Misphonia is a condition which causes the sufferer to feel rage and panic when they hear mouth sounds, like those caused by eating and drinking. It can be socially isolating, of course. From aNew York Times article about the affliction by Joyce Cohen:
“He believes the condition is hard-wired, like right- or left-handedness, and is probably not an auditory disorder but a ‘physiological abnormality’ that resides in brain structures activated by processed sound.
There is ‘no known effective treatment,’ Dr. Moller said. Patients often go from doctor to doctor, searching in vain for help.
Dr. Johnson agreed. ‘These people have been diagnosed with a lot of different things: phobic disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar, manic, anxiety disorders,’ she said.
Dr. Johnson’s interest was piqued when she saw her first case in 1997. ‘This is not voluntary,’ she said. ‘Usually they cry a lot because they’ve been told they can control this if they want to. This is not their fault. They didn’t ask for it and they didn’t make it up.’ And as adults, they ‘don’t outgrow it,’ she said. ‘They structure their lives around it.’
Taylor Benson, a 19-year-old sophomore at Creighton University in Omaha, says many mouth noises, along with sniffling and gum chewing, make her chest tighten and her heart pound. She finds herself clenching her fists and glaring at the person making the sound.
‘This condition has caused me to lose friends and has caused numerous fights,’ she said.” (Thanks Marginal Revolution.)
In Cabinet, Will Wiles recalls the work of John B. Calhoun, a scientist who used rodents to study the effects of overpopulation. Despite Malthusian hand-wringing, population density seems to be a good thing overall for humans. An excerpt:
“So what exactly happened in Universe 25? Past day 315, population growth slowed. More than six hundred mice now lived in Universe 25, constantly rubbing shoulders on their way up and down the stairwells to eat, drink, and sleep. Mice found themselves born into a world that was more crowded every day, and there were far more mice than meaningful social roles. With more and more peers to defend against, males found it difficult and stressful to defend their territory, so they abandoned the activity. Normal social discourse within the mouse community broke down, and with it the ability of mice to form social bonds. The failures and dropouts congregated in large groups in the middle of the enclosure, their listless withdrawal occasionally interrupted by spasms and waves of pointless violence. The victims of these random attacks became attackers. Left on their own in nests subject to invasion, nursing females attacked their own young. Procreation slumped, infant abandonment and mortality soared. Lone females retreated to isolated nesting boxes on penthouse levels. Other males, a group Calhoun termed ‘the beautiful ones,’ never sought sex and never fought—they just ate, slept, and groomed, wrapped in narcissistic introspection. Elsewhere, cannibalism, pansexualism, and violence became endemic. Mouse society had collapsed.” (Thanks Longreads.)
Jacqueline Mroz has an interesting article in the New York Times about a single sperm donor siring 150 children. Having so many kids from the same sperm donor living in close proximity to one another causes complications, as you might expect. An excerpt:
“As more women choose to have babies on their own, and the number of children born through artificial insemination increases, outsize groups of donor siblings are starting to appear. While Ms. Daily’s group is among the largest, many others comprising 50 or more half siblings are cropping up on Web sites and in chat groups, where sperm donors are tagged with unique identifying numbers.
Now, there is growing concern among parents, donors and medical experts about potential negative consequences of having so many children fathered by the same donors, including the possibility that genes for rare diseases could be spread more widely through the population. Some experts are even calling attention to the increased odds of accidental incest between half sisters and half brothers, who often live close to one another.
‘My daughter knows her donor’s number for this very reason,’ said the mother of a teenager conceived via sperm donation in California who asked that her name be withheld to protect her daughter’s privacy. ‘She’s been in school with numerous kids who were born through donors. She’s had crushes on boys who are donor children. It’s become part of sex education’ for her.”
Margaret Mead commenting on speeded-up America inLife in 1968, remarks that seem even more applicable in our time:
“There is tremendous confusion today about change. This isn’t surprising because people are living in a period of the fastest change the world has ever known. Young people have been confronted with the changes, but at the same time they have no sense of history and no one has been able to explain to them what has happened. We are always very poor at teaching the last 25 years of history. Adults have been shrieking about the fact that great newnesses are here but they are not talking about what the newnesses are.”
