December 2009
63 posts
Reading vacation →
The School of Life draws upon Greek philosophy to give 10 ways to live better in 2010:
1. Diet, but not to lose weight.
2. Work to live, don’t live to work.
3. Meet a friend face to face, when you might have chatted online.
4. Start each day by contemplating the worst that can happen.
5. Take a technology Sabbath.
6. Talk to a stranger.
7. Go on retreat.
8. Write a blog for one week. ...
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The art of editing
In a workshop led by Ira Glass, host of public radio’s “This American Life,” I heard him admit, “We edit out people’s breaths and pauses in the interviews before they go on air.” Referring to those ums and stammers, this well-known personality admitted to a group of aspiring storytellers that his renowned radio show might not be as unvarnished as it had once seemed. Editing out pauses makes the...
Interestingness over happiness →
Tyler Cowen on Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project:
People should strive to be more interesting and more responsible. Happiness may result as a byproduct, but those are more important values. I would like to read a book called The Interesting Project.
Cowen also believes in the “set point” theory of happiness, which I first remember being taken by in The Paradox of Choice...
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Secret →
Scott Berkun on the word “secret”:
The word secret makes the boring sound fun. Doing laundry is pretty boring, but secret laundry almost sounds interesting. The word secret promises short-cuts, tricks, or things people don’t want us to know, which all connote ways to get one up on others. This little semantic trick works well on newbies, since they know so little, anything can seem...
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Marking time
We mark time in different ways. From candles to elephants, our history with tracking time is as varied as it is long. School terms were once such device, and for those teaching or studying again, it becomes a comfortable marker, a return to familiar marking of time.
Today, dozens of projects, 28 guest lecturers, 23 faculty, 18 students, seven courses, three staff, and one studio later,...
Alone in public →
On places where one can be alone in public in New York City:
What’s constant is that churches remain a special category of real estate, set-aside zones dedicated to the proposition that all of us, praying types or not, need quiet places to be alone in public, places to think, feel and see things we may not think, feel and see elsewhere.
Everyone has “a place.” At least one place they...
The willpower muscle →
Jonah Lehrer explores willpower as a muscle:
Willpower, like a bicep, can only exert itself so long before it gives out; it’s an extremely limited mental resource.
Resolutions, therefore, such as New Year’s resolutions are “exactly the wrong way to change our behavior.” So what now?
While this willpower research can get dispiriting — the mind is a bounded machine, defined...
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“You have to fiddle on the corner where the quarters are.”
– Robert Altman [via]
The IDEA box →
On getting things done:
When producing a movie, everything stems back to this box: IDEA. In the 1940s, these were the sources of ideas: “Play,” “Short Story or Novel,” “Newspaper Story or Current Event,” “Original Story,” “Magazine Article,” or “Historical Incident.” Way off on the left, however, there’s one additional...
GPAADAK, or a ban on applause →
Jet Dee, a musician deeply influenced by the ideas of Glenn Gould, believes that the presence of audiences ruins classical musical performances:
Live musical performances, especially classical and art music concerts, are often delayed, marred, ruined, and spoiled by audience members who cough, hiss, wheeze, and even yell during events.
Gould seemed to have concurred in a 1962 article in Musical...
Nongifts →
Margaret Visser on the behavior that is gift-giving:
In many cultures, obligatory giving is perfectly normal. People know exactly what to give on what occasion, and how much the gift should cost. Leaving the price on a present is therefore quite acceptable, and so is handing on a conventional present to someone else. There is no relegation of personal gifts to the private sphere, no categorization...
A thing that happens to you →
To a rabbit on Christmas morning:
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.” “Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.”Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful....
Conversation over questions →
Vice talks with David Simon, responsible for the feat that is The Wire. On the show’s writers coming from non-TV-writing backgrounds:
If there’s anything that distinguishes The Wire from a lot of the serialized drama you see, it was that the writers were not from television. None of us grew up thinking we wanted to get to Hollywood and write a TV show or a movie. Ed [Burns] was a cop, and...
The Main streets →
Did you ever notice there are quite a few streets named “Main?”
Once you start looking, you’ll notice Main Streets are everywhere and tell all kinds of stories. There’s a Main Street in San Luis, Arizona that dead-ends right into the Mexican border. The Main Street in Melvindale, Michigan runs through a trailer park in the shadows of Ford’s River Rouge plant, once the...
The B-list of Room A →
Room A at the National Gallery in London is open obscure hours:
The reason for this obscurity lies in the opening times. You can only gain access for 3.5 hours a week, on a Wednesday afternoon. … While much of the hangings are certainly B-list (how many adoring magi or storm-tossed Dutch vessels do we need?), it’s worth remembering that this is the National Gallery’s B-list....
