“Burtynsky: I love the tones of browns and grays—I love more neutral tones. That’s why I like going to the desert and working in the desert. I find that green trees and things like that have a tendency to lock us into a certain way of seeing. When I look at green trees on a sunny day, I don’t know how to make an interesting picture of that. We’re familiar with that already.
Instead, I like the transparency that comes when leaves are off and you can look deeper into the landscape—you can look through the landscape. When I did try to make those kind of green-tree/sunny-day pictures, I’d find myself not ever putting them up and not ever using them. Eventually, I just said, well, I’m not going to take them anymore, because they never make it past the edit.
There’s a certain point where you learn from your own editing. You just stop taking certain pictures because they never make it through. Your editing starts to inform your thinking, as far as where you want to go and what you want to look for when you’re making a photograph.
That what’s different about me after thirty years of doing this kind of work—there are a lot of pictures I don’t have to take anymore. I think that’s called wisdom—learning what not to waste your time on!”
John Cook and Hamilton Nolan are consistently good reads at Gawker. The former can sometimes be extreme–his takedown of Mike Wallace went too far, I think–but even in his excess a lot can be learned. Here’s the opening of Cook’s reconsideration of those Watergate wonders Woodward and Bernstein:
“Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s investigation into the origins of the Watergate break-in—which took place 40 years ago yesterday—is one of the most highly mythologized episodes in the history of journalism. It represents the Platonic ideal of what journalism-with-a-capital-J ought to be, at least according to its high priesthood—sober, careful young men doggedly following the story wherever it leads and holding power to account, without fear or favor. It was also a sloppy, ethically dubious project the details of which would mortify any of the smug high priests of journalism that flourished in its wake. The actual Watergate investigation could never have survived the legacy it helped create.”
Product development is endlessly fascinating and nothing amuses more than truly terrible products that were brought to the market. A lot of very intelligent people thought they sounded like good ideas at the time. Or maybe they were initially good ideas that just got away from them. From Oliver Burkeman’s Guardian article about his recent visit to a storehouse of failed consumer products in Ann Arbor:
“This is consumer capitalism’s graveyard – the shadow side to the relentlessly upbeat, success-focused culture of modern marketing. Or to put it less grandly: it’s almost certainly the only place on the planet where you’ll find Clairol’s A Touch of Yogurt shampoo alongside Gillette’s equally unpopular For Oily Hair Only, a few feet from a now-empty bottle of Pepsi AM Breakfast Cola (born 1989; died 1990). The museum is home to discontinued brands of caffeinated beer; to TV dinners branded with the logo of the toothpaste manufacturer Colgate; to self-heating soup cans that had a regrettable tendency to explode in customers’ faces; and to packets of breath mints that had to be withdrawn from sale because they looked like the tiny packages of crack cocaine dispensed by America’s street drug dealers. It is where microwaveable scrambled eggs – pre-scrambled and sold in a cardboard tube with a pop-up mechanism for easier consumption in the car – go to die.
There is a Japanese term, mono no aware, that translates roughly as ‘the pathos of things’: it captures a kind of bittersweet melancholy at life’s impermanence – that additional beauty imparted to cherry blossoms, say, or human features, as a result of their inevitably fleeting time on Earth. It’s only stretching the concept slightly to suggest that this is how the museum’s proprietor, an understatedly stylish GfK employee named Carol Sherry, feels about the cartons of Morning Banana Juice in her care, or about Fortune Snookies, a short-lived line of fortune cookies for dogs. Every failure, the way she sees it, embodies its own sad story on the part of designers, marketers and salespeople. It is never far from her mind that real people had their mortgages, their car payments and their family holidays riding on the success of products such as A Touch of Yogurt.” (Thanks Browser.)
I am seeking an overnight job in New York City, because I am returning to college full-time in the fall. I am an older student with a college degree, but decided to return to school to enhance my skills. Finding a day job is difficult because of my class schedule. I sent resumes to numerous hotels and retail stores for overnight work, but received no response. I thought about working as a barback at a dance or strip club, but I have no experience.
“This is where the dinosaurs will come to eat.” (Image by Gerhard Boeggemann.)
