Now as we scroll through our feeds we are looking for signals to be inspired, for emotion, for an itch that needs to be scratched. Whether the content is created by a trusted publisher, Vine celebrity, or a brand, the constant remains that we are looking at headlines to telegraph emotion and indicate value. From a marketing perspective, Upworthy co-founder Peter Koechley summed it up perfectly at the Native Advertising Summit when he said, “Headlines are one of the most undervalued parts of online messaging. People care about them, people know to care about them, but still it’s the easiest way to dramatically increase the virality of everything you do and I guarantee that you’re not spending enough time on it.”
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Monday, December 30, 2013
In many ways, we’re fine-tuning our sharing behavior toward what attracts the most attention, posting images and videos that we think will get the biggest response and comments. Instagram Direct seems to be a response, or an acknowledgement of that shift. Which is not to say that Instagram Direct will somehow goad people into sharing their most private moments — it’s still a mass-market product from Facebook, after all. But it arrives at a time when people seem to be eager for better and less public ways to interact with their friends. That is the quiet cleverness of Instagram Direct.
My wife Kate is on Twitter, @knittyliciousUK. There’s no point sending her cards in the post, so I tuck them under her pillow. She tells me a few days later that she doesn’t know how to respond, other than to say “Thank you” as we eat breakfast. “Thank you,” she says. “My pleasure,” I reply. “You’re mad,” she says. “I know,” I reply.
John Densmore, the Doors drummer, is amazed by the fact that he’s asked for autographs wherever he goes these days — mainly by fifteen-year-olds far too young to have ever heard the band perform. “About three years ago, my nieces in Boston — who were about thirteen — told me that their classmates were into the Doors,” says Densmore. “It isn’t like it stopped for ten years, but in the last few years, it’s a big business again.” In fact, some of Densmore’s friends have begun asking him to sign their old Doors records. As one told him: “Shit, your guys are famous again.”
Sunday, December 29, 2013
The ability to corral conflicting, sometimes competitive interests under one banner that has made Linux so successful. It has motivated wildly disparate companies and individual developers to shape Linux to meet their needs. As Apache Software Foundation president Jim Jagielski told me, “Building a kernel is easy, compared to building a healthy and viable community. Linux succeeds because the community does.”
“In general, Swedes are a shy species,” said Carl Waldekranz, co-founder of Tictail, a Stockholm-based start-up, which allows Main Street retailers to start an online store in a couple of clicks. “The law of Jante is part of our culture. It tells us that no one can be better than anyone else.” Such self-deprecation is increasingly hard to justify after a number of Swedish tech brands have become global leaders.
I’ve always been attached to the platonic idea of an attic, where traditional families who live in the same house for forever stick their prized possessions and junk, so that other family members can go up and trawl through it at watershed points in their lives to discover some curio that leads them to a cave under a seasonal restaurant that contains a fully intact 18th-century pirate ship.
This concept of an attic didn’t fit with my family’s life for obvious reasons. But as I’ve moved around and learned, at least corporeally, to let go of stuff, the attic has started to turn out to be in a corner of my cloud storage. It may not be precisely
Saturday, December 28, 2013
But for our economy and society to function, participants must trust that the system is reasonably fair. Trust between individuals is usually reciprocal. But if I think that you are cheating me, it is more likely that I will retaliate, and try to cheat you. (These notions have been well developed in a branch of economics called the “theory of repeated games.”) When Americans see a tax system that taxes the wealthiest at a fraction of what they pay, they feel that they are fools to play along. All the more so when the wealthiest are able to move profits off shore. The fact that this can be done without breaking the law simply shows Americans that the financial and legal systems are designed by and for the rich.
View my 7 latest photos on Flickr: http://flic.kr/u/uSJwW/aHsjPAHnyy
That does it. South Africa is on my bucket list.
Attention is a mental muscle, and can be strengthened with the right practice. The basic move to enhance concentration in the mental gym: put your focus on a chosen target, like your breath. When it wanders away (and it will), notice that your mind has wandered. This requires mindfulness, the ability to observe our thoughts without getting caught up in them.
Blogging forces you to write down your arguments and assumptions. This is the single biggest reason to do it, and I think it alone makes it worth it. You have a lot of opinions. I’m sure some of them you hold strongly. Pick one and write it up in a post—I’m sure your opinion will change somewhat, or at least become more nuanced. When you move from your head to “paper,” a lot of the hand-waveyness goes away and you are left to really defend your position to yourself.