••••••••••
“Trance And Dance In Bali,” by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, 1939:
Alternet has an article by Tana Ganeva about creepy new uses for facial recognition technology. An excerpt:
“In the fall, police officers from 40 departments will hit the streets armed with the Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System (MORIS) device. The gadget, which attaches to an iPhone, can take an iris scan from 6 inches away, a measure of a person’s face from 5 feet away, or electronic fingerprints, according to Computer vision central. This biometric information can be matched to any database of pictures, including, potentially, one of the largest collections of tagged photos in existence: Facebook. The process is almost instant, so no time for a suspect to opt out of supplying law enforcement with a record of their biometric data.
Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told AlterNet that while it’s unclear how individual departments will use the technology, there are two obvious ways it tempts abuse. Since officers don’t have to haul in an unidentified suspect to get their fingerprints, they have more incentive to pull people over, increasing the likelihood of racial profiling. The second danger lurks in the creation and growth of personal information databases. Biometric information is basically worthless to law enforcement unless, for example, the pattern of someone’s iris can be run against a big database full of many people’s irises.”
After two decades of the GOP trying to destroy a couple of moderate Presidents whose main fault is that they belong to another party, we should drop the pretense that a Republican Party still exists. It’s fully and finally the Tea Party now. It’s a political group based on scorched-earth policies, bad science, tax cuts for the wealthy and adherence to an irrational and injurious ideology at all costs. It’s politics as hostage negotiations and nothing more.
Bill Clinton may have had moral failings that made him an easy target (though he wasn’t nearly as morally bankrupt as those who pursued him), but he was going to be targeted regardless. Obama, who has made it easy for them to rally their base by virtue of being black and intelligent, is a clear centrist who has been branded an extremist and undermined at every turn at the expense of the American people. The Tea Party will now run its Presidential election saying that the economy is struggling because of too many government restrictions (too little oversight caused the economic collapse) and high taxes on so-called “job creators” (taxes have been low on the wealthy for almost a decade and no jobs have been created because of it).
Mike Lofgren, a Republican operative for 30 years, recently stepped away from what he now sees as a fringe party. He’s written about the experience on truthout. An excerpt:
“To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.
It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.
The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel – how prudent is that? – in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.”
In 1985, Barbara Walters interviewed infamous society spouse Claus von Bülow, who married well though his wife did not. One odd thing: Walters was made up like Tammy Faye Bakker. Did female reporters on TV in the ’80s always wear such heavy make-up?
Shockingly, Vanity Fair squeezed in a story or two about the lurid case of heiress Sunny von Bülow. From Dominick Dunne’s 1985 article, “Fatal Charm: The Social Web of Claus von Bülow“:
From the beginning, the von Bülow proceedings, legal and otherwise, had had an air of unreality about them. His once beautiful wife was one of the country’s richest heiresses. His stepchildren were a prince and princess. His daughter was a disinherited teenager. His former mistress was a socialite actress. His current lady friend was a thrice-married Hungarian adventuress who was not the countess she was often described as being. The maid who testified against him had once worked for the Krupps. And lurking darkly in the background was a publicity-mad con man bent on destroying him.
The apartment of Sunny von Bülow, even by Fifth Avenue standards, is very grand. Located in one of the most exclusive buildings in New York, its current market value is estimated by one of the city’s top realtors at nearly $8 million. Although a sophisticated friend of von Bülow’s complained that the forty-foot drawing room has ‘far, far too many legs,’ it should be pointed out that the legs are by Chippendale and of museum quality, as is nearly every object in the fourteen-room apartment looking down on Central Park.
