I remember feeling like I’d never be able to breathe again. I ran to the den to find my parents, who were settled quietly on the couch, watching television. I can only imagine the alarm they felt—I tried to tell them what happened, but I kept choking on the words, and they assumed I must have been in some kind of physical pain. When I finally sobbed out a story about a girl stoning her bird to death, it took them a good while longer to understand that I was talking about something I’d read in a book.
Saturday, January 25, 2014
This is not just a geek thing. Everywhere lately, the here and now is the place to be. George Stephanopoulos, 50 Cent and Lena Dunham have all been talking up their meditation regimens. “I come from a long line of neurotic Jewish women who need it more than anyone,” Ms. Dunham, who’s been meditating since she was 9, told a capacity crowd last month at the David Lynch Foundation for Conscious Based Education and World Peace in New York. Then there was the tweet last April from @rupertmurdoch, who announced: “Trying to learn transcendental meditation. Everyone recommends, not that easy to get started, but said to improve everything!”
Any act of writing creates conditions for the author’s possible mortification. There is, I think, a trace of shame in the very enterprise of tweeting, a certain low-level ignominy to asking a question that receives no response, to offering up a witticism that fails to make its way in the world, that never receives the blessing of being retweeted or favorited. The stupidity and triviality of this worsens, rather than alleviates, the shame, adding to the experience a kind of second-order shame: a shame about the shame. My point, I suppose, is that the possibility of embarrassment is ever-present with Twitter—it inheres in the form itself unless you’re the kind of charmed (or cursed) soul for whom embarrassment is never a possibility to begin with.
Friday, January 24, 2014
You don’t need experiments to understand how this works; everyday life is full of it. In his Treatise on Elegant Living, Honoré de Balzac wrote a series of maxims for men of style, number 40 of which states: “Clothing is how society expresses itself.” Men’s clothing of the moment reveals a deep contradiction: Strength means weakness and weakness means strength. Everywhere you look, the weak look hard and the hard look weak. The man in the salmon-colored shirt fires the man in overalls. A face covered with Nazi prison tattoos is the face of a man as powerless as it is possible to be, while the face of Mark Zuckerberg, emanating gentle geekiness, projects his world-encircling billions. The amazing thing is that we live in a world filled with alpha males—most of the world’s billionaires are male, about 80 percent of American political offices are held by men, and 83 percent of all board seats of Fortune 500 companies are held by men. But our culture, at this point, seemingly has no way to express male strength outside of a camouflaged jokiness.
The Value of Work
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When I was eighteen, my car (a monstrous and monstrously large 1978 Lincoln Continental Mark V) broke down, its gigantic rear axle having refused to endure any more of the torture of propelling that beast down the highways of southeast Ohio.
At the time, I'd been seeing the girl I was dating for just shy of two months. One fine Sunday, we went to see her parents, who lived about an hour and a half north of us in a magnificent log cabin in the middle of nowhere. We hadn't been there long when I found myself on the front porch with my girlfriend's father, Bill, who maintained the 65-acre ranch, took care of the horses, the land, the family, in addition to holding down a full-time job in the city as an electrician.
We stood on the porch, he sipping his coffee and I marveling at the surrounding acreage and the cabin behind me, which Bill had built, as they say, with his own bare hands. At some point in the conversation, Bill pointed to a nearly new 1992 Cadillac in the driveway, and said "I want you to take it home."
The man (who'd known me but a few weeks, mind you) was offering me the use of his car while I figured out what to do with mine (a process, it turned out, that would take weeks). I was flabbergasted, and I'm sure it showed in my reaction. I politely declined, assuring him that I would figure something out (he was only worried about his daughter, after all), and after dinner, we left.
In the car we'd borrowed from another friend earlier in the day, we made our way home. I told my girlfriend about the offer, mentioning the two things that had struck me about the conversation. First, of course, was the offer itself. He was looking out for his daughter, yes, but to offer a Cadillac for an indefinite amount of time to the boy who was dating your daughter (a boy who, mind you, was eighteen years old- statistically, and realistically, the worst category of driver on the planet) was a level of generosity I'd not yet encountered in my young life.