From “In the Air,”‘ Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 New Yorker assault on the Great Man Theory, a thumbnail portrait of Nathan Myhrvold, a legend at Microsoft, a company that didn’t exactly have original ideas:
“Myhrvold is of Nordic extraction, and he looks every bit the bearded, fair-haired Viking—not so much the tall, ferocious kind who raped and pillaged as the impish, roly-poly kind who stayed home by the fjords trying to turn lead into gold. He is gregarious, enthusiastic, and nerdy on an epic scale. He graduated from high school at fourteen. He started Microsoft’s research division, leaving, in 1999, with hundreds of millions. He is obsessed with aperiodic tile patterns. (Imagine a floor tiled in a pattern that never repeats.) When Myhrvold built his own house, on the shores of Lake Washington, outside Seattle—a vast, silvery hypermodernist structure described by his wife as the place in the sci-fi movie where the aliens live—he embedded some sixty aperiodic patterns in the walls, floors, and ceilings. His front garden is planted entirely with vegetation from the Mesozoic era. (‘If the Jurassic Park thing happens,’ he says, ‘this is where the dinosaurs will come to eat.’) One of the scholarly achievements he is proudest of is a paper he co-wrote proving that it was theoretically possible for sauropods—his favorite kind of dinosaur—to have snapped their tails back and forth faster than the speed of sound.”
I exercise all over the city and the demographic most actively involved in athletics seems to be women in their 20s. That wasn’t always the case. Title IX, the Nike “If You Let Me Play” campaign and the women’s World Cup soccer victory in 2009 really changed hearts and minds, and sports bras became omnipresent. But Title IX was easily the most important factor of all. From Allen Barra’s “Female Athletes, Thank Nixon,” a smart New York Times opinion piece about arguably the most Liberal American President of the last 40 years, who did some very progressive things when not busy being a paranoid nutjob:
“Nixon did leave some legacies that may outlast the memory of Watergate. Historians have argued that he did a great deal to desegregate Southern schools; that he defied the conservatives in his party to open relations with China; and that he had a good record on the environment. Significantly, he brought women into the world of sports, through the portion of the 1972 Education Amendments better known as Title IX, whose 40th anniversary is celebrated on June 23.
But maybe because Nixon is, well, Nixon, there seems to be a concerted effort to separate the memory of the man from Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in federally financed education programs.
For instance, the ESPN Web site is running a tribute to the amendment called The Power of IX, which it praises as ‘a law whose ripple effects extend far beyond the U.S., creating a women’s sports culture awash in opportunity.’ But there is no word of praise to be found for the man who created the opportunity for the opportunities.
It’s hard to exaggerate the far-reaching effect of Title IX on American society.”
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Criticized initially for its pleading tone, the 1995 Wieden & Kennedy “If You Let Me Play” campaign was ultimately an empowering statement that allowed Nike to turn a secondary market into a primary one.
From “Dorothy, It’s Really Oz,” the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s 1999 essay about that stubborn foolishness Creationism, which has since morphed into the idiocy known as Intelligent Design:
“In the early 1920s, several states simply forbade the teaching of evolution outright, opening an epoch that inspired the infamous 1925 Scopes trial (leading to the conviction of a Tennessee high school teacher) and that ended only in 1968, when the Supreme Court declared such laws unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds. In a second round in the late 1970s, Arkansas and Louisiana required that if evolution be taught, equal time must be given to Genesis literalism, masquerading as oxymoronic ‘creation science.’ The Supreme Court likewise rejected those laws in 1987.
The Kansas decision represents creationism’s first—and surely temporary—success with a third strategy for subverting a constitutional imperative: that by simply deleting, but not formally banning, evolution, and by not demanding instruction in a biblically literalist ‘alternative,’ their narrowly partisan religious motivations might not derail their goals.
Given this protracted struggle, Americans of goodwill might be excused for supposing that some genuine scientific or philosophical dispute motivates this issue: Is evolution speculative and ill founded? Does evolution threaten our ethical values or our sense of life’s meaning? As a paleontologist by training, and with abiding respect for religious traditions, I would raise three points to alleviate these worries:
First, no other Western nation has endured any similar movement, with any political clout, against evolution—a subject taught as fundamental, and without dispute, in all other countries that share our major sociocultural traditions.