Highlighted by Rian van der Merwe in Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better by Clive Thompson (via rianvdm)
The entire idea of rereading implies just such a likeable and progressive assumption about life, one that’s meant to keep us interested in living it: namely, that as you get further along, you find out more valuable stuff; familiarity doesn’t always give way to dreary staleness, but often in fact to celestial understandings; that life and literature both are layered affairs you can work down through.
[…]
Rereading a treasured and well-used book is a very different enterprise from reading a book the first time. It’s not that you don’t enter the same river twice. You actually do. It’s just not the same you who does the entering. By the time you get to the second go-round, you probably know—and know more about—what you don’t know, and are possibly more comfortable with that, at least in theory. And you come to a book the second or third time with a different hunger, a more settled sense about how far off the previously-mentioned great horizon really is for you, and what you do and don’t have time for, and what you might reasonably hope to gain from a later look.
Richard Ford on rereading. Lest we forget, Nabokov put it best: “A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” (via explore-blog)
There’s been a flood of handwringing op-eds lately about how glassy-eyed mobile-phone zombies are ignoring each other at the restaurant instead of talking to another another. I think these pundits are somewhat overblowing the frequency of this behavior, frankly. Very similar alarms were raised about the wave of supposedly society-ending isolation that would wreaked by previous newfangled media — like the telephone in the late 19th century, and the Walkman in the ’80s. We didn’t suffer a social apocalypse then, and I don’t think we’re going to suffer one now.
Thursday, December 26, 2013
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all it’s contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
H.P. Lovecraft (via ndrsltr)
Wednesday, December 25, 2013
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
Each time you open a book and read it,
A tree smiles knowing there’s life after death
Unknown (via 13thmoon)
Monday, December 23, 2013
If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.
Pioneering scientist Rachel Carson on wonder, parenting, and why it’s more important to feel than to know. (via explore-blog)
Sunday, December 22, 2013
"What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is I definable, it is because at first he is nothing.
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism and Human Emotions”
Thursday, December 19, 2013
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Monday, December 16, 2013
Sunday, December 15, 2013
Why I (Must) Write
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I started writing poetry in grade school. Encouraged by even the slightest praise, I kept writing poems throughout high school. What I wrote was too abstract to be good- my poems had the slipperiness of an eel soaked in butter. They were abstract because my thoughts were abstract; I didn’t quite know what I wanted to say
If I try to write poetry today, the result is much the same. Someone (perhaps it’s apt that I forget who) once said that, if you write poetry at twenty, it’s because you’re twenty. If you write poetry at forty, it’s because you’re a poet.
A poet I’m not. I know that now. I write essays now, and copy. I ghostwrite ebooks and newsletters and blog posts. I’ve developed some skill in those areas, mostly through sheer persistence and hard work, but also because there’s a seed of talent buried somewhere within me.
I love writing the things I write. It calms me, frees me, answers some questions, and asks some more. Still, it’s stories that I want to write. The itch first began a couple of years ago. I knew I could write well, so fiction simply seemed like the next step.
So I set about writing stories, and discovered that it was hard—really hard—to write fiction. To be honest, I was a bit taken aback. If I was a good writer, why couldn’t I write stories? I tried again, and again, thinking that perhaps my lack of ability was a fluke- maybe the story I was trying to write just wasn’t the right story. So I wrote another. And another. And another.
None of them were good, so I continued. Two years later, I’m just starting to get my bearings in the world of fiction. And one thought keeps nagging me: why do I persist? Why not just stick to blog posts and newsletters? Why do I feel this compulsion to write stories? The answer, of course, is complicated. For starters, there is a nugget of ability somewhere in me; I know that as deeply as I know anything. I feel a tug every time I read a great story and think I wish I’d written that.
It’s more than that, though. I’ve always felt a moral obligation to write stories, an inexplicable feeling of responsibility, of duty, not unlike the responsibility I felt in serving my country in the Navy.
That’s the aspect of my motivation that I’ve been questioning lately, that I’ve been wrestling with. Turns out my subconscious has been wrestling with this problem, too, and it finally revealed the answer to me during a recent conversation with a friend.
