Archives for the 'Arts and Culture' Category
Neocon Career Advice
First two sentences of a book review by David “End to Evil” Frum in yesterday’s NYT:
In most lines of work, a person does his credibility real damage by denying the obvious and asserting the manifestly untrue. Yet in the book world, there can be very large rewards for a writer who boldly turns reality on its head.
The Literary Offenses of David Brooks
David Brooks’s latest, a disquisition on the difference between ‘geeks’ and ‘nerds,’ is cringe-inducing throughout, the sort of chatty exercise in pointless faux-hipness that makes you long for the cool logic of Maureen Dowd and the mellifluous metaphors of Thomas Friedman, but it was the following sentence that nearly made me swear off reading entirely:
Barack Obama has become the Prince Caspian of the iPhone hordes.
Why? Why??
“Great” Presidents: They’re Good for the Soul!
Scroll to the end of the audio of this Federalist Society debate on “Executive Discretion & the Rule of Law” for the following gem from the unsatirizable Harvey Mansfield:
Q: is the type of [presidential] greatness you’re talking about consistent with separation of powers [and is it] necessarily good for individuals?
A: ….Is it always good for the individual? No, if by good for the individual you mean make him more wealthy or more secure, but… what… what is good for your soul? what is good for your soul is something that enlarges it and makes it respect itself more and it gives you something to be proud of–and that’s what a great president does in our country. Our greatness is wrapped up in our great presidents.
Huh. And here I thought the ostensible purpose of the national government was to make the individual more prosperous and secure. And I thought that tasks like enlarging the soul and making it, er, respect itself more, were beyond the purview of the federal government’s chief magistrate, who was to have “no particle of spiritual jurisdiction.”
Shows how much I know. I mean, until HM published Manliness a few years back, I was inclined to doubt that you could learn much on the subject from some twee, tweed-jacketed fellow whose own bio brags that “he has hardly left Harvard since his first arrival in 1949.”
My Precioussss….
My God, the Kindle is great. And I say this even though the first one I got broke after about three hours (screen locked up and wouldn’t reset). My replacement arrived yesterday. This morning, it was like Jeeves had brought me the New York Times–it was right there when I woke up and all I had to do was reach for it.
One Thing at a Time
(Or none). In “The Autumn of the Multitaskers,” Walter Kirn explains why the only time I really seem to get anything done anymore is when I’m crammed into a tiny coach seat, forbidden to use electronic devices, and faced with the choice between doing some work and watching a Katherine Heigl movie.
Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on.
What does this mean in practice? Consider a recent experiment at UCLA, where researchers asked a group of 20-somethings to sort index cards in two trials, once in silence and once while simultaneously listening for specific tones in a series of randomly presented sounds. The subjects’ brains coped with the additional task by shifting responsibility from the hippocampus—which stores and recalls information—to the striatum, which takes care of rote, repetitive activities. Thanks to this switch, the subjects managed to sort the cards just as well with the musical distraction—but they had a much harder time remembering what, exactly, they’d been sorting once the experiment was over.
Even worse, certain studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy.
The next generation, presumably, is the hardest-hit. They’re the ones way out there on the cutting edge of the multitasking revolution, texting and instant messaging each other while they download music to their iPod and update their Facebook page and complete a homework assignment and keep an eye on the episode of The Hills flickering on a nearby television. (A recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 53 percent of students in grades seven through 12 report consuming some other form of media while watching television; 58 percent multitask while reading; 62 percent while using the computer; and 63 percent while listening to music. “I get bored if it’s not all going at once,” said a 17-year-old quoted in the study.) They’re the ones whose still-maturing brains are being shaped to process information rather than understand or even remember it.
This is the great irony of multitasking—that its overall goal, getting more done in less time, turns out to be chimerical. In reality, multitasking slows our thinking. It forces us to chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we’re interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly.
Speaking of flying/multitasking: about a week ago, I was in the bathroom at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, when a guy comes in quacking away on his bluetooth device, sidles right up next to me at the urinal, and continues talking (apparently to an assistant/employee) about an upcoming meeting, treating his associate to a cascading liquid symphony punctuated by autoflushes.
For the Raisins
It turns out I had another blogiversary while this site was on hiatus. I’ve missed blogging a bit during my near six-month break. But my feeling about the enterprise as a whole remains what it was two years ago in this post. Excerpt:
Have you ever spent an hour or so reading through your own archives? It’s like being trapped in a very tiny room being hectored by your clone. You don’t look like you think you look, sound like you think you sound. The effect is probably something like the dysphoria Nixon experienced when he had to read through the transcripts of his Oval Office tapes: “[expletive deleted]: is that really me?” And the thing is, I’m generally ok with what I write, in small doses. I wonder how some other people can keep it together after doing this exercise or surfing through some of the vast sea of crap out there.
My father once told the story of a colleague who had a recurring dream. He’s swimming through what seems like an endless sea of crap for what seems like hours, when he encounters another swimmer. “Crap! It’s all crap!” the first swimmer exclaims. “Ah, it’s not so bad,” replies the second swimmer, “every now and then, you get a raisin!”
And so, chin up, we swim on and on against the current. For the raisins.
You Had Me at “Live Lobsters”
So my dad, who, like me, is a fan of pulpy noir detective novels and shows, sends me an email telling me to set my Tivo for this. I click the link and read:
In the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant in Edinburgh, corrupt cop Brendan McCabe is being drowned in a tank of live lobsters.
That is perhaps the best sentence I’ve ever read.
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