Second, evolution is as well documented as any phenomenon in science, as strongly as the earth’s revolution around the sun rather than vice versa. In this sense, we can call evolution a ‘fact.’ (Science does not deal in certainty, so ‘fact’ can only mean a proposition affirmed to such a high degree that it would be perverse to withhold one’s provisional assent.)
The major argument advanced by the school board—that large-scale evolution must be dubious because the process has not been directly observed—smacks of absurdity and only reveals ignorance about the nature of science. Good science integrates observation with inference. No process that unfolds over such long stretches of time (mostly, in this case, before humans appeared), or at an infinitude beneath our powers of direct visualization (subatomic particles, for example), can be seen directly. If justification required eyewitness testimony, we would have no sciences of deep time—no geology, no ancient human history either. (Should I believe Julius Caesar ever existed? The hard bony evidence for human evolution, as described in the preceding pages, surely exceeds our reliable documentation of Caesar’s life.)
Third, no factual discovery of science (statements about how nature ‘is’) can, in principle, lead us to ethical conclusions (how we ‘ought’ to behave) or to convictions about intrinsic meaning (the ‘purpose’ of our lives). These last two questions—and what more important inquiries could we make?—lie firmly in the domains of religion, philosophy and humanistic study. Science and religion should be equal, mutually respecting partners, each the master of its own domain, and with each domain vital to human life in a different way.”
••••••••••
Gould disccuses evolution in 2000 with that affable dinosaur Charlie Rose:
Good to see that Nik Wallenda successfully crossed Niagara Falls on a high wire yesterday. But defying death requires a confidence that can be self-deluding, as other members of the daredevil family have learned.
Karl Wallenda, founder of the troupe, was 73 when he attempted a relatively simple high-wire stunt in 1978. His mind had become conditioned to success, to being able to live in the sky without a net. He was certain the weakening of his body was no match for his experience and knowledge. A gust of wind was enough to send Wallenda from the wire to his death.
“Chicago, Ill.–While leaning over a casket yesterday, taking a last look at the remains of a girl friend, Minnie Budolski fell forward over the casket and died instantly. Miss Budolski and Minnie Graef, her dear friend, had been constant companions since babyhood. A double funeral will now take place and the two girls, inseparable in life, will be buried side by side.”
I posted something about thehologram helpersbeing added soon to NYC airports. They’re already hard at work in Germany. FromMashable: “One solution is already in place in a number of airports, including Dulles International in Washington, D.C, Dubai International and the Edinburgh Airport. Tensator’s Virtual Assistant communicates guidelines and information via a virtual spokesmodel.
‘Obviously airports are huge environments, and there are massive people walking through,’ says Keith Carpentier, vice president of business development atTensator. ‘They like the idea of this holographic-type creator or ambassador — it makes people do a double-take.'”
I love dreams, but the great Michael Chabon hates them. The opening of his new essay in the New York Review of Books about unconscious narratives:
“I hate dreams. Dreams are the Sea Monkeys of consciousness: in the back pages of sleep they promise us teeming submarine palaces but leave us, on waking, with a hermetic residue of freeze-dried dust. The wisdom of dreams is a fortune on paper that you can’t cash out, an oasis of shimmering water that turns, when you wake up, to a mouthful of sand. I hate them for their absurdities and deferrals, their endlessly broken promise to amount to something, by and by. I hate them for the way they ransack memory, jumbling treasure and trash. I hate them for their tedium, how they drag on, peter out, wander off.
Pretty much the only thing I hate more than my own dreams are yours. ‘I was flying over Lake Michigan in a pink Cessna,’ you begin, ‘only it wasn’t really Lake Michigan…,’ and I sink, cobwebbed, beneath a drifting dust of boredom.
Dreams are effluvia, bodily information, to be shared only with intimates and doctors.”
China, world leader in construction and cancer, is planning to build the tallest edifice on Earth in just 90 days. Pre-fabrication figures into the equation, of course. From CNNGO:
“In an interview with Xinhua, BSB chief executive officer Zhang Yue (张跃) said the company plans to break ground on Sky City in November 2012, and that the tower will be completed in January 2013.
The company is confident the government will green-light the project.
BSB is renowned for its eye-opening construction efficiency. Its portfolio includes assembling a 15-story building in six days in June 2010, and erecting a 30-story hotel in 360 hours in December 2011.