What struck me most, though, was Bill's reaction when I declined: he looked hurt. What he said next has remained seared in my memory: It's just a possession, Rob.
I think I offended him, I told my girlfriend.
She confirmed. That's the type of man he is, she said.
I grew up in a small town, but I hadn't encountered this type of person yet. To me, Bill was straight out of a John Wayne movie- the kindest, gentlest soul you'd ever meet, but who wouldn't hesitate to tear your throat out if you crossed one of his three daughters. He built a cabin with his bare hands, was, I think, the original horse whisperer, and held honor to be the highest human virtue. Frankly, I adored the man.
Why do I mention this? Because this is the memory that came to mind when I read Miya Tokumitsu's piece in Slate on doing what you love. Some interesting points are made in the piece, like the fact that the realization of Steve Jobs' vision took countless workers on the other side of the world countless hours to bring to fruition. We'd all do well to remember those countless others typically behind any endeavor, let alone those of such monstrous scale.
The well-made points in the piece, though, are frustratingly rare. The main takeaway is this:
If we believe that working as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or a museum publicist or a think-tank acolyte is essential to being true to ourselves, what do we believe about the inner lives and hopes of those who clean hotel rooms and stock shelves at big-box stores? The answer is: nothing.
The doing what you love mantra, Tokumitsu argues, is offensive to those who do "regular" work. We would all do better to shut our traps and stop desecrating the sanctity of hard work. That Tokumitsu presumes to know the inner thoughts of everyone who does what they love is laughable.
No one in their right mind would ever tell Bill that what he does, as the head maintenance supervisor of a sizable building complex in Columbus, didn't matter, but the work itself had little to do with its value. Rather, it was Bill himself who made the work valuable. He approached it with the same dedication and sense of pride with which he approached everything, and it was that dedication that made the world better. It wasn't the work, it was the man behind the work.
At the same time, if Bill's dream had been to breed horses, who in their right mind would tell him that to follow that dream would be detrimental to society, that it would be offensive to those who weren't fortunate enough to follow their own dreams? I've been on the unfortunate side of this exchange, and I feel safe in saying that if I were offended by the notion of someone else doing what they love, simply because I could not, I would turn my gaze inward. It's a small person that begrudges others the right to do work they love.
The type of work that betters society has nothing to do with the job being done; rather, it's the approach to the work that matters. In condemning those of us who've chosen to do something we enjoy, Tokumitsu has missed the point entirely. Whether you're a stenographer or a cashier or a politician or a ditch digger is of no import. What matters is the pride you take in your work. Were a designer to quit his job and start freelancing to do what he loves, we'd know too little based on that fact alone to judge his decision. If we could see the work ethic he applies to his job, we'd be in a slightly better position to judge. If we could see the work ethic he applies to a more traditional job, like paving roads or installing windows, so much the better. Show me a man or woman who applies the same level of principle and pride to all these jobs equally, and I'll show you someone the world is better off for having been home to... regardless of what particular job they've chosen to do.
The latest cover story in The New Statesman, the British weekly that The New Republic shares content with, is a controversial article by Cristina Odone, a former editor at the magazine. Titled ‘The New Intolerance,’ Odone’s piece argues that Western liberalism has become intolerant of other points of views, specifically religious points of view, on issues like homosexuality. The article is incoherently argued, and ultimately confusing, but it also manages to highlight an annoying trend that Americans used to the so-called ‘War on Christmas’ have become accustomed to: the self-pity of religious majorities. Be proud, Americans: the phenomenon has gone global.
Sunday, January 19, 2014
So this is the most fundamental challenge we face in the attention economy: how do we pin down the wandering mind? How do we override the natural tendency for a mind to skip away from whatever we are showing it? By telling stories. In normal life, we spin about one-hundred daydreams per waking hour. But when absorbed in a good story—when we watch a show like Breaking Bad or read a novel like The Hunger Games—we experience approximately zero daydreams per hour. Our hyper minds go still and they pay close attention, often for hours on end. This is really very impressive. What it means is that story acts like a drug that reliably lulls us into an altered state of consciousness.
