John Sunyer

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“He And Three Interns Search The Bowels Of The Web”

July 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Not everyone can be a syphilitic prostitute or a foul-smelling arsonist, so some must settle for being Instagram comedians. 

I mean, there’s nothing wrong with Instagram or Vine or any other platform in the hands of someone who’s genuinely funny and creative, but what’s thought of as humor on these new channels is largely (and almost intentionally) witless, just topical bullshit that doesn’t require anything more than the barest sentience for the so-called jokes to be received.

Case in point: Josh Ostrovsky, whose main flaw should be that he dubbed himself “The Fat Jew” (or “The Fat Jewish”), but he’s also hampered by being resolutely lame in captioning photos unearthed in web searches and posting them to his Instagram account. His brutally unfunny shtick is as painful as it is popular, unless you think “White girl ordering Starbucks” riffs are hilarious. Like the Kardashians, he’s mastered form free of any worthwhile content, but the difference is Reality TV promises none while humor does (or at least should). In a FT piece by John Sunyer, Ostrovsky’s process, as it were, is revealed. An excerpt:

The Fat Jew explains how, each day, from an office he rents in the back of a nail salon in Queens, he and three interns search the bowels of the web for unusual, often slightly ridiculous images — so long as they haven’t already gone viral — to post to his followers.

Last month, celebrating the Supreme Court’s decision to approve same-sex marriage across the US, he posted a Photoshopped picture of rapper Kanye West kissing his double. Below it, the Fat Jew wrote: “Finally, Kanye can legally marry himself absolutely anywhere in this great nation.” The picture gained almost 238,000 likes.

Outlandish taste runs through his comedy — in one picture two pizza slices are positioned together so that they look like the Star of David, with the caption “This is my religion” typed below. He also mocks our dependence on the internet. Take the picture showing a message saying: “Home is where your WiFi connects automatically,” beneath which a caption reads: “Meaning not my parents’ house, where the WiFi password is RHXFGJIJ0000055$T.”

With this sort of content, which people seem unable to resist regramming or telling their friends about, the Fat Jew has found fame and financial success. Still, he says, it’s difficult to explain to “proper adults” what he does.

“Not getting all high and mighty about it but it’s more like performance art than comedy,” he says, draining his cocktail. “I won’t ever open a soup kitchen but what I do is the next best thing. Pictures are what I can give back to the world. A lot of people have steady careers, health insurance, a pay cheque at the end of the month, a wife and three kids. But that kind of life can get boring; sometimes you need to see a fat guy sitting in a giant bowl of chilli.•

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“Today The Idea, If Not Quite The Practice, Of Living In Space Is Coming Back Into Fashion”

February 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The greatest thing about colonies on Mars? No taxes. It’s even better than the Cayman Islands. Mitt Romney could yet be President. Seriously, a lot of megarich people have their heads in the sky, seeing space living as both a sound investment and a bold adventure. As Elon Musk says: “I’d like to die on Mars, just not on impact.” The opening of John Sunyer’s well-written Financial Times article about private wealth reheating the Space Race:

“Here we are more than a decade into the 21st century and we’re still not there. To be a child of the 1960s and 1970s was to daydream not only about travelling in space but also about settling there, indefinitely. National space agencies planned inflatable lunar cities. Space was where we were all going to live and work – Moon bases and hotels, everything in Stanley Kubrick’s futuristic 2001: A Space Odyssey. This was the era of the space race and of humanity’s first orbiting residences.

To young people today this is old news: they know that the Americans went to the Moon, just as they know the Romans built straight roads. Manned space flight lost its glamour; Nasa lost its way, its ambition severely weakened by funding cuts; and we gave up on the idea that living in space was the next step in humankind’s evolution. As Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the Moon, tells me: ‘After the Apollo lunar missions, America lost its love of space – there was no concentrated follow-up and we didn’t have any clear objectives.’

Still, not all hope is lost for wide-eyed space cadets. Today the idea, if not quite the practice, of living in space is coming back into fashion. If the 20th century space race was about the might of the US government, the space race today is about something that could be even more powerful – private wealth.”

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“This New Approach To Literature Depends On Computers To Crunch ‘Big Data'”

June 14, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’m sure that feeding books into computers instead of reading them can tell us something about literature–and ourselves–but there are limits to quantitative methods when it comes to poetry. The opening of “Big Data Meets the Bard,” an article about “distant reading” by John Sunyer in the Financial Times:

“Here’s some advice for bibliophiles with teetering piles of books and not enough hours in the day: don’t read them. Instead, feed the books into a computer program and make graphs, maps and charts: it is the best way to get to grips with the vastness of literature. That, at least, is the recommendation of Franco Moretti, a 63-year-old professor of English at Stanford University and unofficial leader of a band of academics bringing a science-fiction thrill to the science of fiction.

For centuries, the basic task of literary scholarship has been close reading of texts. But for digitally savvy academics such as Moretti, literary study doesn’t always require scholars actually to read books. This new approach to literature depends on computers to crunch ‘big data,’ or stores of massive amounts of information, to produce new insights.

Who, for example, would have guessed that, according to a 2011 Harvard study of four per cent (that is, five million) of all the books printed in English, less than half the number of words used are included in dictionaries, the rest being ‘lexical dark matter’? Or that, as a recent study using the same database carried out by the universities of Bristol, Sheffield and Durham reveals, ‘American English has become decidedly more ‘emotional’ than British English in the last half-century’?

Not everyone is convinced by this approach.”

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