Photo taken by Kathy Santamore.
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He Just Wasn’t Made for These Times
The Nate Silver saga: Silver leaves the New York Times for ESPN, and the Times’ public editor says, essentially, we didn’t want him anyway:
I don’t think Nate Silver ever really fit into the Times culture and I think he was aware of that….His entire probability-based way of looking at politics ran against the kind of political journalism that The Times specializes in: polling, the horse race, campaign coverage, analysis based on campaign-trail observation, and opinion writing, or “punditry,” as he put it, famously describing it as “fundamentally useless.” . . . I was surprised to quickly hear by e-mail from three high-profile Times political journalists, criticizing him and his work. They were also tough on me for seeming to endorse what he wrote, since I was suggesting that it get more visibility.
Kevin Drum is agog at this attitude:
Even for those of us who are pretty cynical about political reporting, this is astonishing. If I were editor of the Times, I’d do whatever it took to find out who those three are, and then fire them instantly. Whoever they are, they shouldn’t be trusted to cover the pig races at a country fair, let alone write about politics for the most influential newspaper in the country.
Paul Waldman sees the disconnect between all parties:
The trouble is, many political reporters have come over the decades to think that “Who’s going to win?” is in fact the question they should be asking; indeed, many of them think it’s the only question they should be asking. So it’s no wonder that when people like Silver come along and turn out to be able to answer it using an entirely different set of tools than those the journalists have spent their careers mastering, some react like petulant children.
The long and the short of it is that if Nate Silver, a guy who relies on facts and data rather than manufactured drama, if he didn’t “fit in” at the Times, that reflects far more poorly on the Times than on Silver.
But maybe the Times can now allocate more resources to important stories like the fact girls college girls like hooking up, or the trials and tribulations of rich kids whose parents buy them whole apartment buildings.
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Bookstores as Literary Outposts in the Digital Age
Virginia Postrel at Bloomberg has an idea for saving bookstores like Barnes and Noble in the digital era:
Separate the discovery and atmospheric value of bookstores from the book-warehousing function. Make them smaller, with the inventory limited to curated examination copies — one copy per title. (Publishers should be willing to supply such copies free, just as they do for potential reviewers.) Charge for daily, monthly or annual memberships that entitle customers to hang out, browse the shelves, buy snacks and use the Wi-Fi. Give members an easy way to order books online, whether from a retail site or the publishers directly, without feeling guilty. And give the place a good name. How about Serendipity Books?
This sounds familiar.
Oh yes! Here’s me in 2011:
I would love the idea of a bookstore I could visit, browse their physical library, get ideas, and then have the option of beaming a new book right to my Kindle, with credit for the sale going to the bookseller. Bookstores could be places where one buys dead-tree codices, and where folks top off their e-readers. Why not?
I was thinking mainly of how to help indie bookstores in the midst of Amazon and Barnes and Noble crowding them out, but now even B&N is being shoved aside, thus the piece from Postrel. But the logic holds: Create a space for people to get a sense of the product, let them browse, sample, have some coffee, talk to a learned staff, hold book club meetings, etc. And when it’s time to buy, zap it right into whatever gadget you have on hand.
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Toad Pays its Dues
Toad the Wet Sprocket is back together, much to my delight, and about to release a new record, which last happened during the first year of Clinton’s second term. I’ve been following frontman Glen Phillips’ career since then, watching as he’s had to reestablish himself as a viable performer and recording artist with little name recognition outside the Toad fan base.
In this interview with New Times Broward-Palm Beach, he describes a realization of what it actually takes to be a working musician:
We did well off the bat when we were young, actually really well nine months into our third record, so we didn’t really understand how how hard it can be, how much work it really takes, all the little jobs that have to get done. In the last ten or fifteen years, I’ve done all those jobs and done most of them badly. I kind of understand how lucky we are now, and how special this position is, and I think everyone else understands that too. So we kind of have to pay our dues on the back end, whereas most bands pay them on the front end.
It’s so refreshing to see someone who’s achieved success recognize how fortune played a role that may have been as great as, say, their talent. And as someone who once planned on making a career of this singer-songwriter shtick, I take heart that, yes, a lot of it, like everything else, is just a job.