What these two world views, pop psychology and religion, have in common is a deep-seated need for meaning and order, for a system or a narrative that makes sense of the world. The idea that maybe nothing happens for a reason is deeply unsettling to many people. For the rationalist, regretting past events or actions is tantamount to admitting to the terrifying possibility that failing is as easy as knocking over a glass. Goal-based decision-making gives structure to what would otherwise be a series of random events, and accomplishing those goals gives the illusion of meaning. The idea that it’s always preferable to keep your eyes trained on the future, to look on the bright side, and to let go and let God take over is deeply ingrained in both rational and religious world views.
Saturday, January 18, 2014
If you exist for a long enough time on the Internet, you’ll lead lots of different lives there. You’ll become known first for one thing, and then, if you’re lucky, another. Creative life on the Internet is long, and made up of a bunch of bright intense bursts. Eyeballs all turn your way at once, and then they turn away. This all may add up to a certain kind of fame, but I think a better way of looking at it is that you just become part of the Internet’s furniture. People sit on you, people lie down on you and cry, people let their dogs put muddy paws all over you, people forget you in favor of another couch, people discover you again.
Back in July, Patricia Lockwood lit up the Internet with “Rape Joke,” a harrowing poem. Now, Lauren O’Neal interviews Lockwood, who talks about “Rape Joke,” the subsequent reaction and her 2012 book, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black. You could also read Elisa Gabbert on Lockwood’s Twitter followers. (via millionsmillions)
When I’d reached the end of the star tunnel a few minutes earlier, I’d tried to look into eternity myself. The tunnel aperture is wide up there, as wide as the orbit of Polaris, as viewed from Earth’s surface in 15,000AD. In my mind, I tried to go further than that. I tried to push past the current ‘great year’, the one bound by this specific cycle of precession. After all, Hipparchus might have seen deeper patterns in the sky than his predecessors, but he wasn’t the last link in the chain. Modern astronomers tell us that there are greater years than his, like the sun’s orbit around the black hole at the Milky Way’s heart, which takes nearly a quarter of a billion years to complete. In only a few million, the solar sphere will have blasted its way to a new part of the galaxy, bringing a fresh batch of stars into our sky. The current constellations will have faded from view, even those that sit close to the pole like Polaris. Star Axis will have fallen into ruin by then, but even if not, the aperture at the top of the tunnel will frame blackness. The celestial sphere that once symbolised eternity will have revealed itself to be a slave to larger cycles, immense increments of time that are themselves glimmers in a grander scheme. After all, this universe has rhythms that make the sun’s entire existence look like the flash of a firefly. Some of them are known, like the life cycle of cosmic energy, from big bang to heat death. Others are mysterious, and could forever remain so.
This is the most perfect thing I’ve read in some time. The writing and the subject are—almost literally—timeless.
Star Axis is a profound meditation on the sky – Ross Andersen – AeonFriday, January 17, 2014
I experimented with polyphasic sleep a few years ago and from that I have retained the ability to fall asleep quickly pretty much anywhere. My best trick is to pretend to be in REM sleep:P Find a comfortable position to sleep in, close your eyes and squint slightly while looking upwards, basically trying to look at the bridge of your nose. This should not hurt at all.
Forbid all thoughts of words and music.
Look for patterns in the random noise of your eyelids and try to “follow” it. Once you start seeing complete images you’re under way to dreamland. It’s ok to suddenly realize that you’re doing it and thus waking yourself up a little. Try again. Just relax, think about nothing and watch the pretty pictures. Don’t get upset if it takes a while—just keep going. Using this technique I normally fall asleep in 2-7 minutes.
When you’re anxious about something, it’s really hard to stop thinking about it and it would be better to write it down, thinking it through before sleeping.
Thursday, January 16, 2014
[gallery]
(1) President Abraham Lincoln, who had depression
(2) Writer Virginia Woolf, who had bipolar disorder
(3) Artist Vincent Van Gogh, who had bipolar disorder
(4) Writer Sylvia Plath, who had depression
(5) Mathematician John Nash (from A Brilliant Mind), who had schizophreniaInspired by this post
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Roger Ross Williams went to Uganda to interview Christian evangelicals who support (and encourage) the country’s new death penalty for homosexuality. When asked about his approach, Williams said he told the interviewees he just wanted to understand. Mind that the differences in opinion aren’t minor; these are people who believe that Williams himself should be imprisoned for his sexuality.
