go ahead of you; it’s part of the holiday spirit.

15. “Hedy Lamarr’s World War II Adventure”

“The uniqueness of this story lie deeper themes that Rhodes touches upon: the gender biases against beautiful and intelligent women, the delicate interpersonal politics of scientific collaboration and, perhaps most important of all, the never-ending, implacable conflict between art and Mammon in American culture.”

16. From “The One-Page Magazine”

“Researchers at Harvard and Duke have found that creative thinkers are more likely to take unethical shortcuts for gain, possibly because their talents make them better at rationalizing bad behavior.”

17. “Michael Stipe Is Not Grumpy”

“I still get death threats about it from Beatles fans.”

18. “Four Minutes With The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”

“‘The human brain wants to put things together; it wants to create a narrative.’ Their job is to facilitate that desire.”

19. “Grocery Shopping on Speed”

“What if, he wondered, one chair was placed on top of another? What if a basket was placed on top of each seat? What if it had wheels? The modern shopping cart was born.”

—Paul Graham

Bernard-Henri Lévy: Number one, I don’t know. Number two, I don’t care. And number three, the pack always loses against a writer or an artist.

—Chuck Klosterman, “Fail”

Q: How on earth were you able to gain the incredible amount of authorial control that you have over Louie? Have you had to battle with FX over any particular jokes/concepts/creative choices?

A: I got it by demanding it and refusing to do the show any other way at all and by having the leverage that I was completely willing to walk away without doing the show and by agreeing to an extremely low budget so that they could offset the risk of giving me this freedom because they are risking less money.

Elsewhere Louis talks about how he edits his TV show by himself on his MacBook.

The whole thing reminded me of Bill Cunningham’s sage advice, “If you don’t take the money, they can’t tell you what to do.”

Related viewing: Mike Monteiro’s “Fuck You, Pay Me” talk.

1. “An Earth Where the Droids Feel at Home”

“My first intention wasn’t to produce a series on Star Wars, but to photograph locations that are the makeup of our modernity: parking lots, peripheral zones, wastelands, forgotten places, of both beauty and ugliness, common and mad.”

2. “Two Romneys: Wealthy Man, Thrifty Habits”

“He is as cheap as it comes. And I think that carries over into everything he does.”

3. “Put It on My Marquee: I Just Watched Creepshow 2”

“In 1987, the Washington City Paper, a weekly newspaper, published the video rental records of Judge Robert H. Bork, who at the time was a nominee to the Supreme Court. One of the paper’s reporters had obtained the records from Potomac Video, a local rental store. Judge Bork’s choice of movies — he rented a number of classic feature films starring Cary Grant — may have seemed innocuous. But the disclosure of Judge Bork’s cultural consumption so alarmed Congress that it quickly passed a law giving individuals the power to consent to have their records shared.”

4. “Consultant Nation”

“Consulting, with its rapid succession of different assignments, is the prototypical industry for a job market in which instability and change appear to be the norm.”

5. “A Message on Every Arm”

“Seemingly democratic and certainly affordable (if not free), the tote might be the ideal carryall for these post-luxury recessionary times. The tote’s status is stealth. It telegraphs not money but access, ethics, culture.”

6. “For Anchorwomen, Family Is Part of the Job”

“A Fox news journalist promoting federal social programs?”

7. “Obsession, Reignited”

“When people come to me and say, ‘Why can’t you compromise?’ I’m like: ‘What are you talking about? The fact that we’re having this conversation means that we’ve compromised.’”

8. “The 10 Best Books of 2011″

“We overestimate the importance of whatever it is we’re thinking about. We misremember the past and misjudge what will make us happy.”

9. “The African-American Experience”

“The story is just so endlessly rich, and powerful, and poignant, and inspiring.”

10. “William F. Buckley Jr.: Right Man, Right Time”

“Not only was he the high priest of the modern American conservative movement and the founding editor in chief of its leading intellectual publication, National Review; he was also a gifted polemicist, best-selling novelist, sesquipedalian speaker, television star, political candidate, yachtsman, harpsichordist, wit and bon vivant.”

11. “Anarchist Anthropology”

“Graeber argues that once-prevalent relationships based on an incalculable sense of duty deteriorated as buying and selling became the basis of society and as money, previously a marker of favors owed, became valuable in its own right.”

12. “Everyone Speaks Text Message”

“For the vast majority of the world, the cellphone, not the Internet, is the coolest available technology. And they are using those phones to text rather than to talk. Though most of the world’s languages have no written form, people are beginning to transliterate their mother tongues into the alphabet of a national language. Now they can text in the language they grew up speaking.”

13. “Riffs: The Year in Movies”

“Drive is the year’s best Batman adaptation.”