According to the terms of Sunny von Bülow’s will, the apartment will go to von Bülow when she dies. So will Clarendon Court, the fabulous mansion set on ten acres overlooking the sea in Newport, Rhode Island, where her two comas took place during successive Christmas holidays, in 1979 and 1980. So will $14 million of her $75 million fortune. In the meantime the maintenance on the apartment is paid for by Sunny’s estate, so in effect von Bülow and his self-proclaimed mistress, Andrea Reynolds, have been largely supported by his comatose wife since his conviction in 1982 for her attempted murder. That verdict was overturned on appeal because certain materials had been withheld from the defense and others had been improperly admitted as evidence.•
Steve Jobs waswary of technology in the classroomwhen he was asked about the topic in 1993, and now schools decked out with the latest tech teaching tools are so far seeing stagnant test scores. Are our measurements of educational growth lacking and passé or is the problem with our schools (and ourselves) something that can’t be remedied by bytes and bots? An excerpt from apiece on the topicby Matt Richtel in the New York Times:
“CHANDLER, Ariz. — Amy Furman, a seventh-grade English teacher here, roams among 31 students sitting at their desks or in clumps on the floor. They’re studying Shakespeare’s As You Like It — but not in any traditional way.
In this technology-centric classroom, students are bent over laptops, some blogging or building Facebook pages from the perspective of Shakespeare’s characters. One student compiles a song list from the Internet, picking a tune by the rapper Kanye West to express the emotions of Shakespeare’s lovelorn Silvius.
The class, and the Kyrene School District as a whole, offer what some see as a utopian vision of education’s future. Classrooms are decked out with laptops, big interactive screens and software that drills students on every basic subject. Under a ballot initiative approved in 2005, the district has invested roughly $33 million in such technologies.”
Good piece by Jonathan Newton in the Washington Post about the arm operation known as Tommy John Surgery. The procedure, created by Dr. Frank Jobe, was first performed in 1974 on the pitcher for whom it was named. The article gets to the heart of just how experimental the ligament-reconstruction procedure was when John went under the knife, and explains what changes to the operation have reduced risk. An excerpt:
“When Jobe operated, he sliced John’s elbow wide open and moved the ulnar nerve in order to reach the bone. He took a tendon from a cadaver’s leg and attached it with screws. Then he hoped John’s body would react favorably and the tendon would serve the same role as the ligament.
‘We didn’t really know whether we could do it or not,’ Jobe said. ‘We didn’t know whether we could heal it or not. We didn’t know whether a tendon would be accepted by the body and receive blood supply and become part of the body.’
Jobe and John waited. John did not throw a ball again for 16 weeks. Jobe decided he should not pitch in a major league game again until one year of rigorous rehab. Every step of the way, the recovery unfolded as Jobe hoped. John returned in 1974, and in seven of the next eight seasons he threw more than 200 innings.
‘I would never have thought it would happen,’ Jobe said. ‘I didn’t do it again for another two years. After another year or so, I had a couple successes. I thought, This may be something we ought to use a little more routinely.”
••••••••••
Elton John (no relation) performs at Dodger Stadium in 1975, the year Tommy John couldn’t pitch for L.A. as he recuperated from surgery:
From “Lost in the Supermarket,” David Mattin’s attempt to make sense of the recent London riots, published today at the Los Angeles Review of Books:
“Now, two weeks on, Britain is puzzling over what has happened. In the sound of the metropolitan British middle-class — the politicians, the columnists, the activists — trying to explain these riots to each other, there can be discerned a strange, schizophrenic mixture of anger and uncertainty, a frustrating inability to get much beyond first principles. What caused these riots? What do the people who participated in them want? What do they tell us about the country in which we live? What, in short, do the riots mean?