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An Atheist’s Prayer, an Actor’s Vulnerability, a Patient’s Trauma
There’s something a little bit eerie to me about Jerry DeWitt’s article in Huffington Post in which he exhorts his fellow nonbelievers to engage in a nonreligious version of prayer. And it’s not eerie because I have some problem with atheists engaging in what sounds at first blush like a form of meditation just because it apes supernaturalism. Who gets irked about that kind of thing, other than, like, Tom Flynn? (Hi, Tom!)
No, no. It’s something else that gives me the willies. Here are some samplings of DeWitt’s post:
When sharing our innermost thoughts and feelings with no one or no-thing, there’s far less pressure to maintain a facade or pretend to be better off than we really are. It feels refreshing to step into our prayer closets and allow ourselves to become emotionally naked. If you have a friend who can be completely trusted, this should still be possible for the nonbeliever. If not, please don’t let this exercise pass you by. Find a secluded space, start talking out loud about what’s troubling you, and don’t stop until you know that you’re no longer pretending or hiding from your true self on any level. [ . . . ]
Some atheists seem to struggle with the idea of “going with the flow” with their emotions. Unrestrained emotions are considered by a portion of nonbelievers to only belong to the domain of religion. For that reason they feel that some forms of emotional expression can be dangerous. In the religious world I was raised in, emotional displays were not only allowed but expected. In my experience, you’ll know when you’re no longer hiding when the tears begin to flow.
Now, fellow thespians back me up on this. Read that last line again about tears. Does this not sound just like a class on Strasbergian/Stanislavskian “Method” acting??
The late Doug Moston was a renowned teacher of the method, and I was unspeakably fortunate to have been able to study under him during my brief time at the Actors Studio graduate school (I left after the first year, and it’s a long story). He was marvelously funny, rich with experience and compassion, and deeply committed to his students’ development.
But his class was also extremely rigorous.
To sum the whole “method” thing up briefly (and probably badly), the system isn’t about making yourself angry or sad or whatever when you’re in a scene, tricking yourself into believing you actually are the character you’re playing, or blindly unearthing your ugliest emotions on stage, though many actors misuse it that way, and familiar stereotypes of it have emerged as a result.
What Doug clarified for us was that the method, in tapping into one’s darkest and most intense emotions and memories — and as is often forgotten, in intentionally manufacturing new ones — one builds a toolbox of physical responses to stimuli, genuine responses, that one can then utilize in performance. In rehearsal, it might be sloppy, scary, unfocused, and the line between reality and artifice can feel blurry, but the goal is specifically rehearse it until it does in fact become artifice, in the sense that an emotional or physical response is merely a byproduct of doing the real work: playing a character who is pursuing an objective. Verbs and actions, not emotions.
But to make all that work, Doug had to put us through a series of exercises and “games” designed to make us vulnerable, exercises in which we would have to unburden ourselves of every ugly thought, every anxiety, every prejudice, and perhaps most importantly, every layer of mask that we put on ourselves to cover those things. Each activity was meant to strip the actor emotionally bare and raw.
And I hated it. Many actors took to it extremely well. It was intense to them, but they embraced it. I fought it. I fought myself, I fought the very idea that there was a class full of hip young New York actors watching me writhe through this process. It was excruciating.
But I got it. Christ, it was hard, but I clued in. This is not to say I mastered it, but I got it. And I get it.
Remarkably, there is yet another parallel. The “artifice” aspect of all this: One repeats the process of taking a melon baller to one’s psyche until the act of confronting one’s morass of emotions and hangups becomes rote, something to be learned from and referenced, and no longer possessing the potency to control and overwhelm (on stage, at least). This is incredibly similar to the work I did in my post-assault therapy. The memories of my attack, as well as other painful events in my past, were replayed in my mind over and over and over until they were defanged, transformed from pure pain to tools. (The pain never goes away entirely, of course, but we’re talking about degrees.)
And this brings it all back to DeWitt and the atheist prayer. DeWitt uses the language familiar to him as a former pastor, that of praying. But it turns out that what he’s really talking about is this very practice: taking one’s darkness and converting it to something manageable by the act of speaking it, as often as is necessary.
In “prayer,” in the method, in therapy, it’s all about taking control of your internal traumas through regimented and intentional practice. It’s about committing to a discipline.