This friend had recently attended a conference for work. When I asked him how the conference had gone, he spent no time on the material presented; instead, he told me about many of the other people who’d attended. In recounting many of their behaviors, he could barely disguise the disgust in his voice. They had been rude, self-involved, pushy, demanding.
Not a single detail escaped his lips about the content of the conference- the presentations, the speakers, the food, the hotel. It was all about the people, with a continuous subtext of how superior he was to each of them.
This is why I want to tell stories, I thought. My friend badly needed a dose of empathy, and stories increase our empathy by letting us see things from someone else’s point of view. They teach us that other people live lives just as compex, as difficult, as real as ours. They teach us to step outside of our incredibly limited perspectives and see the world for what it really is: a vast labyrinth of interwoven stories.
While this connected a couple of dots, it wasn’t the final answer. I’d known of empathy’s relationship with empathy prior to this conversation. What I don’t think I realized is just how foundational a lack of empathy is to many of our problems as a society.
In a brilliantly written essay, Mandy Brown explores the notion of a meritocracy through (what else?) a story published in the late 1950s. It’s a timely and necessary topic, since so many have been throwing around the word (meritocracy) lately. Brown explains that, not only are we not living in a meritocracy, but we don’t want to, either, since what a true meritocracy would look like is nothing like what we envision.
...the real meritocracy isn’t one in which every person is judged equally, and any privileges or systemic disadvantages are swept out of the way. The meritocracy we have is one in which the illusion of merit is used to justify the neglect of those less fortunate. That meritocracy is deployed not in order to give everyone an equal opportunity to achieve, but to defend the preexisting structures of power.
The word that struck me here was judged.
Judgement is the most acceptable form of sickness known to man. And make no mistake, it is a sickness. It’s vile, and it twists and contorts our otherwise lovely little hearts into horrific caricatures of themselves.
And it’s everywhere. We judge women, we judge gays, we judge the poor. We judge our neighbors, our colleagues, our friends. Oppression, both large- and small-scale, occurs because a person or group of persons judges another unfairly. The poor are lazy, so let’s punish them. Women are whores, so let’s punish them. Immigrants are taking our jobs, so let’s punish them. My neighbor is a horrible parent, that guy who cut me off in traffic is an asshole, my sister is spoiled.
This is it; this is the problem. Think for just a minute about a world without judgement. Lovely image, isn’t it?
Of course, we’ll never know a world without judgement, but we can use what we know to wound this beast, to keep it at bay.
The only way we do that is through stories, because (remember!) stories cultivate empathy, which destroys judgement.
This is the role of the writer, the role that I’ve decided to take on. Like Vonnegut, I’m disgusted with civilization:
Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization.
Lest you confuse my disgust for civilization with misanthropy, consider this: I’m not arguing against humanity; I’m arguing for it. A state of judgement is not our natural state; a state of empathy is. We’re hardwired for storytelling, which means we’ve a natural predilection for a society in which empathy dominates and judgement withers.
And so I had my answer. This is why I feel the need to write stories, why I so revere masters of fiction, because their work is more than fantasy: it is an antidote to the most pernicious and disgusting aspects of ourselves. A story is not an escape, it is a salve, it is medicinal. It is the antidote to the sickness.
The necessity of nowness plus the professionalization of content production for the stream means that there are thousands and thousands of people churning out more crap than can possibly be imagined. And individual consumers of information have been tuned by social-media feedback mechanisms (Likes!) to do for free what other people do for money. They, too, write viral headlines, post clickbait, and compete for mindshare. I am not joking when I say: it is easier to read Ulysses than it is to read the Internet. Because at least Ulysses has an end, an edge. Ulysses can be finished. The Internet is never finished.
Saturday, December 14, 2013
Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon.
Joseph Conrad, from “A Familiar Preface” to A Personal Record (via liquidnight)
Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.
Friday, December 13, 2013
Eggers, Scocca concludes, is “full of shit,” and with that he is off, for many thousand more words. It is an artful performance, with a number of fine moments. At one point, Scocca quotes me on the deliberate streak of optimism in my work—and he is not wrong in locating in that attitude a subtle self-interest. In being nice to the world, the writer obliges the world to be nice to him. But Scocca has larger ambitions: he wants to argue that the tyranny of niceness is the defining feature of our age, and he wants to make Dave Eggers the poster child for this movement. And it is here, I think, that his essay falters.