Across the last two weeks, these questions have been the subject of much talk; they can accommodate so much talk because their answers are so elusive. Even the left’s best attempt to imbue the riots with a meaning — the argument that contends that they were an expression of inchoate anger at the current austerity, and the mismanagement that brought us to it — is, on close examination, not satisfactory. And that is because there is a sense in which the English riots of 2011 mean nothing at all. Nothing, at least, to the people who participated in them. Which is what makes them so uniquely frightening, and problematic. “
In 1972, with the cover story “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back On Life,” the New York Times Magazine got into generation-defining business, with the aid of precocious writer Joyce Maynard, a representative of the first American generation to have been raised by that glowing picture tube in the living room and to have taken space-age technology for granted. For Maynard, the article spawned a book and a romantic relationship with the Garbo-ish author J.D. Salinger. She became something of a scorned figure in American Letters, perhaps seeming to have gotten too much too soon. The opening of her famous (and infamous) Times piece:
“Every generation thinks it’s special–my grandparents because they remember horses and buggies, my parents because of the Depression. The over-30’s are special because they knew the Red Scare of Korea, Chuck Berry and beatniks. My older sister is special because she belonged to the first generation of teen-agers (before that, people in their teens were adolescents), when being a teen-ager was still fun. And I–I am 18, caught in the middle. Mine is the generation of unfulfilled expectations. “When you’re older,” my mother promised, “you can wear lipstick.” But when the time came, of course, lipstick wasn’t being worn. “When we’re big, we’ll dance like that,” my friends and I whispered, watching Chubby Checker twist on “American Bandstand.” But we inherited no dance steps, ours was a limp, formless shrug to watered-down music that rarely made the feet tap. “Just wait till we can vote,” I said, bursting with 10-year-old fervor, ready to fast, freeze, march and die for peace and freedom as Joan Baez, barefoot, sang “We Shall Overcome.” Well, now we can vote, and we’re old enough to attend rallies and knock on doors and wave placards, and suddenly it doesn’t seem to matter any more.
My generation is special because of what we missed rather than what we got, because in a certain sense we are the first and the last. The first to take technology for granted. (What was a space shot to us, except an hour cut from Social Studies to gather before a TV in the gym as Cape Canaveral counted down?) The first to grow up with TV. My sister was 8 when we got our set, so to her it seemed magic and always somewhat foreign. She had known books already and would never really replace them. But for me, the TV set was, like the kitchen sink and the telephone, a fact of life.
We inherited a previous generation’s hand-me-downs and took in the seams, turned up the hems, to make our new fashions. We took drugs from the college kids and made them a high-school commonplace. We got the Beatles, but not those lovable look-alikes in matching suits with barber cuts and songs that made you want to cry. They came to us like a bad joke–aged, bearded, discordant. And we inherited the Vietnam war just after the crest of the wave–too late to burn draft cards and too early not to be drafted. The boys of 1953–my year–will be the last to go.
So where are we now? Generalizing is dangerous. Call us the apathetic generation and we will become that. Say times are changing, nobody cares about prom queens and getting into the college of his choice any more–say that (because it sounds good, it indicates a trend, gives a symmetry to history) and you make a movement and a unit out of a generation unified only in its common fragmentation. If there is a reason why we are where we are, it comes from where we have been.”
••••••••••
Maynard queried by that handsome, world-weary robot Charlie Rose, 1998:
Trailer for To Die For, the 1995 film adapted from a Maynard book:
The mass-market paperback has understandably passed into obsolescence, thanks to the inexpensive e-book. Mixed in with all the dross that was published were undervalued genre works that introduced a lot of young people to reading. An excerpt from a story about the dying dead-tree edition from Julie Bosman in theNew York Times:
“A comprehensive survey released last month by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group revealed that while the publishing industry had expanded over all, publishers’ mass-market paperback sales had fallen 14 percent since 2008.
‘Five years ago, it was a robust market,’ said David Gernert, a literary agent whose clients include John Grisham, a perennial best seller in mass market. ‘Now it’s on the wane, and e-books have bitten a big chunk out of it.’
Fading away is a format that was both inexpensive and widely accessible — thrillers and mysteries and romances by authors like James Patterson, Stephen King, Clive Cussler and Nora Roberts that were purchased not to be proudly displayed on a living room shelf (and never read), but to be addictively devoured by devoted readers.”
Rural areas of India lack electricty, so the typewriter remains a popular tool. From anarticle by Mark Magnier in the Los Angeles Times:
“It’s a stultifying afternoon outside the Delhi District Court as Arun Yadav slides a sheet of paper into his decades-old Remington and revs up his daily 30-word-a-minute tap dance.