And that, my friends, starts to sound a lot like Karen Armstrong’s version of religion, and I am not opening up that can of worms right now.
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On the Occasion of My Little Girl Turning One
“I’m the nicest guy I know, and I’m an asshole!”
This is my standard line to describe my anxiety about being the father of a baby girl. Here’s another way to put it: A friend of mine related this line to me, but I don’t know the original source.
“When you have a boy, you only have to worry about one dick. When you have a girl, you have to worry about all of them.”
I was delighted when we found out that, after having a strong, sweet, smart, robust boy, our next child would be a girl. Moments later, I was filled with fear as well.
Oh no, I thought. I will have to protect her from everything.
I’ve calmed down some since then. But the essence of that anxiety remains with me.
My daughter is going to turn one year old in just a few days, and she’s powering into toddlerhood with all thrusters firing. She’s remarkably verbal (though apparently more so with her daycare teachers, with whom she uses actual words, which she has refused to do with us), wicked smart, with abilities to process physical and intellectual nuance that often floor me. She’s absolutely dying to get up on her own two feet and amble. Oh, and she’s got a sense of humor and a real attitude.
She’s a force to be reckoned with, is what I’m saying, and this will only become truer as she grows up. (Wow, even just typing the words “grows up” in regards to my daughter brings a lump to my throat.) She, like my boy, will be able to do anything she wants with her life.
But you know, I mean that partly aphoristically, of course. As in, they will be able to do whatever they want with their lives, assuming an asteroid doesn’t kill all life on Earth, or whatever. External forces beyond my own children’s will, skill, and effort can dampen their opportunities, or add danger where it might not otherwise be. Of course. How could it be any other way?
You know that song “Soliloquy” from Carousel? Where the guy, Billy, sings about how he’s about to be a dad, and he fantasizes about having a little buddy of a son who’s just like him, and then he stops the song and realizes that he might, holy crap, have a girl? At first he warms to it, sees the idea as all cuddly and cute, and then has this revelation that somehow his fatherly responsibility has doubled if it’s a girl, that he is now called to parental greatness:
Dozens of boys pursue her
Many a likely lad does what he can to woo her
From her faithful dad
She has a few
Pink and white young fellers of two or three
But my little girl
Gets hungry ev’ry night and she comes home to me!
I got to get ready before she comes!
I got to make certain that she
Won’t be dragged up in slums
With a lot o’ bums like me
She’s got to be sheltered
And fed and dressed
In the best that money can buy
I never knew how to get money,
But, I’ll try, I’ll try! I’ll try!
I’ll go out and make it or steal it
Or take it or die!I get this. We’d already had one kid when we knew we were having a girl, and especially considering that I had been unemployed when we first found out we were going to have the first one, I had already reached Carouselian heights of determination within myself. But then I also remembered the line above about “you have to worry about all of them,” and I could have damn well broken into song.
(Fun fact: I actually performed this song at two events for high school, once for the drama department’s awards night, once for a graduation-related awards night for the whole senior class. I don’t think the latter, a cafeteria filled with bullies and dumbasses, appreciated it.)
As for my little girl, she will not be a shrinking violet; this is already clear. But I will be worried every day for the rest of my life about what she encounters day after day. As she makes friends, interacts with boys, dates, and does things farther and farther from my parental sphere of influence. She is and will be strong. But it is inescapable that she will be viewed as prey by some, by too goddamn many.
How can I fix that? I’ve joked that I want my son to be conscripted into protecting her for the rest of his life. I’m kidding, of course, but I’m kidding on the square.
I know I can only parent as best I can, give her the best opportunities, the best foundation I can, and then let her do her thing. It’s not enough, not for me. But what else can I do?
My baby is turning one. She’s a marvel. I have to trust that all those who would impede her will be dazzled, blinded by her strength, character, and confidence, rendering them harmless and cowed.
I’ll help her any way I can. My little girl is turning one, and there are many, many more ones to come. I will be, as ever, her faithful dad.
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A Song I Wrote Was Gonna Be in a Movie But Now It’s Not So You Can Hear It Now I Guess
Earlier this year, I was asked if one of my original songs, “Selfless,” could be used in a film being produced that a friend of mine is involved in. I was delighted, and I recorded a fresh version that I thought sounded a little stronger than the 2004 original.