Thursday, December 12, 2013
As the majority of ghostwriters sign nondisclosure agreements, it’s impossible to know exactly how many books are ghostwritten each year. The president of Arbor Books, which furnishes ghostwriters, told us, “From what I’ve seen, I’d imagine a billion dollar industry.” The president of a similar firm estimated that at least 25% of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list is ghostwritten and that when a celebrity or politician is involved, “It’s nearly 100%.”
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Shlomo’s English was good. He told me about the Dead Sea Scrolls. He told me about Brazilian agronomy. He told me about Joseph Stiglitz.
Shlomo said, “I ask myself, who are the wisest people in the world? The answer is: the Jews. This is well-known.
“And who are the wisest Jews? A moment’s reflection reveals that Russian Jews are the wisest.
“Next we must discover who are the wisest of these Russian Jews. And the answer comes back, clearly the people of Odessa.
“So who are the wisest Jews in Odessa? The members of the old synagogue.
“It’s plain to see, then, that the wisest man in the world must be Rabbi Loew, chief rabbi of the old synagogue of Odessa. But he’s such an idiot.”
And Amatsia said, “My brain is fucking.” He meant his memory was going bad. Asked for an example, he explained that in the army he had once carried a dead man on his back for two days and now he couldn’t remember the man’s name. He shook his head. “Fucking,” he said.
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
That we’ve gotten to this point is astonishing to me because basically in winning its victory, in seeing that Wall come down and seeing the former Stalinist state’s journey towards our way of thinking in terms of markets or being vulnerable, you would have thought that we would have learned what works. Instead we’ve descended into what can only be described as greed. This is just greed. This is an inability to see that we’re all connected, that the idea of two Americas is implausible, or two Australias, or two Spains or two Frances. Societies are exactly what they sound like. If everybody is invested and if everyone just believes that they have “some”, it doesn’t mean that everybody’s going to get the same amount. It doesn’t mean there aren’t going to be people who are the venture capitalists who stand to make the most. It’s not each according to their needs or anything that is purely Marxist, but it is that everybody feels as if, if the society succeeds, I succeed, I don’t get left behind. And there isn’t a society in the west now, right now, that is able to sustain that for all of its population.
The angels appeared to his mother and predicted that the son whom she would conceive would become the greatest the stars had ever seen. He was so great that he even forgave the crimes of his greatest enemies and shook brotherly hands with those who had plotted against his life. His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.’
At the time of this writing, there are sixteen thousand two hundred and seventy-seven days remaining in my life. I know this because an app I have installed on my phone tells me so. I downloaded it about a week ago, back when I still had sixteen thousand two hundred and eighty-four days left to live, a number that strikes me in retrospect as an embarrassment of riches, days-wise. By the time you read this, I will have even fewer days left to live. Depending on the turnaround time for this piece, I could be down to a number as low as sixteen thousand two hundred and seventy. I’m running out of days here, is what the app is telling me, in its bluntly literal way.
Monday, December 9, 2013
If the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books, as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA.
Susan Hill, Howards End is on the Landing (via booksandghosts)
Indeed, the all-inclusive facilities of Google, Apple, Facebook and their planned expansions are a precise reflection of the spirit of Silicon Valley — a spirit that is an intriguing paradox: It combines a disciplined domination of the market with the freedom of the creative hippie artist. In the 1990s, media theorists Richard Barbook and Andy Cameron coined the term “California ideology” to describe this phenomenon. “This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley,” they wrote. This has created a peculiar ideological mixture of right-wing and left-wing, ultra-individualistic and ultra-capitalistic beliefs, ranging from liberalism to anti-statism.
That we’ve gotten to this point is astonishing to me because basically in winning its victory, in seeing that Wall come down and seeing the former Stalinist state’s journey towards our way of thinking in terms of markets or being vulnerable, you would have thought that we would have learned what works. Instead we’ve descended into what can only be described as greed. This is just greed. This is an inability to see that we’re all connected, that the idea of two Americas is implausible, or two Australias, or two Spains or two Frances. Societies are exactly what they sound like. If everybody is invested and if everyone just believes that they have “some”, it doesn’t mean that everybody’s going to get the same amount. It doesn’t mean there aren’t going to be people who are the venture capitalists who stand to make the most. It’s not each according to their needs or anything that is purely Marxist, but it is that everybody feels as if, if the society succeeds, I succeed, I don’t get left behind. And there isn’t a society in the west now, right now, that is able to sustain that for all of its population.
