Well, as I mentioned last month, I like to take a month a year off of looking at any news. And it’s always August, because the combination of nothing happening in August and the need/desire of news to keep people breathlessly interested, means that August is a time for swift boating, death panels, shocking fake-heartfelt …
You should be watching Mad Men.
Ok, this is some pretty good looking stuff. Loving the dude with the white shirt. (via J Kottke.
I always liked Howard Zinn. Along with Studs Turkel, he defined for me an old-school commitment to listening to people and caring about what they said and did, without great self-promotion. Hearing about his passing today, I wonder where the Zinn’s of today and tomorrow are. Time for a drink and another pass through A …
I have a sort of interesting question, though perhaps it’s less interesting than I imagine it to be. Given the following two scenarios, which is more likely and why? Scenario 1: In the first case, we have a series of attributes attached to a person, and then we can make arguments (empirical, theoretical) about how …
Gabriel had a thoughtful post about Jay Leno, comparing his programming to NPR and classical music over the past couple decades. I’m much more sympathetic to Grant McCracken’s view of Leno as a failure because he misses the contemporary moment’s desire for specificity and instead provides the blandest of something-for-everyone variety. Though McCracken and Rossman …
Ok, this is impressive. And I’ve seen Primer three times and still don’t 100% have the timeline worked out.
November 2, 2009 – 10:14 am
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By Peter
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Posted in Culture
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One of Erving Goffman’s brilliant insights is the extent to which people engage in presentations of self. Front-stage behavior is the display meant for ‘public’ consumption: witty, urbane, dangerous, smart, smooth, down-to-earth, intellectual, anti-intellectual. This depends on the audience, of course, and it is meant to make oneself look good. Backstage behavior is closer to …
There’s a longer post I intend on the ways political/social discourse gets hijacked by experts, well-covered territory to be sure but important nevertheless. In the meantime, I’m still on something of a news hiatus. So I am coming to this a little belatedly. Apparently, Niall Ferguson, a professor dude who writes about money, wrote an …
I’m feeling a little like all I do is complain round here. This site on the impossible cool is 99% awesomeness. Does that help to offset some of my crotchety-ness?
One of the more interesting notions in the social studies of finance over the past decade has been the idea of performativity. Discussions about the concept abound, both online and off – (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)….and the list goes on. I’m only pointing at a very few of the pieces. In art, the …
Awards should definitely be given out those who are willing & able to connect Michael Jackson’s death to their own personal research perspective / business idea / hobby horse. Kudos.
My partner and I have been talking a lot about non-profits of late, and some of the thinking about expertise that came out of these discussions is possibly worth sharing (at least to the extent that anything really is on the intertubes). I want to give credit to partner without assigning blame for my viewpoint. …
Frankie Manning died yesterday, April 27th. He was a month shy of his 95th birthday. There were (and are) celebrations planned, which will now become memorials. My partner and I started taking swing lessons a good 7-8 years ago, and we’ve probably taken a few workshops a year since then. We go dancing occasionally (a …
It’s true. Partner and I saw This American Life, simulcast at a movie theater from NYU. The show will air in a couple weeks, I think. The theme was “Return to the Scene of the Crime”, and the highlights (IMHO) were Dan Savage’s tear-inducing story about his lapsed Catholicism, and Joss Whedon’s performance of a …
In another frame of mind, I would say that some crowd-sourced reviews do make me happy. ‘Skip S’ reviews Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion on iTunes: Okay. Imagine sitting back in the day with none other than the Buddha himself. The two of you are discussing life, love, and various other zen things. Then, all …
It seems to me that one of the fundamental advances and problems with web 2.0 is that it poses expertise against aggregation. The ‘old’ system (and here I would say that these are overlapping, not coterminous ways of doing things) is one of expert reviews, or critics. You want to know what movie to see, …
The world would be better if people made this salad more. It takes less than 5 minutes. Materials: a salad bowl and tongs for salad; a small-ish bowl, a small spoon, and a whisk for dressing Ingredients: (for the salad) a big bag of mixed green salad walnuts (toasted a few minutes in a dry …