- Smiley face business card party game
- Teller reveals his secrets [Smithsonian Magazine]
- Young women often trendsetters in vocal patterns [NYT]
- Why doctors die differently [WSJ]
- Who are you calling a mama's boy? [WSJ]
- Divorce is immature and selfish. Don't do it. [Penelope Trunk]
- How to break free from being stuck [James Altucher]
- Lytro camera review over [WSJ]
- The Writer's Job [blog post from New York Review of Books]
Creative writing schools are frequently blamed for a growing standardization and flattening in contemporary narrative. This is unfair. It is the anxiety of the writers about being excluded from their chosen career, together with a shared belief that we know what literature is and can learn how to produce it that encourages people to write similar books. Nobody is actually expecting anything very new. Just new versions of the old. Again and again when reading for review, or doing jury service perhaps for a prize, I come across carefully written novels that “do literature” as it is known. Literary fiction has become a genre like any other, with a certain trajectory, a predictable pay off, and a fairly limited and well-charted body of liberal Western wisdom to purvey. Much rarer is the sort of book (one thinks of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin, or Peter Stamm’s On a Day Like This, or going back a way, the maverick English writer Henry Green) where the writer appears, amazingly, to be working directly from experience and imagination, drawing on his knowledge of past literature only in so far as it offers tools for having life happen on the page.- Why there has never been a better time to be an investor [WSJ]
- Food etiquette rules that might surprise you [Yahoo]
- I was a warehouse wage slave [Mother Jones]
The culture is intense, an Amalgamated higher-up acknowledges at the beginning of our training. He's speaking to us from a video, one of several videos—about company policies, sexual harassment, etc.—that we watch while we try to keep our eyes open. We don't want to be so intense, the higher-up says. But our customers demand it. We are surrounded by signs that state our productivity goals. Other signs proclaim that a good customer experience, to which our goal-meeting is essential, is the key to growth, and growth is the key to lower prices, which leads to a better customer experience. There is no room for inefficiencies. The gal conducting our training reminds us again that we cannot miss any days our first week. There are NO exceptions to this policy. She says to take Brian, for example, who's here with us in training today. Brian already went through this training, but then during his first week his lady had a baby, so he missed a day and he had to be fired. Having to start the application process over could cost a brand-new dad like Brian a couple of weeks' worth of work and pay. Okay? Everybody turn around and look at Brian. Welcome back, Brian. Don't end up like Brian.- Obesity and Prejudice / I hate fat people [Men's Health]
- On TED Talks and the like: are we running out of things to say? [NYMag]
- Calling all lady traders [bclund]
- Taking the long view [The Economist, on Jeff Bezos]
- Why I am proudly, strongly, and happily in favor of adverbs [The Atlantic]
- How to be creative [Jonah Lehrer, on WSJ]
- Why interacting with a woman can leave men 'cognitively impaired' [Scientific American]
- Is Pinterest the next napster? [WSJ]
- How Kindle, Nook and iPad fuel sales of erotica for women [WSJ]
- I didn't tell Facebook I'm engaged, so why is it asking about my fiance? [The Atlantic] I think she's overreacting a bit, but I get why she feels that way because I feel the same way. Especially about this (though I have to point out that these are just personal preferences, and obviously not everyone -- in fact most everyone probably -- wouldn't feel the same way):
A year later, my reservations with making our relationship "Facebook official" persist. I keep going back to the way Jaron Lanier puts it in You Are Not a Gadget: "Life is turned into a database...based on [a] philosophical mistake, which is the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships. These are things computers cannot currently do." I hesitate to sum up such a deeply personal and important fact into a data point in a profile field. Zadie Smith was similarly inspired by Lanier's words, and described how personhood as represented online is somehow lacking: "When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it's a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears."- It's an annoying song (after all) [The Atlantic]
- The man who broke Atlantic City [The Atlantic]
- Why finish books? [NY Books]
Do we need to finish them? Is a good book by definition one that we did finish? Or are there occasions when we might choose to leave off a book before the end, or even only half way through, and nevertheless feel that it was good, even excellent, that we were glad we read what we read, but don’t feel the need to finish it? I ask the question because this is happening to me more and more often. Is it age, wisdom, senility? I start a book. I’m enjoying it thoroughly, and then the moment comes when I just know I’ve had enough. It’s not that I’ve stopped enjoying it. I’m not bored, I don’t even think it’s too long. I just have no desire to go on enjoying it. Can I say then that I’ve read it? Can I recommend it to others and speak of it as a fine book?
No comments:
Post a Comment