Nearby, hundreds of other workers clatter away on manual typewriters amid a sea of broken chairs and wobbly tables as the occasional wildlife thumps on the leaky tin roof above.
‘Sometimes the monkeys steal the affidavits,’ Yadav said. ‘That can be a real nuisance.’
The factories that make the machines may be going silent, but India’s typewriter culture remains defiantly alive, fighting on bravely against that omnipresent upstart, the computer.”
Eye-scanning on a massive scale is currently being carried out in India, in efforts to have permanent records of poor people. From a report in the New York Times by:Lydia Polgreen:
“KALDARI, India — Ankaji Bhai Gangar, a 49-year-old subsistence farmer, stood in line in this remote village until, for the first time in his life, he squinted into the soft glow of a computer screen.
His name, year of birth and address were recorded. A worker guided Mr. Gangar’s rough fingers to the glowing green surface of a scanner to record his fingerprints. He peered into an iris scanner shaped like binoculars that captured the unique patterns of his eyes.
With that, Mr. Gangar would be assigned a 12-digit number, the first official proof that he exists. He can use the number, along with a thumbprint, to identify himself anywhere in the country. It will allow him to gain access to welfare benefits, open a bank account or get a cellphone far from his home village, something that is still impossible for many people in India.”
William Gibson describes discovering personal computers, via The Paris Review:
“I was walking around Vancouver, aware of that need, and I remember walking past a video arcade, which was a new sort of business at that time, and seeing kids playing those old-fashioned console-style plywood video games. The games had a very primitive graphic representation of space and perspective. Some of them didn’t even have perspective but were yearning toward perspective and dimensionality. Even in this very primitive form, the kids who were playing them were so physically involved, it seemed to me that what they wanted was to be inside the games, within the notional space of the machine. The real world had disappeared for them—it had completely lost its importance. They were in that notional space, and the machine in front of them was the brave new world.
The only computers I’d ever seen in those days were things the size of the side of a barn. And then one day, I walked by a bus stop and there was an Apple poster. The poster was a photograph of a businessman’s jacketed, neatly cuffed arm holding a life-size representation of a real-life computer that was not much bigger than a laptop is today. Everyone is going to have one of these, I thought, and everyone is going to want to live inside them. And somehow I knew that the notional space behind all of the computer screens would be one single universe.”
This brings us back, literally thousands of years to an ancient discussion that continues to this day about exactly how people can make a living, or make their way when technology gets better. There is an Aristotle quote about how when the looms can operates themselves, all men will be free. That seems like a reasonable thing to say, a precocious thing for somebody to have said in ancient times. If we zoom forward to the 19th century, we had a tremendous amount of concern about this question of how people would make their way when the machines got good. In fact, much of our modern intellectual world started off as people’s rhetorical postures on this very question.
Marxism, the whole idea of the left, which still dominates the Bay Area where this interview is taking place, was exactly, precisely about this question. This is what Marx was thinking about, and in fact, you can read Marx and it sometimes weirdly reads likes a Silicon Valley rhetoric. It’s the strangest thing; all about ‘boundaries falling internationally,’ and ‘labor and markets opening up,’ and all these things. It’s the weirdest thing.
In fact, I had the strange experience years ago, listening to some rhetoric on the radio … it was KPFA, in fact, the lefty station … and I thought, ‘Oh, God, it’s one of these Silicon startups with their rhetoric about how they’re going to bring down market barriers,’ and it turned out to be an anniversary reading of Das Kapital. The language was similar enough that one could make the mistake.
The origin of science fiction was exactly in this same area of concern. H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine foresees a future in which there are the privileged few who benefit from the machines, and then there are the rest who don’t, and both of them become undignified, lesser creatures. Separate species.•
H.G. Wells meets Orson Welles in San Antonio (audio only):
“I’ve had to persuade myself to believe in the impossible more often. In the past several decades I’ve encountered a series of ideas that I was conditioned to think were impossibilities, but which turned out to be good practical ideas. For instance, I had my doubts about the online flea market called eBay when it first came out. Pay money to a stranger selling a car you have not seen? Everything I had been taught about human nature suggested this could not work. Yet today, strangers selling automobiles is the major profit center for the very successful eBay corporation.