“Telecommunications, which in theory should bind us together, has often divided us in practice.”

2. “Selling Books by Their Gilded Covers”

“If e-books are about ease and expedience, the publishers reason, then print books need to be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning, not just reading.”

3. “Know What You’re Protesting”

“Ironically, the topic of the lecture that the protesters chose to boycott was economic inequality.”

4. “Software That Listens for Lies”

“A small band of linguists, engineers and computer scientists, among others, are busy training computers to recognize hallmarks of what they call emotional speech — talk that reflects deception, anger, friendliness and even flirtation.”

5. “Don’t Just Sit There, Work Out at Your Desk”

“Every little bit helps.”

6. “Talking Face to Face Is So … Yesterday”

“Face time — or what used to be known as spending time with friends and family — is exhausting. Maybe that’s why we’re all so quick to abandon it. From grandfathers to tweenies, we’re all taking advantage of the ways in which we can avoid actually talking, much less seeing, one another — but still stay connected.”

7. “Riot Gear’s Evolution”

“Following the ‘Battle in Seattle’ protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999, a more restrictive, preemptive and aggressive form of protest policing emerged at the 2003 protests in Miami over the Free Trade Area of the Americas.”

8. “The Junking of the Postal Service”

“Do Americans need Saturday mail delivery … or daily mail delivery … or a state-run postal service at all? Should mail be a guaranteed government service — like primary education — because it is essential to our well-being? Or has this once hallowed institution, like pay phones, outlived its utility?”

9. “Getting Far, Far Away From It All”

“The idea of going for more than an hour or two without checking some sort of device for a text or e-mail, never mind face-to-face interaction, is unfathomable to many people in the professional world Mr. Trippetti inhabits. But there are overworked, overcommitted professionals in big cities like New York who periodically do just that.”

10. “One More Thing Goes to the Web: Subway Ogling”

“To unsuspecting subjects, an admiring photographer is as likely to be checking e-mail as snapping a shutter.”

11. “The Cardboard Beginnings of the Credit Card”

“At first, the very notion spooked people.”

12. “The Foul Reign of Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’”

“Oh, the deception! The rank insincerity! It’s just like the Devil in Mutton Chops to promise an orgiastic communion fit for the gods, only to deliver a gospel of ‘self-conceit so intensely intellectual,’ as Melville complained, ‘that at first one hesitates to call it by its right name.’”

13. “Me and My Man Shed”

“There is a model clipper ship made entirely out of Budweiser cans — Palace’s favorite brew. There are black-and-white photographs of Muhammad Ali, John Wayne, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Ernest Hemingway and a yellowing newspaper cutout of Joe Namath throwing a touchdown pass.”

14. “Viggo Talks and Talks”

“He never had Champagne dreams and caviar wishes, and much of what passes for ‘a celebrity lifestyle’ is, he thinks, rather banal and grim. ‘I don’t have lots of friends in the business, and the ones I do have are probably more like me, in that they’re not the kind of people to go places just so they can be seen. I see people doing that stuff and to me, it seems pathetic and ridiculous and kind of . . . well, humiliating. Life’s too short.’”

Waiting for the cable guy, books you’ve lent out and want back, books you want to read, pick up some marmalade at the store, get gas.  Stars – they’re just like us!

(Via Michael Leddy.)

“It used to be that if you worked hard, you were guaranteed a certain kind of life. There are reasons success is no longer a straight shot.”

2. “Out of Work, and Trying to Stay Positive”

“Every morning, Ms. Henry checks her e-mail alerts from the Web site CareerBuilder.com. Then it is on to Monster.com and Indeed.com. Since being laid off in June 2009, Ms. Henry said, she has sent out an average of 50 to 100 résumés a month – more than 2,000 in all. Last year, she had two interviews.”

3. “The Agony of Gift-Giving in a City That Has Seen It All”

“It is not merely that so many New Yorkers have a lot, but rather that so many have heard about way too much. Really, they have heard about everything, it seems, so that presenting the novel, the outré, the unforeseen, quickly becomes a challenge that feels insurmountable.”

4. “Naked Truth: New Sitcoms Are Reruns”

“It’s definitely the End of Comedy. As with Francis Fukuyama’s much-discussed essay ‘The End of History,’ that doesn’t mean there will be no more small-screen humor. It means that television comedy has ceased evolving.”

5. “Famous Minds, Keeping Secrets”

“J. Edgar and A Dangerous Method are movies about secrecy, about the psychological mechanism of repression, about the gap between the face that is presented to the world and the morass of desires, fears and contradictions that lurk behind that face. Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Cronenberg, in different ways, try to probe the obscure zones of their characters’ inner selves, to indicate truths about those people that cannot quite be seen or expressed in words.”