Saturday, December 7, 2013
There’s an analogy here with every journalist who has ever looked at the Web and said “Well, it needs an editor.” The Web has an editor, it’s everybody. In a world where publishing is expensive, the act of publishing is also a statement of quality — the filter comes before the publication. In a world where publishing is cheap, putting something out there says nothing about its quality. It’s what happens after it gets published that matters. If people don’t point to it, other people won’t read it. But the idea that the filtering is after the publishing is incredibly foreign to journalists.
Clay Shirky, Ontology is overrated (via stewartmccoy)
Friday, December 6, 2013
Monday, December 2, 2013
These theories also share an understanding that people in Western society are generally uncomfortable admitting that who they are might be partly, or perhaps deeply, structured and performed. To be a “poser” is an insult; instead common wisdom is “be true to yourself,” which assumes there is a truth of your self. Digital-austerity discourse has tapped into this deep, subconscious modern tension, and brings to it the false hope that unplugging can bring catharsis.
And the industry’s seemingly endless capacity to perpetuate itself matters. Marketing is not simply a mirror of our prevailing aspirations. It systematically promotes and presents a specific cluster of values that undermine pro-social and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour. In other words, the more that we’re encouraged to obsess about the latest phone upgrade, the less likely we are to concern ourselves with society’s more pressing problems. That’s a reason to want to keep a careful tab on advertising’s elusive and ephemeral forms.
Sunday, December 1, 2013
Part of the allure is simple gluttony: If you’re loving a book, it’s delightful to know that there’s plenty of it. But I believe there’s also an inherent appeal in fat novels, something that only written fiction can offer and that short stories, for all their felicities, aren’t able to provide. You can be swallowed up by a long novel, immersed in the world its author has created in a fashion that no other medium can rival. No, not even boxed sets of HBO series consumed in day-long binges! This immersion reminds many of us of our first, luxuriant plunges into books as children, and any author who can take us back to the place where we forget where we are and how much time has passed will pretty much have us eating out of her hand for good.
I am so grateful for not wishing I could believe any more. That wish always triggered a circular avalanche of unsolvable riddles, the only answer to which is “accepting the mystery,” and that I can’t do; thus, I can’t really “belong.” It is, quite frankly, a miracle that I am free of that heartache and of all its piggybacking miseries. Is it possible to thank God for removing the longing for God? Because I do. I may find “God” elsewhere. I may find that concept useless. Doesn’t matter, really.
It is difficult to be shy in the digital age, but impossible to be honest. So often our self-portraits are of the selves we would like to become: they are aspirational, always attempting to make us into someone other than who we are. As Ashbery writes: “Tomorrow is easy, but today is uncharted, / Desolate, reluctant.”
All those millions of selfies filling our albums and feeds are rarely of the selves who lounge in sweatpants or eat peanut butter from the jar, the selves waiting in line at the unemployment office, the selves who are battered and abused or lonely and depressed. Even though the proliferation of self-portraits suggests otherwise, we are still self-conscious.
The most important insight I gained by forgoing an M.F.A. program in favor of launching a Tumblr was learning that to be successful, I didn’t need a particular degree, or any specific family background or life experience. I didn’t have to apply to a writing program or have a friend who knew somebody. All I needed to do was make good content. Starting “Fairy Tales for Twenty-Somethings” helped me grow as an artist and writer and gave me the confidence to write the book. I needed to have an audience in order to learn how to write.
Fair treatment for writers and artists is an even more difficult matter, which will ultimately require a major change in how we think about support for the arts. Fortunately, however, we already have an excellent model, in our support of athletics. Despite our general preference for capitalism, our support for sports is essentially socialist, with local and state governments providing enormous support for professional teams. To cite just one striking example, the Minnesota State Legislature recently appropriated over $500 million to help build the Vikings a new stadium. At the same time, the Minnesota Orchestra is close to financial disaster because it can’t erase a $6 million deficit. If the Legislature had diverted only 10 percent of its support for football, it would have covered that deficit for the next eight years.
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