We’d all do well to emulate Williams, to seek only to understand our ideological opposites, rather than condemn.
(Source: http://media.mtvnservices.com/)
Monday, January 13, 2014
Remember — until the mid-seventeenth century, most people in England were either slightly — or very — drunk all of the time. Drink London’s fetid river water at your own peril; most people wisely favoured watered-down ale or beer (“small beer”). The arrival of coffee, then, triggered a dawn of sobriety that laid the foundations for truly spectacular economic growth in the decades that followed as people thought clearly for the first time. The stock exchange, insurance industry, and auctioneering: all burst into life in 17th-century coffeehouses — in Jonathan’s, Lloyd’s, and Garraway’s — spawning the credit, security, and markets that facilitated the dramatic expansion of Britain’s network of global trade in Asia, Africa and America.
It’s hard to overstate how much I loved this little lesson on the history of coffeehouses: The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse
Sunday, January 12, 2014
Introverts, in contrast, may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions.
There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists.
Derrick Jensen, from A Language Older Than Words. (via modernhepburn)
Input/ Output
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2013, as every other year, was a year in which many good and many bad things happened. Things were created, and things were destroyed. Hopes were dashed, and hopes were lifted. Many breathed their last, and many breathed their first.
We all witnessed the spectrum of these happenings; they happened to all of us. The only real difference (excepting extreme circumstances) is how we responded.
The problems of the modern world are at once fewer and greater than those of ages past. Fewer because we’ve devised solutions for many of our troubles: our collective health is on the rise; disease on the decline. Access to education is broader than ever before. Journeys, today, take minutes or hours, where they once took days, weeks, or even months.
Some solutions have tackled less ambitious problems. We can order food without leaving our house, and it is delivered to our door. We can now boil water in a matter of minutes. Books, gateways to other worlds, can be had for a trivial amount, and we can see the face of another soul, from halfway around the world, by clicking a couple of buttons on a screen.
And yet. And yet. We criticize. We lament. We complain. We deride.
This derision is popping up more and more on the web.
I get this shit all day. Every day. pic.twitter.com/5WlYw8nhqi
— Lizz Winstead (@lizzwinstead) January 6, 2014The above tweet is from Lizz Winstead, comedian and founder of The Daily Show. She’s an incredibly smart and funny woman, and I highly recommend you follow her. That said, she has a tendency I find odd, but not unusual. Like anyone with a public persona and a large following, she opens herself up to ridicule (and flat-out dickheadedness) every day. That’s not her fault, of course; it’s the nature of the medium. What I find odd is that Lizz so rarely retweets or in any way publicizes positive interactions on Twitter. Instead, she emphasizes only the mouth-breathing lunatics that try to pick a fight with her.
That tendency, from what I can tell, is not a Lizz tendency, but a human one. I’ve noticed the same behavior in others with large followings. Salmon Rushdie comes to mind, and a few others.
And I get it. This has happened to me, and I understand the compulsion to call these idiots out, to open their hatred to public ridicule. I understand, too, that the problem is not limited to the internet, but is a more underlying feature of human nature- we emphasize the negative far more than the positive. But if Thoreau was right, and the price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for something, Winstead is paying a high price for these trolls.
This phenomenon is also playing out across various media publishers. Mat Honan writes a controversial piece, and Mark Wilson calls bullshit. Biz Stone makes something, and Selena Larson explains why it sucks.
Again, I don’t think this is an anomaly; I think it’s one of the more pernicious aspects of human nature. It’s the same part of us that succumbs to gossip, or writes a snarky tweet to NBC after they cancelled Community, or criticizes someone else’s parenting ability.
It’s a way to make us feel superior.
That is the only thing that’s accomplished by criticism of this kind. The other kind of criticism—invited, constructive, helpful—is another thing entirely. It’s not only welcome, it’s necessary to a healthy relationship, to a functioning society. It lifts, it corrects, it inspires, it changes.