6. “Let’s See What’s Inside That Pretty Head”

“With the exception of Woody Allen movies and, God help us, The Prince of Tides, the psychological aberrations of men rarely attract the attention of serious filmmakers.”

7. “The Unbelievers”

“88 percent of African-Americans believe in God with absolute certainty.”

8. “Willpower: It’s in Your Head”

“When people believe that willpower is fixed and limited, their willpower is easily depleted. But when people believe that willpower is self-renewing – that when you work hard, you’re energized to work more; that when you’ve resisted one temptation, you can better resist the next one – then people successfully exert more willpower.”

9. “How It Went”

“A lot of critics think I’m stupid because my sentences are so simple and my method is so direct: they think these are defects. No. The point is to write as much as you know as quickly as possible.”

10. “The Mind’s Ear”

“At the very moment the poor old book-object dissolves before our eyes, pecked to pieces by the angry birds of Kindle, iPad and the rest, we are renewing our primary contract with the author by offering him our ears.”

11. “Enthusiasms”

“The man writes a lot.”

12. “Two Brains Running”

“It is an astonishingly rich book: lucid, profound, full of intellectual surprises and self-help value. It is consistently entertaining and frequently touching.”

13. “A Good Run”

“Just why, beginning around 1500, did a few small polities on the western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the rest of the world?”

14. “So Much Depends”

“To many, including me, he was the greatest poet of the 20th century. Unlike Eliot and Pound, two of his rivals in importance, he refused to be an expatriate. When Pound wrote him from overseas, urging Williams to leave America, Williams incorporated the advice into a brutally terse and powerful poem in praise of staying home. He spent virtually all his life in Rutherford, N.J., close to the American voices that enthralled him.”

15. “The Not-So-Invisible Empire”

“In the early 1920s, the K.K.K. became a national phenomenon, more popular north of the Mason-Dixon line than south of it. At its peak in 1924 there were probably 35,000 Klansmen in Detroit, about 55,000 in Chicago, 200,000 in Ohio, 240,000 in Indiana and 260,000 in Pennsylvania: a veritable army of proud Anglo-Saxons kluxing in their local klaverns. Ten bucks a head for membership, another six and a half for those fine flowing robes.”

16. “What Muncie Read”

“Women read romances, kids read pulp and white-collar workers read mass-market titles.”

17. “The Evolution of Fleece, From Scratchy to Snuggie”

“It completely changed the way the world dresses for cold weather.”

18. “Can the Bulldog Be Saved?”

“Most can’t have sex without help – they’re too short and stocky. Most can’t give birth on their own – their heads are too big. A breed that has trouble doing those two things is, by definition, in trouble.”

19. “Should We All Go Gluten-Free?”

“Even a healthy intestine does not completely break gluten down. For those with celiac disease, the undigested gluten essentially causes the body’s immune system to lash out at itself, leading to malabsorption, bloating and diarrhea – the classic gastrointestinal symptoms – but also, at times, joint pain, skin rashes and other problems.”

In Part 1 of Woody Allen: A Documentary, which aired last night on PBS (Part 2 airs tonight), documentary maker Robert Weide tells Allen that Sleeper was the first time he ever heard the term “cloning.” Allen nods and says that’s why he felt the need to include a scene explaining it; no one at the time knew what cloning was. Now, of course, Allen jokes, everybody clones.

This exchange reminded me of Harlan Ellison’s argument that Woody Allen is partly, maybe even primarily, a science fiction filmmaker:

Can I be the only reader of fantastic literature to perceive that Woody Allen has been, and continues to be, one of our best filmic interpreters of the je ne sais quoi we call “the sense of wonder”? Surely not. Surely some other observer of the flickering screen image has stumbled on this obvious truth! But I search in vain through all the treatises on Woody, and I find no support for my theory. Nowhere outside the specialist semiotics of cinema lucubration (do I speak their language or don’t I!?) analyzing The Terminator till one could retch; nowhere in the totality of non-fantasy incunabula. They talk of his ambivalence between roots as a Brooklyn Jew and foliage as an adult who wants to make it with the goyishe cheerleaders. They prate of his influences; from Wittgenstein to Ingmar Bergman. They totemize him as the germinal influence in raising the nerd to hunk status. But nowhere does anyone simply say, “This guy has a for-real science-fictional-fantasy outlook.”

Ellison calls Sleeper and Zelig and The Purple Rose of Cairo “pure SF,” and contends that many of Allen’s other films have science fiction and/or fantasy elements: the sperm segment of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, the aliens at the end of Stardust Memories, the subtext of a Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. Even the sense of wonder that pervades Radio Days is, to Ellison, indicative of a science fiction sensibility.

