October 2009
“It’ll be great because all those Ph.D.’s are in there, like,...”
– Annie Hall, which I’m re-watching to prepare for presenting it at the school film series this weekend.
It’s over 30 years old, but still feels more freshly relevant than most romantic comedies today. Others may have aped Woody Allen’s self-conscious rants, but they still...
September 2009
“It’s like an echo chamber in an outhouse.”
– An internet poster on Dan Brown’s new book The Lost Symbol, which apes the movie National Treasure (which itself aped Dan Brown).
The Daily Beast Looks to Speed Up Print Process →
The NY Times reports on The Daily Beast’s new effort to quickly pump out timely books on a much faster schedule than the normal publishing process, which usually takes a year between turning in the manuscript and the book’s release.
More interesting, though, is Tina Brown’s admitted focus on books around 150 pages. There’s a real dearth of novella-length books these days...
Amazing Entries in Running Log History, #1 of N
At the institution where I work, we keep tabs on things by filling out a “running log,” the same as the paper-based “desk logs” kept when I worked at my college. Each shift, we scan the roster to see what happened recently that we should know about (as well as anything we should follow-up with our assigned students).
This entry is from about a week ago.
XXXXXX came...
The Best Fiction of the Millennium (so far) →
The Millions has polled a few dozen authors and critics to come up with a list of the best fiction published since the turn of the century, and it’s less crazy than most lists usually are.
Sadly, I’ve only read one of the twenty books listed. Hopefully I’ll make some progress on catching up this year!
p.s. the reader’s poll is also worth a perusal.
Eight Days: the battle to save the financial... →
You can only read it if you’re a subscriber (or have access through Lexis-Nexis or like), but last week’s New Yorker article on the near-collapse of world markets one year ago is the most gripping reading you’ll find in recent reportage.
Earlier this year, reports trickled out of the meeting between Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, and congressional leaders on September 18, 2008....
“Quine showed us that our interpretation of the world is always affected by what...”
– Terrance Tomkow, writing about how Quine’s critique of positivism applies to the global warming debate. It’s a lot cooler and more accessible than my esoteric summary would make it seem, especially for those with background in Philosophy.
But on a tangent, this had me thinking about the...
College for $99 a month →
Here’s a really fantastic article examining some e-learning alternatives to the traditional university model that are starting to spring up. Probably the best part is when it examines the financial structure of colleges today: large introductory lecture hall classes that are cheap for the university, effectively subsidizing the more expensive higher-level classes. The StraighterLine company...
“Our dreams are delicately tweaked versions of reality, stuffed full of...”
– Jonah Lehrer, summarizing research into the function of dreams.
Hyman Minsky's "Financial Instability Hypothesis" →
One of the more interesting recent side-shows in journalism has been the resuscitation of economic Cassandras to try and explain what happened, and how to prevent it from happening again. Minsky is one of the more interesting cases because his critique isn’t based on the financial system, but rather on some simple rules of human behavior.
After an economic crisis, the financial system as a...
“Let me preface this somewhat negative review by stating that I come from a...”
– An amazing Amazon.com review that I stumbled upon. I love unexpectedly running into random bits of humor like this.
Time Fcuk →
A bizarre game that’s a Mario-like platformer, but without enemies. The neat gimmick is that you can switch layers to complete the level, sometimes dragging objects with you.
The most interesting part of the game, though, is the decidedly weird aesthetic. It’s very electronic/lo-fi as far as the visuals and sound go, and each level features a face to the right from elsewhere, mumbling...
New Flaming Lips album streaming on Colbert Nation... →
The album doesn’t actually come out until October 13, so this is a few-days-long sneak peek! The streaming-player is on the left side of the page.
Jung's Big Red Book →
The idea of the “unconscious” was one of the titanic shifts in our popular understanding of the world, but there were actually two different conceptions of what it was. Freud’s pathological view won out in seeing the unconscious as personal, causing problems that affected the conscious self. Jung, on the other hand, saw the unconscious as windows into something beyond the self....
Watch“Triumph of a Heart” by Bjork (directed by Spike Jonze)
Somehow I made it four years without stumbling onto this video. I couldn’t stop grinning the whole way through. Jonze is wonderfully absurd.
“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is...”
– Walter Benjamin in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” as quoted by Richard Nash. After reading this, I never want to see Klee’s painting he references; Benjamin’s description is so wonderful as to outpace any reality.
(Nash marshals this metaphor to describe and decry...
“Despite the determinisms of the day, despite the code-breakers, the wetware...”
– Mark Slouka in “Dehumanized” (available online only to Harper’s subscribers).
1 tag
“One is not superior merely because one sees the world as odious.”
– François-René de Chateaubriand, being awesome.
Wall Street to buy life insurance policies, bundle... →
A really interesting look in the NY Times at how Wall Street is searching for the next cash-cow after mortgages imploded, and how they think they’ve found it in life insurance. Basically, they’re going to buy life insurance premiums off of individuals for a set amount of cash - say 40% of the eventual payout - and in return they get to collect the premium once the person dies.
This is...
“Half of college graduates under age 25 are in jobs that do not require college...”
– The NY Times reporting that teenage unemployment has hit 25%, the highest level ever recorded.
There’s a vicious perversity in our colleges becoming more vocationally-oriented while guaranteeing less and less when it comes to gainful employment afterward. What’s the point of all that...
Paul Krugman - Nobel Prize-winner - on the past,... →
So my description sounds incredibly boring, but it’s the first great summary I’ve seen of the controversy surrounding the stimulus. We’ve seen a bunch of big-picture explanations as to why the recession started, but strikingly few about what government policies we should adopt to end it.