And that change is central to life. It’s not the exception, it’s the rule. Every organism, in fact, maintains a sense of constancy only through its openness to being modified by its environment, as David Barash recently explained:
Paradoxically, maintaining a state of apparent constancy (i.e., life) requires continual openness to change, in this case exchange with an organism’s environment. When that exchange ceases, so does life; although even then, every body continues to change, whether via decomposition, incorporation into another body, or incineration.
We regularly underestimate the relationship we have with our environment, with what we expose ourselves to, and what we expose others to. That relationship may, in fact, extend further than we ever thought possible. In the documentary film I Am, Rollin McCraty of Heartmath electronically links filmmaker Tom Shadyac with a small amount of yogurt, the composition of which is monitored for the duration of the connection. When Shadyac refers to (and consequently thinks about) things such as his lawyer, the actual composition of the yogurt changes to reflect Shadyac’s state of mind. It's not some abstract emotional impact we have on our environment, and consequently, others- we actuallly create physical changes in the people and things around us (perhaps that's why misery loves company, and why laughter is contagious).
The purest essence of what it means to live well is being conscious of both what we let in (to our minds, to our bodies, to our psyche) and what we emit (through facial expressions, status updates, deeds, work, and even attitude). And while we can control our consumption to a certain degree, we are not an effective filter. Try as we might, we still let in harmful things, and that’s not about to change. What can change, however, is the process by which we synthesize the input once it’s already inside of us. Just as a healthy person will better digest a meal than an unhealthy person, so a healthy mind will more effectively recognize and filter those thoughts, dreams, and emotions that compose our mental state at any given time.
That means that, though we can’t control the input to a great degree, we can control the output, which, in turn, affects the next input. When Lizz chooses to put more emphasis on the hateful backlash to her own thoughts, she recycles, albeit unwittingly, that hatred, telling the world that ignorance and hatred are welcome here; I will nourish it. And the cycle continues.
If all of this sounds complicated, thorny, even muddy, that’s because it is. There is no one great insight I can give, no one sentence I can write that will fully encompass the strength that emotional and mental muscles need to combat hatred, or ignorance, or resistance to change. It is, as they say, a process. It’s not knowledge that strengthens those muscles, it’s the very process by which knowledge is acquired. That process begins with the simple, deliberate intention to be more aware of our relationship to our environment, be it the birds overhead or the keyboards at our fingertips.
I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors.
Jorge Luis Borges (via liquidnight)
Saturday, January 11, 2014
And this is where it gets a little tricky. Because even though linguists are fairly strict with their definition of code-switching, there are anthropologists and sociologists and philosophers and theorists who persuasively suggest that you can code-switch within a language depending on who you happen to be talking with, or your intention, based on relationships and personal and communal identities. Some recent sociolinguistic studies suggested that people have a few basic reasons for code-switching. For one thing, we want to fit in, so we often code-switch as a way of showing solidarity. We sometimes code-switch subconsciously in this kind of situation. I’d intuitively choose the word “try,” for instance, when I’m sitting on the Greyhound bus out of Salt Lake City, talking to the friendly trucker next to me who’s deadheading back from LA to Indianapolis. We talked for, like, two hours about how to make the perfect Bolognese, and disagreed only about whether or not the milk was really important. But I’d probably intuitively go with “attempt” if I were asking a question of a panelist at an academic conference. Well, depending on the panel. People code-switch for all kinds of contexts, including social class, age, race, and other kinds of origin. A lot of us have identities that belong to more than one discourse. Of course, the darker side of solidarity is less about belonging and more about hiding. Or perhaps more aptly, passing.
Friday, January 10, 2014
Patina of the Web
I’m a big advocate of the value of aged goods. A good patina on an old bowl, a wooden handle worn smooth by years of use, corners rounded off the edges of old bricks. But when I build a website, a few years on, it doesn’t have patina. It doesn’t become better with age. It might start to break in places if not maintained, as browsers and server software march onward. But could those time-induced rough edges ever be seen as pleasant? Will we ever have a digital equivalent to patina?
Sunday, January 5, 2014
She advocates limiting our device usage in “sacred spaces” like the dinner table, the places where phones and their enticements may impede intimacy and interaction. She wants us to look into each other’s eyes as we talk. She wants us to read each other’s movements. She wants us to have conversations that are supremely human.
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