Ellison famously hates the term “science fiction,” preferring instead the more highfalutin term “speculative fiction,” but his basic point remains.

Though it’s not an interpretation advanced by Weide’s documentary, and it remains an unsung view, I’m sympathetic to Ellison’s argument. Indeed, since Ellison wrote the above words in 1987, Allen has made Deconstructing Harry, Melinda and Melinda, and Midnight in Paris – all movies that, when you think about it, are essentially science fiction films. Hell, one might even argue that Woody Allen is one of the premier science fiction filmmakers of the last fifty years.

“For people of a certain technological proclivity, this has become the new multitasking: to live simultaneously in the physical world and in their smartphones, without missing out on either.”

2. “What They Don’t Teach Law Students: Lawyering”

“Law schools have long emphasized the theoretical over the useful, with classes that are often overstuffed with antiquated distinctions, like the variety of property law in post-feudal England. Professors are rewarded for chin-stroking scholarship, like law review articles with titles like ‘A Future Foretold: Neo-Aristotelian Praise of Postmodern Legal Theory.’ So, for decades, clients have essentially underwritten the training of new lawyers, paying as much as $300 an hour for the time of associates learning on the job.”

3. “Kris Jenkins’s View of Life in the N.F.L. Trenches”

“NFL fans, people outside, they have no clue what goes on.”

4. “Drake Pushes Rap Toward the Gothic”

“No rapper has been as woman focused as Drake since LL Cool J, but seduction is barely a motif for him. He’s past that, on to disloyalty, miscommunication, manipulation. He lives in a world where complete trust isn’t possible and believes the only woman right for him is a scarred one.”

5. “Film Is Dead? What Else Is New?”

“Why aren’t there any good movies anymore?”

6. “Going Abroad, Staying Authentic” + “Answers to ‘Where on Earth to Eat?’”

“Anyone who doesn’t have a great time in San Francisco is pretty much dead to me.”

7. “Headphones With Swagger (and Lots of Bass)”

“In terms of sound performance, they are among the worst you can buy.”

8. “For Job Hunters, Digital Merit Badges”

“The badges will not replace résumés or transcripts, but they may be a convenient supplement, putting the spotlight on skills that do not necessarily show up in traditional documents — highly specialized computer knowledge, say, or skills learned in the military, in online courses or in after-school programs at museums or libraries.”

9. “Distracted? It’s Time to Hit the Reset Button”

“He suggests visualizing a reset device in your brain and saying: ‘I need to press the reset button and get back on track.’ This takes the spotlight off the distraction and puts it on the redirection. ‘You are rewiring your brain,’ he says.”

10. “Are You a V.I.P.? Check Your Klout Score”

“In September, during a Fashion’s Night Out event in the upscale Miami neighborhood of Bal Harbour, guests decked out in Marc Jacobs and Herve Leger could not help but notice a separate velvet-roped V.I.P. area. There, a privileged few shared one denominator: each guest had accumulated a Klout score above 40.”

11. “Goodbye, Golden Years”

“Retirement seems out of the question for increasing numbers of Americans who are saddled with debt and whose savings evaporated during the recent bust. Today’s workers should expect to labor longer, and companies should expect to employ more older workers.”

12. “Download: Christo”

“Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Web sites — those words are not in my vocabulary. I never learned to drive. I do not know how to use a computer. I do not even like to talk on the telephone.”

13. “Secret Dread at Penn State”

“True masculinity, like true sportsmanship, contains other virtues, too: forthrightness, honesty, fair play, courage in difficult situations, readiness to acknowledge error, concern for the weak as well as admiration for the strong. In their handling of Mr. Sandusky, the leaders of Penn State’s legendary football program failed to display a single one of these qualities.”

14. “Poet-Bashing Police”

“I wanted to see what was going to happen and how the police behaved, and how the students behaved.”

15. “Sorry, Strivers: Talent Matters”

“Sometimes the story that science tells us isn’t the story we want to hear.”

16. “So You Think You Can Be a Morning Person?”

“For those who fantasize about greeting the dawn, there is hope. Sleep experts say that with a little discipline (well, actually, a lot of discipline), most people can reset their circadian clocks.”

17. “Teaching Good Sex”

“If kids are starting to use their bodies sexually, they should know about their potentialities.”

Woody Allen: A Documentary premieres nationally Sunday, November 20 from 9-11 p.m. (ET/PT) and Monday, November 21 from 9-10:30 p.m. (ET/PT) on PBS (check local listings) as part of the 25th anniversary season of American Masters.

“Do you have any books the faculty doesn’t particularly recommend?”

(Via Wesley Hill.)