The key to achieving such stunning speed is an innovative construction technique developed by BSB.
Most of the company’s buildings are pieced together with prefabricated components from its factory. In this case, 95 percent of Sky City will be completed before breaking ground.”
The opening of “The Mind Reader,” David Cyranoski’s new Nature article about Adrian Owen, who has developed a method to communicate with patients in vegetative states:
“Adrian Owen still gets animated when he talks about patient 23. The patient was only 24 years old when his life was devastated by a car accident. Alive but unresponsive, he had been languishing in what neurologists refer to as a vegetative state for five years, when Owen, a neuro-scientist then at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues at the University of Liège in Belgium, put him into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and started asking him questions.
Incredibly, he provided answers. A change in blood flow to certain parts of the man’s injured brain convinced Owen that patient 23 was conscious and able to communicate. It was the first time that anyone had exchanged information with someone in a vegetative state.
Patients in these states have emerged from a coma and seem awake. Some parts of their brains function, and they may be able to grind their teeth, grimace or make random eye movements. They also have sleep–wake cycles. But they show no awareness of their surroundings, and doctors have assumed that the parts of the brain needed for cognition, perception, memory and intention are fundamentally damaged. They are usually written off as lost.
Owen’s discovery, reported in 2010, caused a media furor.”
“Virgil F. Parker, a dentist, who lives on the tenth floor at the Arlington flats, was arraigned before Justice Walsh this morning charged with cruelty to animals. The complaint was made by George Roth, a butcher, of 74 Montague Street, through the Society for the Prevention of the Cruelty to Animals. Mr. Roth swears that Parker, who is something of a marksman, wantonly shot and killed three cats which were kept by the butcher for the purpose of killing rats in his store.”
Before it was synonymous with genocide, Srebrenica was a spa-centric tourist haven. People there assumed things would remain the same because they had become trained to expect it. Then dreams were replaced by nightmares. A 1970s promotional video for the town.
E.O. Wilson thinks war is our genes, though I’ve never felt like going to war with anyone. Perhaps it’s a genetic defect I possess. From the biologist’s new Discover article, “Is War Inevitable?“:
“Once a group has been split off from other groups and sufficiently dehumanized, any brutality can be justified, at any level, and at any size of the victimized group up to and including race and nation. And so it has ever been. A familiar fable is told to symbolize this pitiless dark angel of human nature. A scorpion asks a frog to ferry it across a stream. The frog at first refuses, saying that it fears the scorpion will sting it. The scorpion assures the frog it will do no such thing. After all, it says, we will both perish if I sting you. The frog consents, and halfway across the stream the scorpion stings it. Why did you do that, the frog asks as they both sink beneath the surface. It is my nature, the scorpion explains.
War, often accompanied by genocide, is not a cultural artifact of just a few societies. Nor has it been an aberration of history, a result of the growing pains of our species’ maturation. Wars and genocide have been universal and eternal, respecting no particular time or culture. Archaeological sites are strewn with the evidence of mass conflicts and burials of massacred people. Tools from the earliest Neolithic period, about 10,000 years ago, include instruments clearly designed for fighting. One might think that the influence of pacific Eastern religions, especially Buddhism, has been consistent in opposing violence. Such is not the case. Whenever Buddhism dominated and became the official ideology, war was tolerated and even pressed as part of faith-based state policy. The rationale is simple, and has its mirror image in Christianity: Peace, nonviolence, and brotherly love are core values, but a threat to Buddhist law and civilization is an evil that must be defeated.
Since the end of World War II, violent conflict between states has declined drastically, owing in part to the nuclear standoff of the major powers (two scorpions in a bottle writ large). But civil wars, insurgencies, and state-sponsored terrorism continue unabated. Overall, big wars have been replaced around the world by small wars of the kind and magnitude more typical of hunter-gatherer and primitively agricultural societies. Civilized societies have tried to eliminate torture, execution, and the murder of civilians, but those fighting little wars do not comply.”
The opening of “Twilight of the Trucks,” Steven Levy’s new Wired piece about Apple’s further shift from the desk and the lap into the pocket:
“Almost exactly 2 years ago, Steve Jobs outlined his view of personal computing. We used to be an agrarian nation, he explained, and as a result our vehicles were largely trucks. As the country became more urban and suburban, we moved to an era where the highways were dominated by cars, not their lumbering counterparts.