I thought the idea of an encyclopedia that anyone could change at any time to be a non-starter, a hopeless romantic idea with no chance of working. It seemed to go against my general understanding of human nature and group interaction. I was so wrong. Today I use Wikipedia at least once a day.
Twenty years ago if I had been paid to convince an audience of reasonable, educated people that in 20 years time we’d have street and satellite maps for the entire world on our personal hand held phone devices — for free — and with street views for many cities — I would not be able to do it. I could not have made an economic case for how this could come about “for free.” It was starkly impossible back then.
These supposed impossibilities keep happening with increased frequency.”
••••••••••
Kevin Kelly lectures on the meaning of technology, in Amsterdam in 2009:
I’ve never triedBooktrack, a service that provides a cinematic-ish soundtrack for digital books, but it sounds truly hideous. An excerpt from aBetsy Morais articleat the Atlantic:
“There is a long-held belief about cinema: ‘There never was a silent film.’ From the early days, when moving images fascinated viewers in their mute spectacle, musical accompaniment drowned out the incessant whirring of the projector machine. Sound brought cinema’s haunting figures into being, amplifying their moods and heightening the intensity of the action.
Reading, however, is silent by design. Unless readers add their own accompaniment. On any given public transit commute, one might find an audience of readers trying to do just that, headphones in, books open, providing soundtracks to literature. Mark Cameron noticed this on his daily ferry rides, and as he selected his own music-reading pairings, found himself choosing songs that emotionally corresponded to the words on the page. When he told his brother, the two started cooking up an idea for ‘a more cinematic-type experience’ for reading, says Paul Cameron, who is now the CEO of the company they co-founded, Booktrack.”
The city of Bonn, trying desperately to make up for budget shortfalls, has instituted a tax on prostitution, which is legal in Germany. Since many sex workers are from overseas and don’t understand the language, Bonn officials have come up with a solution in the form of a “sex meter.” FromSpiegel:
“The budget is tight in Bonn. So tight, in fact, that city officials instituted a new ‘sex tax’ for prostitution this year. They hoped to raise up to €200,000 per year in additional revenues.
Yet while it might sound straightforward enough, the sex tax has been difficult to enforce among those prostitutes who do not work in established brothels and sex clubs. Leading the city to come up with plan B: an automated ticket machine in an area frequented by prostitutes and their customers.
Since Monday, freelance sex workers on the city streets have been required to pay €6 per night into the machine, which resembles an automated parking ticket distributor. This machine, however, emits nightly permits to practice prostitution.”
Only in the Bizarro world of 2011, when the Republican Party is essentially the de facto Tea Party, can Jon Huntsman seem too liberal to be the party’s Presidential nominee. He’s ultra-conervative on social issues and has the type of sophisticated intelligence that could be attractive to Independents who’ve wearied of Obama. But because he believes in global warming and thought the debt ceiling shenanigans were ridiculous, he has essentially no shot at the nomination. You will accept the self-defeating ideology without question or else. An excerpt about Huntsman’s formative years at the American Conservative:
“Huntsman Jr. had a rebellious phase. He dropped out of high school to focus on his progressive-rock band, Wizard. Ask him about those days and he slips into semi-seriousness. He describes Emerson Lake and Palmer, Yes, and Genesis as ‘highly impactful in terms of [his] view of the music world.’ And he jokes that the ’80s were a mostly ‘lost decade’ in terms of music when explaining his fondness for ’90s acts like the Foo Fighters and Ben Folds Five.
He eventually completed his GED and went to University of Utah; he also went on a two-year mission on behalf of the LDS church. Assigned to Taiwan, he quickly set to learning Standard Chinese Mandarin and Taiwanese Hokkein. These years proved pivotal. He not only acquired the skills that would allow him to expand his father’s business in Asia, he also found himself an unofficial diplomat.
