- Blog
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I Stay Awake, My Brain Decays
I have written previously and with great despair of my (eventual?) surrender to sleep. By that, I mean giving in to the fact that I am older than I was when I could thrive on relatively little sleep, and given the realities of my daily life, relying on late-night internetting and whatnot for my treasured…
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Intrigued by the Depth of His Loathing
I’ve never read a Jonathan Franzen novel, and I’ve been inclined to maintain that status quo considering the territory Franzen has staked out as the Internet’s Chief Fist-Waver. At least, that’s the impression one might fairly get from the aggregate of his commentaries on technology in recent years. So, anyway, though I guess his books…
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Instead of Smaller Government, Let’s Elect Fewer Assholes
Ilya Somin kind of blew my mind with this piece at Cato’s website, and it briefly shook my belief in a strong central government. Briefly! Ever so briefly. What I think Somin gets right is the diagnosis of a particular problem: voters’ abysmal political ignorance. No matter how much smarter we as a society might…
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iOS and Android: Physical Logic and Cyber-land
Alex Payne helps me understand what really differentiates the ideas behind iOS and Android: Everything from Android’s name to its styling speaks to an aesthetic that’s technical and a touch retro-futuristic. After years on iOS, parts of Android look and feel cool, but the slightly anxiety-inducing cool of science fiction. The skeuomorphic approach that’s now…
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Catching You Up on “SVU” and “Downton Abbey”
Jed Groettum watched these shows so you don’t have to. Law & Order: SVU: A quick recap so far of that Law and Order SVU episode you just turned on halfway through: Some people were just walking along doing a normal everyday thing and they stumbled on a body. Then the detectives showed up and…
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In Case You Don’t Want to Be an Unpaid Spokesmodel
If you don’t want to have your mug showing up all over the Web, appearing to endorse products and services in Google’s ads, go to this site, scroll the bottom, and uncheck the box that says, “Based upon my activity, Google may show my name and profile photo in shared endorsements that appear in ads,”…
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Articles of Faith in Silicon Valley
There is a theme gaining traction in some of the writing I’ve come across lately, and I think I just want to flag it as a compelling topic to which I’d like to return in more depth. It’s the idea of Silicon Valley and the tech industry as a new kind of religious center, where…
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Struck in the Skull with a House of Worship
I woke in a bed. In a room. In an inn. More than that was not immediately clear to me. It felt exactly like someone had hit me in the head with a church. This is the character Kvothe from Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind after a day of danger and derring-do. Let…
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The Facts, Not in the Flow
Jeff Jarvis: . . . I have long believed that the real job of journalism is to add value to what a community knows — real value in the form of confirmation and debunking and context and explanation and most of all reporting to ask the questions and get the answers — the facts —…
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If We Were Taught to Feel
As I’ve noted several times before, one of my favorite promotions of Shakespeare, and indeed of all rich and substantive art, comes from the panhandling man interviewed in Al Pacino’s documentary Looking for Richard, who says: Intelligence is hooked with language. And when we speak with no feeling we get nothing out of our society.…
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A Forward from No One
I’ve asked this question on Twitter a number of times, but no one will respond, and it’s making me feel like I might be going crazy. So I’m going to sully my blog and hope one of my five or six readers will have an answer. Here’s the thing. For some reason, all but two…
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Attacked in the Park
This story about an out-of-the-blue attack in Riverside Park by a guy with scissors, slashing people up, stabbing a guy in the stomach, a woman in the neck, and even cutting a 2-year-old, well, it makes my heart race. After having actually experienced something like this (a beating by two assailants, not a stabbing, thank…
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The World Cannot Stand Idly By
Henry Porter, like me, can’t believe the U.S. populace puts up with its gun insanity epidemic, and wonders whether the rest of the civilized world should put up with it: That’s America, we say, as news of the latest massacre breaks – last week it was the slaughter of 12 people by Aaron Alexis at…
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Propagating Virtue Through Use (Or, Humanism as Inexhaustible Doritos)
A little while ago I posted about Claude S. Fischer’s piece exploring the phenomena of sympathy, and how our “moral circle” has expanded over time to allow us to feel sympathy or grief for the misfortunes of strangers and foreigners (in all senses of the word), and, incidentally, how at least in the West a…
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Let’s Rap.
pav dot quest 