The same thing was happening in the technology world — and, with the iPhone and the iPad, the movement was accelerating. ‘PCs are going be like trucks,’ Jobs said at the 2010 All Things D Conference. ‘They are still going to be around, but only one out of x people will need them.’ Clearly, he didn’t expect the percentage to be a big number.”
“Material and popular culture provided plenty of support for your thesis that the world expected manned flight to magically transform humanity. Please cite some of that colourful evidence for us.
Joseph Corn: ‘An Airplane in Every Garage’ was the name of an article that appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1930, a publication for the intellectual elite. During the wind-down of World War II, as the defeat of the Germans and Japanese became obvious in late 1944 and early 1945, Ladies’ Home Journal asked its readers whether they expected to own an airplane and an amazing percentage said yes – 30-odd percent, as I recall, and this was at a time when a far smaller percentage of people had cars. The percentage of people who actually got airplanes was less than 1% at its peak. Planes per population peaked in 1946 and basically it’s been going down ever since.
Remember, America rapidly moved from the development of the Model T to mass automobility by 1915. England didn’t reach the level of car ownership that California had in 1906 until 1956. So people thought, first we had horses and carriages and then we had bicycles and then we had cars and next, soon, it’ll be airplanes. And there was a brief moment after the war when the evidence suggested that the dream of owning an airplane would be within reach of almost anyone. Macy’s Department Store in New York sold airplanes in 1946. One newspaper article reported that the elevator men would call out, ‘Furniture, bed settings and airplanes 5th floor.’. Another bit of evidence of ‘the winged gospel’ – there was a movement, centred at Columbia University Teachers College to push ‘air-age education’ into all schools. Textbooks were written on subjects like ‘air-age English,’ ‘air-age geography’ and ‘air-age mathematics.’ Geography made some sense because the airplane seemed to be shrinking the globe.
…
Perhaps the best evidence were the ritualistic observances that went along with ‘the winged gospel.’ People would go up in airplanes to get married and at least in one case a couple parachuted out to start their honeymoon. One woman in Florida took off with her husband piloting when she was in labour and her obstetrician delivered her baby at 5,000 feet – she named the girl Aero Jean. These little observances are all testimony to the tremendous excitement people had for flight and their tremendous optimism as to how flight was changing the world.”
“Booth gave Lawler a pass to attend Ford’s Theater that night.”
A supporting player in one of the great American tragedies of the 19th century, barber Thomas C. Lawler became an accidental part of history when he crossed paths with a man who acted notoriously. Lawler’s death in 1900 was reported in the New York Times and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. From the Eagle:
“Lynn, Mass.–Thomas C. Lawler, who figured in the identification of J. Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Lincoln, died here to-day aged 58 years.
A short time before Booth committed the crime, Lawler, who was proprietor of the National Hotel barber shop, shaved the actor and cut his hair. Booth gave Lawler a pass to attend Ford’s Theater that night, but Lawler was unable to leave the shop, so he did not witness the assassination. Lawler was taken on board the monitor Miantonomoh after Booth had been shot to identify the remains.”
We all go through different stages in life, but some people change at a shocking, even puzzling pace, though it seems perfectly natural to them. It’s not that they’re only responding to different information or stimuli but that there’s something always in flux inside of them. And no matter that they take wildly divergent views at different times, each one feels like the truth to them.
Here Eric Sevareid comments in 1975 on Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver returning to the U.S. after seven uncomfortable years living as a fugitive in communist countries. Cleaver renounced his militant ways but never stopped experiencing revolutions within, later becoming a Mormon, a conservative Republican and a crack addict, among other things.
The central thought experiment from moral philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous and much-debated 1971 paper, “A Defense of Abortion“:
“But now let me ask you to imagine this. You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, ‘Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you–we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.’ Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says. ‘Tough luck. I agree. but now you’ve got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him.’ I imagine you would regard this as outrageous, which suggests that something really is wrong with that plausible-sounding argument I mentioned a moment ago.”
Chuck Barris, game-show producer andoccasional murderer, realized like P.T. Barnum before him and reality shows after that there was money to be made off the marginal, even the freakish. But I doubt Barris could have predicted that the sideshow tent would be relocated to the center ring.