‘It was not just the effort to learn the language, the effort to learn the new highly structured system,’ he recalls, ‘I learned a lot about Asia, and I learned a lot about the United States.’ Huntsman arrived in Taiwan in the years following the Shanghai Communique, during which U.S. relations with mainland China began to normalize, a development that angered the Taiwanese.” (ThanksMarginal Revolution.)
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Prog rock, via Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman and Howe:
I’ve never been a fan of comic strips, even as a child, but apassage at the Los Angeles Review of Booksby Brian Doherty about comics curator Bill Blackbeard caught my eye. It woud seem that one man’s obsession is responsible for much of the trove of pulpy panels still available to us. An excerpt:
“The historian, editor, and collector Bill Blackbeard made the world of modern comic strip reprints possible by his dogged efforts to rescue them from far-flung newspapers being systematically destroyed by libraries. With his masterful co-edited Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics anthology in 1977, Blackbeard exposed a generation of fans and cartoonists to the fact that moldering, disappeared old comic strips were cool and desirable.
Blackbeard personally clipped and collated over 350,000 Sunday strips and over 2 million dailies, stored them in his own home for decades, and eventually donated them to Ohio State University. Jenny Robb, who now curates the archive Blackbeard created, says that Blackbeard’s careful preservation, contextualization, and editing ‘transformed comic strips into objects with legitimate cultural, historic and sometimes even aesthetic value.'”
"He preferred to spend his time learning the tango in Buenos Aires or archery in Kyoto." (Image by Olivier Ezratty.)
If you haven’t had a chance yet to read Rebecca Mead’s great New Yorker profile of souped-up self-help guru, Timothy Ferriss, don’t let it slide. Ferriss is the best-selling author behind the 4-Hour Workweek and other similarly alluring titles. The article is hilarious and sums up the age we live in, the desperation people feel to find some way to the other side of this very discomfiting paradigm shift we’re experiencing. An excerpt;
“Ferriss’s first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, was turned down by twenty-six publishers before being accepted by Crown, and he recounts this statistic with pride. But it’s easy to understand the caution of those twenty-six. Ferriss’s aesthetic is a pointed rejection of the culture of constant BlackBerrying, corporate jockeying, and office all-nighters that is celebrated in most business-advice books, and in films such as The Social Network.The 4-Hour Workweek was inspired by a personal epiphany. In 2004, Ferriss, feeling burned out as the C.E.O. of a sports-nutrition company, where he worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week, discovered that he preferred to spend his time learning the tango in Buenos Aires or archery in Kyoto. He also found that, by automating his business operations to the largest extent possible, he was able to pull this off. (To a point, at least. Kane Ng, a Hollywood executive who is Ferriss’s friend, told me, expansively, ‘Tim is a total fraud, you know. ‘Four-hour workweek’? He is constantly busting ass.’ Of course, it was Seneca who said that hyperbole ‘asserts the incredible in order to arrive at the credible.’) Ferriss advises would-be members of the New Rich to check e-mail no more than twice a day, and to set automated responses advising correspondents of the recipient’s unavailability. (Anyone who e-mails Ferriss these days immediately receives in her inbox an automated response, with the cheery sign-off ‘Here’s to life outside of the inbox!’) The book counsels readers to take what Ferriss calls ‘mini-retirements’ now—a month in Costa Rica, three months in Berlin—rather than saving up the prospect of leisure for the final decades of life. And it recommends funding all this by discovering a ‘muse,’ which Ferriss defines, as Seneca did not, as ‘an automated vehicle for generating cash without consuming time.’
Finding one’s muse, like catching one’s rabbit before cooking it, is more easily said than done, but Ferriss’s advocacy of liberation from the workplace has had a wide appeal, especially among younger people to whom the workplace may be unattainable in the first place, given the unemployment rate. Similarly, his latest book, The 4-Hour Body, speaks to the peculiar obsessions and insecurities of the young American male. Ferriss tells readers how they might lose twenty pounds in thirty days without exercise—eggs, spinach, and lentils are crucial—and how to triple their testosterone levels. (Gentlemen, put your iPhone in the pocket of your backpack, not the pocket of your jeans.) The book, which is five hundred and forty-eight pages long, contains a lot of colorfully odd advice—he recommends increasing abdominal definition with an exercise he calls ‘cat vomiting’—but it also reassures readers that they need not go so far as to have Israeli stem-cell factor injected into the cervical spine, as Ferriss did in the name of inquiry. Nor need they necessarily incorporate into their regimen Ferriss’s method for determining the effectiveness of controlled binge eating: weighing his feces to find out exactly what kind of shit he was full of.”