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Analemma →
On the solar eclipse analemma:
If you went outside at exactly the same time every day and took a picture that included the Sun, how would the Sun appear to move? With great planning and effort, such a series of images can be taken. The figure-8 path the Sun follows over the course of a year is called an analemma. This coming Tuesday, the Winter Solstice day in Earth’s northern hemisphere,...
Illogical resolutions →
A non-reader pursues eighty-one books, the recommendations of Donald Barthelme to his students:
Barthelme’s only guidance, passed on by Padgett Powell, one of Barthelme’s former students at the University of Houston and my teacher at the time, was to attack the books “in no particular order, just read them,” which is exactly what I, in my confident illiteracy, resolved to do.
But first he had to...
The inspired 3% →
Forced Entertainment’s Tim Etchells on rehearsals:
When it comes to improvising, a good half of what we do is useless — misplaced people, silly costumes, tangled-up texts, ideas that don’t come to anything. It’s a matter of “eliminating things from our inquiries”. We’re knocking on doors, a lot of them, and asking stupid questions. The rest of our work is...
Rescheduler detection
Rumor had it, when applying to schools, the feedback loop was simple. And weighty. Receive a skinny envelope in the mail: you were rejected. Receive a thick envelope: you were accepted. We found later, nothing was this simple. We learned of gray areas, of dilemmas. And decisions only got more tangle-y. But there was something categorically comforting about the...
Dessert taxonomy →
First, Serious Eats’ cookie swap:
Pretty much just what it sounds like: a gathering where cookie swappage takes place. It’s kind of like a potluck but multiplied by cookies and since they are especially all the rage during Christmastime (not that cookies are ever not raging) the swaps usually happen during December.
What I liked about this post wasn’t just its etiquette or...
Red, wine, and blue →
German researchers have found that ambient light modifies the subjective value of wine:
Drinkers’ brains are tricked into thinking a glass of white wine is better and more expensive tasting when exposed to the red or blue background lighting than those in rooms with green or white background lighting. … They found the same wine was perceived as being nearly one-and-a-half times sweeter...
Some structural problems with collecting →
Charles Holland on collecting:
In his essay Unpacking My Library, Walter Benjamin described the act of collecting as one that gives life to objects, creating a frame for them to exist. “The acquisition of an old book”, he wrote, “is its rebirth”. Outside the collection objects have no meaning or, perhaps, only their everyday, quotidian meaning. We need the collection,...
A good landmark always stands out →
Google launches Google Maps India, and now gives directions like a local:
We knew from previous studies in several countries that most people rely on landmarks — visual cues along the way — for successful navigation. But we needed to understand how people use those visual cues, and what makes a good landmark, in order to make our instructions more human and improve route descriptions. To get...
Closer still →
Ben Hammersley on Mag+:
[W]hile BERG’s work, and other pieces like it, are beautiful to see, they leave me very frustrated. The client-side development is very exciting to do — especially the systems-thinking that you need to do to take the entire customer journey from browsing to buying to backing-up — but the harder work, the more fundamental work, isn’t done. I’m talking about the editorial...
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“Whether we agree with the Greek poet that ‘Sometimes it is sweet to be mad,’ or...”
– Seneca (See also: Alain de Botton focusing on Seneca in the A Guide to Happiness series)
The user is the final link →
This, from an Eames video, feels more like something out of Dreyfuss’ Designing for People:
We have been looking at one invention which began pretty purely out of the conception of a need. The hope: to change the person who takes pictures from a harried offstage observer into someone who’s a natural part of the event. … In the end, it links the inventors, the engineers, the...
With saying →
Violet Gray, a character in the Peanuts comic strip, was a bit of a snob:
She often looks down on people who fail to meet her social standards, especially Charlie Brown, to whom she once stated flatly, “It simply goes without saying that you are an inferior human being.” His adroit reply to that was, “If it goes without saying, why did you have to say it?!”
It goes without...
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“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on...”
– Terry Pratchett
Life goes both ways →
Vancouver’s downtown changed its dreary Main Street back from a one-way to a two-way street. After the city spent millions of dollars to revitalize the city, people were surprised at the simple success of the double-yellow stripe:
The merchants on Main Street had high hopes for this change. But none of them were prepared for what actually happened … In the midst of a severe recession,...
The methods filter →
Frank Chimero (and hurry off right now for a while to enjoy reading some of his writing if you do not already) was interviewed on his design process for the making of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five poster.
What caught my eye was, when asked about his favorite part of the book, his attention went to process. That, and I felt as if I’d written this myself:
To be honest, I intensely love...
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The last goodbye
If holidays are a season of greetings, they’re just as equally a time for farewells. Whether holiday parties, year-end meetings, or phone calls, there are statistically more reasons to get together with people at the end of the year. This concentration, then, by default increases the number of “goodbyes” we must issue. And, I’ve noticed, it appears goodbye is harder than it...
