February 2012
78 posts
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As If They'd Somehow Sprouted Overnight →
I’ve posted about The David Foster Wallace Audio Project before, but I just wanted to highlight another particularly moving reading. It’s a smidge over 30 minutes long, a Hammer Museum reading of a big chunk of “The View From Mrs. Thompson’s,” DFW’s piece on 9/11 for Rolling Stone. Listen and/or download here.
If you like, here’s a scan of the actual...
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A Closer Inspection of Good and Bad Days
If:
Life is usually (realistically, not pessimistically, speaking) full of shit.
And:
People expect “good” things to happen during a day when the weather’s “nice.”
Or:
People expect “bad” things to happen during a day when the weather isn’t “nice.”
Then:
When the “shit” occurs during a “good” day, it’s...
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“Retronyms.
In the beginning there was the telephone. Each one had the same...”
– Bryan Garner, “Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day, 27 February 2012”
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Do You Need The Number?
Me: Office of Residence Life.
Caller: Hello?
Me: Yes?
Caller: Oh, Hi. I'm trying to send a fax to the Office of Residence Life?
Me: Okay.
Caller: ...
Me: Do you need the number?
Caller: No, I have it.
Me: ...
Caller: Am I calling the right number?
Me: Are you asking me if you're currently speaking with the fax machine?
Caller: What? Oh! Oh, never mind. Thank you.
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Posters For the Minimalist, Design-Conscious Child →
Incredible work. Picking just one to highlight was nearly impossible.
/via Brain Pickings
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WatchPearl Jam ft. Jimmy Fallon, “Jeremy (Lin)”
/via Joe Fiorello
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“Your mother’s naive. It takes fierce will to get ahead in this world. If...”
– From, in my opinion, the best movie of 2011, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life.
(Watch the trailer here. And for those who will argue that the trailer is misleading—it’s actually the reverse. It’s the trailers of 99% of all the other movies that are misleading. You...
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Photography’s Angel Provocateur →
For the photography fans in NYC and the greater NY Metro area (is that even a term?), be sure to check out the Cindy Sherman show that is opening this Sunday at MOMA. It runs through June 11. You’ll probably remember this image from History of Photography class:
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Rembert Explains the '80s: SilverHawks →
When I saw this, I thought about how incredibly excited the little, chubby 5 year-old Joe Stracci would be to know that the Internet finally recognized the greatness of the SilverHawks.
(I immediately followed that thought up with how confused LCJS would be when I tried to explain The Internet to him, but alas, the fact remains.)
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There Are No Fat Baton Twirlers
I implore you to commit to the less than six minutes needed to listen to this David Foster Wallace excerpt. It’s him reading from “Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All” (aka The Illinois State Fair piece) at an unknown date and time.
It comes courtesy of The David Foster Wallace Audio Project.
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A 9-year-old died after being forced to run for... →
Yes, we definitely need less access to contraception in the good ‘ol U S of A.
/via TIME’s Twitter
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WatchSaturday Night Craft Project Stress Release.
(‘Suffer For Fashion’ by Of Montreal)
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A Question of Identity →
The incredibly poignant and thoughtful Jeremy Lin-centric writing continues, this time from Jay Caspian Kang. One of the many highlights from this piece:
If you stare at the word “ChiNkBaLLa88” for long enough, you begin to see, a bit more clearly, the reason why Linsanity has sparked such an intensity of emotion among Asian Americans. Within that strange, thoroughly American word...
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Mountain Lion: How Apple Let Us Do The Work For...
On this week’s episode of The Talk Show, listeners were treated to a recap (as well as a few behind-the-scenes details) of John Gruber’s experience with the Mountain Lion unveil.
At one point in the conversation, John, Dan, and John Siracusa (was it ever mentioned why he was there? If it was, I missed it.) were discussing why Apple had chosen to unveil Mountain Lion in the way that...
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U.S. Highways Mapped Like A Subway System →
If you woke up this morning and thought: Man, I really wish Cameron Booth would create a Tube-style map of U.S. interstate highways, then today’s about to get off to a great start.
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A Kind of Stolidly Productive Humility
10-10-95
Dear Don,
Since it’s clear from your letters that you’re a person nice, and since it’s well-known that an overkeen sense of obligation tends to afflict the congenitally nice, I again want to implore you not to feel any obligation to read the BM any faster¹ than your own schedule and inclinations permit. If Little/Brown’s Pietsch put blurb-pressure on you or...
“I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.”
– David Foster Wallace (via 4mbivalent)
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“You had The Look. It wasn’t fear, exactly. It was the sudden, glassy-eyed...”
– From Mark Lisanti’s piece on Grantland on Friday, which I thought was the perfect obit for the A.J. Burnett era in The Bronx. I actually sent Burnett a tweet this morning, as I do feel sympathy for him, simply because it must be pretty fucking difficult to wake up every day knowing that your...
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The Whitney Houston Funeral Gang Truce →
A lot of people posted/tweeted about this story on Saturday, and the accompany editorials intrigued me, as most were along the lines of, “Well why don’t they, out of respect, just stop being in a gang, period.”
From a sociological perspective, this brought me back to one of my favorite collegiate debates. What would a world with no gangs look like? One would assume the crime...
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E-books Can’t Burn →
I’m yet to hear an argument against ebooks that doesn’t fall back on “but that’s not the way we used to do it” logic in one form or another. I especially loved this:
But I want to go beyond practicality to the reading experience itself, our engagement with the text. What is it that these literary men and women are afraid of losing should the paper novel really go...
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“In Moscow, as soon as he moved into his huge house with the dried-and drying-up...”
– Leo Tolstoy, “War and Peace”
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“There was already a black man sitting there playing bongo drums. I hate bongo...”
– Donald Barthelme, “I Bought A Little City”
Listen to Donald Antrim read the entire story here.
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Guitar Zero: A Neuroscientist Debunks the Myth of... →
What I love about Brain Pickings is that it consistently presents topics/ideas/articles that push the boundaries of what you think that you know. It exhibits precisely why scientific thought is essential to the human experience and our world, and why external forces (read as: religion) that want to dampen the efforts of science are so dangerous.
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Mountain Lion →
Mountain Lion, the next version of Mac OS X, was announced this morning. The iPad-ification of the Mac continues with the addition of Messages, Notification Center, Reminders, Notes, and Game Center.
Also of note is Gatekeeper, which introduces a new middle ground between the download-whatever-app-you-want world of the Mac and the closed sandbox of iOS. Developers will be able to have their apps...
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““Brown was driving a vehicle with Robyn F. as the front passenger on an...”
– Chris Brown.
/via MTV News and Mike Api
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WatchAnd they tried to tell you that Hip Hop wasn’t doing anything for the community.