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“The four-hour workweek is possible, but you need to completely unplug and reset”:
Alexander Masters has a interesting profile at the Guardian about his downstairs neighbor, math prodigy Simon Phillips Norton, who, yes, is brilliant and very eccentric. An excerpt;
“The Monster is Simon’s special area in mathematics, a field known as Group Theory, or the study of symmetry. In 1980, mathematicians discovered the largest symmetry: the most convoluted symmetrical atom of them all. Because of its size and complexity, the final atom was dubbed ‘The Monster”.’Mathematicians study symmetry using grids of numbers. A sudoku table has nine rows and nine columns of numbers. The Monster has 808017424794512875886459904961710757005754368000000000.
It’s essential to emphasise that in no sense of the term is Simon mad. He’s covered in facial hair and wears rotten shoes and trousers for the opposite reason: too much mental order.
He burps; he thinks you won’t mind knowing about the progress of his digestion; he goes on long, sweaty walks, and doesn’t change his clothes for a week. But what else can he do? Everybody is messy somehow, and there’s no other place for Simon to store his quota. Inside his head there’s no room: all the mess has been swept out. It’s as pristine in there as a surgeon’s operating theatre.
Simon’s mother, now dead, taught him maths, up to quadratic equations. Astounding, for a British housewife in the 1950s – no one in the family can explain it. Simon says he’s a fluke of genetics. Every birth is a gamble by nature, a throwing in the air of infinite possibilities. In Simon’s case, ‘The molecules settled in my favour. Neither of my brothers is particularly intelligent.'” (ThanksLongform.)
From Jon Gertner’s excellent New York Times Magazine article about the burgeoning lithium-battery market and the future of manufacturing in America:
“On both sides of the world, the fundamental appeal of expanding manufacturing is jobs. It is a curiosity of modern life that information companies can create extraordinary social disruptions and vast shareholder wealth but relatively few jobs. Facebook has about 2,000 employees worldwide. Google has about 29,000. Even in its new, slimmed-down state, General Motors, a decidedly less valuable company, has about 200,000 employees. What’s more, that number represents only a fraction of the people behind the production of a G.M. car. ‘When you’re manufacturing anything, even if the work is done by robots and machines, there’s an incredible value chain involved,’ Susan Hockfield, the president of M.I.T., says. ‘Manufacturing is simply this huge engine of job creation.’ For batteries, that value chain would include scientists researching improved materials to companies mining ores for metals; contractors building machines for factory work; and designers, engineers and machine operators doing the actual plant work. By some estimates, manufacturing employs about 65 percent of America’s scientists and engineers.”
I’d read somewhere that Nathanael West had written at least parts of his two devastating short novels, Miss Lonleyhearts and The Day of the Locust, while working the graveyeard shift at Manhattan hotels in the 1920s. From a1970 Time article about the author called, “A Great Despiser”:
“Early in 1927, West found himself working as night manager in a seedy little Manhattan hotel on 23rd Street called Kenmore Hall; later, he moved uptown as manager of the shabby-genteel Sutton Club Hotel.
In disaster, it would seem, West found his will to write. In the hotels, he found his subject. He saw them as zoos of failure, terminal wards filled with ‘dismantled innocents’ who had lost the battle for survival in a machine civilization. With the skinned eyes of poverty, he saw that he too might someday lose the battle and wind up on the other side of the desk. Horrified, fascinated, wrung with love, he watched his tenants like a man watching himself die in a mirror. He chatted with them endlessly: he steamed open their letters and read their secrets; and through long, lonely nights in hotel offices, he braided their stories into books.”
