January 2011
20 posts
On why, or the magic of coffee
I would stand eyes level with the yellow formica counter, and watch her make magic. The steps were always the same. Although I could barely see over the counter, I could make out the ceramic mug. Guiding boiling water in motion, she’d bring the kettle to the cup. And I’d watch water — see-through clear — pour out from kettle to cup.
That’s when the magic happened.
Padding...
“A hotel room is the perfect place to write. You’re cut off from all the...”
– E.B. White cf. Victor Hugo would write naked and tell his valet to hide his clothes so that he’d be unable to go outside when he was supposed to be writing. cf. New York City snow days
How artists must dress →
Roger White celebrates a third printing of an etiquette book with some key pointers:
The relationship between an artist’s work and attire should not take the form of a direct visual analogy. A stripe painter may not wear stripes. …. The artist’s sartorial choices are subject to the same hermeneutic operations as are his work. When dressing, an artist should imagine a five-paragraph review...
Sentence appreciation →
The aim of the new How to Write a Sentence from Stanley Fish:[T]o offer a guide to sentence craft and appreciation that is both deeper and more democratic. What, at base, is a sentence? he asks, and then goes on to argue that the standard answer based in parts of speech and rules of grammar teaches students “nothing about how to write”. Instead, we should be examining the “logical relationships”...
Hacking time →
Matt Danzico has taken on a year-long project to explore how new experiences affect his perception of time with The Time Hack:
An experiment aimed at exploring whether our perception of time is influenced by our actions. [I]t aims to test whether time itself is flexible and whether our brains measure time differently than the clocks around us. …. Experts argue that when one engages in a new...
The benefits of the implied or →
Steve Davis on the messiness of “and”:
“Education is not a “this OR that” concept; rather it is a “this AND that” concept. “Or” is clean. “And” is messy. “Or” is obvious “And” is nuance. “Or” is destructive. “And” is human. Do you interact with your students the same way you tweet? Do you eat mashed potatoes AND gravy? Which word describes your pedagogy in the classroom and...
The three Is →
Charlie Rose asks Warren Buffet in a 2008 interview, “Should wise people have known better?” regarding what we can learn from the economic mess. Bill Taylor summarizes:
See also: All shareholder letters from Warren Buffet; Farnam Street recommends them over an MBA program
Of course they should have, Buffet replied, but there’s a “natural progression” to how...
An encyclopedia of superlatives →
New York Magazine on the little-knowable-ness of New York City:
Every time I visit, I go into a sort of spaced-out, semiconscious coma. From my God’s vantage point on the walkway that surrounds it, I feel like some all-seeing bodiless eye. I might think about where Walt Whitman stood when he wrote “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” look at where the Titanic might have docked had she made it. Often I’m...
2010 by the margins →
Sam Anderson talks out loud, month by month, about what he’s scribbled in the margins:
The writing I enjoy doing most, every year, is marginalia: spontaneous bursts of pure, private response to whatever book happens to be in front of me. It’s the most intimate, complete, and honest form of criticism possible — not the big wide-angle aerial shot you get from an official review essay, but a...
What we talk about when we talk about happiness
My lists are shrinking. Not my to-do lists, unfortunately. Rather, my lists of resolutions. I recently had the opportunity to collect all of my New Year’s resolution lists in one place and noticed a trend. Lists from a decade ago or more had upwards of three dozen items, many of which were objects — books, game consoles, music players. Recent lists, however, were only a few items long: Take more...
Sorry, no consuming →
The photography project, Sorry, We’re Closed, intends to teach people to look at familiar things in a different light:Say a fisherman gets dropped off at his fishing lake every day and fishes for his living. Imagine if his pole broke on the first cast of the day, and he was left to sit by the lake all day until his ride came back. He would probably start to see the beauty of the lake, it’s...
Uncomfortability
“Natural selection, also, leads to divergence of character; for more living beings can be supported on the same area the more they diverge in structure, habits, and constitution of which we see proof by looking at the inhabitants of any small spot or at naturlised productions.”
In these snowy times, I retreat inside with the great “Great Ideas” series, and this week with...
In hiding →
Oliver Sacks on having face blindness:I have had difficulty recognizing faces for as long as I can remember. My inability to recognize schoolmates would cause embarrassment and sometimes offense — it did not occur to them (or to me, for that matter) that I had a perceptual problem. …. I have what neurologists call prosopagnosia — an inability to recognize individual faces as most people can.
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1 tag
Innoventions →
David Rakoff takes on the Disney Innoventions Dream House:
[C]an we pause for a moment to talk about that term, Innovention? A neologism that, in an effort to turbo-charge meaning, takes two perfectly eloquent and unassailable words and by combining them renders both suspect. It is a word developed by a committee, one that can only be spoken unironically if one is being paid to do so, like menus...
Melody roads →
The speed limit now has a soundtrack:
If you’re driving faster than the speed limit, the app makes your music slow down. If when you’re exceeding the speed limit by more than 10 km per hour, the music stops completely.
Over in Japan’s Nagano Prefecture, they’ve take to the streets and placed a groove in the road, resulting in “Melody Road”:
Another...
A bee story →
Eight-year olds may be the youngest scientists ever to have their work published in a peer-reviewed journal:“We discovered that bumblebees can use a combination of colour and spatial relationships in deciding which colour of flower to forage from,” the students wrote in the paper’s abstract. “We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one...
Pronunciation patterns of place →
A professional linguist presents an addictive map of American English Dialects with over 600 sound-samples:
Some people collect stamps. Others collect coins. I collect dialects. …. For many of the cities or towns on this map, you can listen to an audio or video sample of speech of a native (more specifically, someone who was raised there, though not necessarily born there, and whose dialect...
“[A]bove all let there be pleasure. Let there be textural delight, let there be...”
– Stephen Fry on not minding your language. From the same essay: “In life you have to explain wine. You have to explain cheese. You have to explain love. You can’t, but you have to try, or if not try you have, surely, to be aware of the astonishing fact of them.”