The lyrical proverbs →
Kevin Kelly on Anne Herbert:
Anne Herbert was a gifted writer who edited CoEvolution Quarterly (the periodic magazine of the Whole Earth Catalog) before I did in the early 1980s. We never worked together, or were close friends, but I really dug her writing. It was telegraphic, lyrical, abbreviated, evocative, extremely personal and mystical. She wrote in short bursts. Like proverbs from a secret...
Panta Rhei, for light and living →
Yumi Kori, an architect-artist, uses qualities of light in her pieces to challenge conventional ideas of space. Panta Rhei, or “all things are in constant flux,” is one such piece:
For Kori, light and shadow imply the passage of time, induce human activities, and deconstruct and construct space, as demonstrated in her installation project …. The work was titled Panta rhei, or “all things are...
On the dignity of multiple →
Grant McCracken mourns the replacement of the word “several:”
“Somehow, while we were not really paying attention, “multiple” stole into our language and displaced “several” in a bloodless coup.”
And why? Dignity.
Police spokespeople like to dress their remarks in extra dignity and they do this by reaching for their “best” vocabulary. People become persons or...
The superlatives of the L.H.C. →
Kurt Andersen revels in an impressive set of extremes — the largest machine ever built and the coldest place in the universe, the Large Hadron Collider:
The L.H.C., which operates under the auspices of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, cern, is an almost unimaginably long-term project. It was conceived a quarter-century ago, was given the green light in...
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“At first, writing for The New Yorker was very scary to me. I couldn’t...”
– David Sedaris
Following →
Mouth-frothing for Malcolm Gladwell is at near-fever pitch this year. I’m not saying the guy doesn’t make an interesting argument for how success is nurtured (or can’t be nurtured … or whatever the theory of “Outliers” is), but can we get some love for author and McSweeney’s publisher Dave Eggers? Firstly, the guy is seriously committed to educational...
Gladwellian rule for public speaking →
I’m linking to this interview again because I’m certain you didn’t get through the whole 60 minutes of it the first time. So just this:
I don’t get nervous before public speaking. I am kind of a nervous person but years ago I used to be a competitive runner, and I would get insanely nervous before big races so much so that I wouldn’t be able to sleep for weeks...
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“A lot of people have this strategy where if they have a hard question they wait...”
– Chuck Klosterman
A city organized in black and white →
At one point, the city of New York took a 35-mm black-and-white picture of every single building in the five boroughs:
The city’s physical evolution is vividly illustrated in photographs, and a rich trove of them has been made available to the public. Between 1938 and 1943, about 700,000 stark, unsentimental black-and-white pictures of properties in every borough — known as tax photographs — were...
Rise and fall of the boombox →
Lyle Owerko, a New York-based photographer, is a historian. A boombox historian:
There’s a history with this, and boomboxes mean a lot more to culture and to people than just the object itself. And there isn’t one box that means any more than one another. It’s really what you’re playing through it, it’s what the image of it conveys.
NPR, in a recent eulogy for the...
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“To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as...”
– Joan Didion
Expressing wild ideas →
Maps can do more than express flat or neatly measured ideas:
[M]apmakers don’t always value precision above all else. Indeed, historically, cartographers have introduced outrageous inaccuracies into their atlases. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. During the Age of Discovery, explorers plotted islands and continents where none existed. First, writers, and later, propagandists,...
Gladwellian rule of conduct →
Malcolm Gladwell discusses one of his “rules of conduct” for people:
[By default] I think everyone’s interesting. When people are talking about something they know well and do well, they’re almost always interesting. And if they’re not, it’s generally your fault because you’re not asking the right questions and you haven’t made them comfortable. And...
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A contract of constraints
I began piano lessons at age five. Classical only. Scales. Practicing every evening before dinner was a requirement. In the early ’80s, weakened by requests, my parents purchased a synthesizer for me. It was an imperative purchase, I felt at the time, for me to continue my creative pursuits as a young musician.
See also: The New England Synthesizer Museum
Yet with four more...
Human-centered prepositions →
Buckminster Fuller on a more human-centered approach to using the prepositions “down” and “up”:
The words “down” and “up”, according to Fuller, are awkward in that they refer to a planar concept of direction inconsistent with human experience. The words “in” and “out” should be used instead, he argued, because they better...
Design through immersion →
Spend two weeks next summer studying visual communication with the best typographers in Italy:
Visit the Trajan Column, the Pantheon and the Arch of Titus. Examine inscriptions on Roman buildings and monuments that have long been a typographic ideal. Our workshop in design history, theory and practice is an intensive period of study that enables students to research and analyze the roots of...