Then a few weeks ago I was told they decided that actually they weren’t going to use it. That kind of sucked.
But it also means that I can now post it here and share it with you. So here’s “Selfless 2013.”
The 2004 original from my album Paul is Making Me Nervous can be heard here, and a couple years back, my friend Rin Barton covered the song very beautifully, and that’s here.
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Gerson Shows a Heart
Michael Gerson, though I have accused him of having a lizard brain and doing the Douthat Twist, shows a heart with ambition, calling for a great national project to lift up African American young men:
If the reelection of President Obama is to mark a new era of liberal governance, let’s at least have some causes worthy of the liberal moral impulse. The one advantage of a social challenge on this scale is that it offers broad opportunities for creative policy: promoting early childhood education and parenting skills; encouraging youth development and mentoring; expanding technical education and apprenticeships; fostering college enrollment and completion; offering greater opportunities for national service; extending wage subsidies to low-income, noncustodial fathers; reforming sentencing and easing prisoner reentry. When there is a canyon to fill, just about everyone can usefully take a shovel.
Right, let’s do that. But no tricks, okay? When a conservative talks about “creative policy” I can’t help but feel like they’re gonna slip some Jesus or no-taxes-for-rich-people thing in there or something. Benefit of the doubt, then.
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For Winter, Respect. For Summer, Contempt.
It is summer, which is a bad thing, I await the change of seasons, but things are not as simple as they once were.
There was a time when winter didn’t bother me in the least. Not only am I an introvert, and therefore already inclined to spend my time indoors, and therefore unhampered by the inability to engage in outdoor activities, but I also have a powerful aversion to heat and humidity.
This aversion is related to my distaste for doing things outside. In fact, it’s kind of a result of that distaste, and also an augmenting factor. Okay, it’s a chicken-and-egg kind of thing.
Let me try and sum this up briefly. I am and always have been extremely poor at sports and other physical games. Even lighthearted attempts at participation in these activities almost inevitably ends in intense feelings of humiliation, shame, self-loathing, and utter alienation. They make me feel as though I belong to an entirely separate and wholly unwanted species of semi-ape. This is on top of the physical discomfort: I am quickly exhausted, and my lack of skill and coordination are exacerbated by my psychological and emotional struggles, which cause me to perform even worse than I already would.
The outside also exposes one to the sun, which has never been friendly to me. I sunburn very easily, very quickly, and I find the application of sunblock fairly gross, so I don’t put it on every time I ought to.
This physical discomfort abetted by the sun leads to sweating. Now, some people like to sweat. it tells them and those around them that, hey, I am really playing hard here. This is not how it works for me. I find sweat, first off, simply icky. Of course, it also smells. There is no scenario in which I feel like a salty, oozy wetness seeping from my pores is favorable.
But in addition, the appearance of being sweaty is something about which I have become hyper-aware. This goes all the way back to gym class in middle and high school (doesn’t everything?), where the other boys, seeing me sweat in the pathetic performance of gym activities, would mock 1) how quickly I would break said sweat, and 2) the quantity of sweat I would produce, when they, so they’d boast, would have yet to do so. At the same time, I was also often ridiculed for my hair: I had no idea how to style or keep up hair in a way acceptable to late-80s/early-90s teenage America — indeed, I didn’t know how to keep it at all. My hair was often overly long, unruly, and mangled, despite my poor attempts to mitigate the problem. Add what sweat can do to even nicely-kept hair, and the problem is multiplied many times over.
So among the arsenal of weapons my very existence in gym class already provided to my tormentors, my sweat would serve as a physical, visible sign of my ineptitude, my awkwardness, my quasi-speciation. Things were already terrible. Heat, the outdoors, the sun, made it all much worse.
So, winter. Frustrating to many, particularly in my adopted home of Maine, for the unforgivingly low temperatures and frequent snowfall that keep regular Americans from enjoying the outside world over which God has given them dominion. (Hey God, if you’ve given us domain over all this shit, why do you make it so freaking cold that we can’t enjoy it?!?!) Not so for me. You can have your outdoors, I will enjoy the sight of the falling snowflakes and the accumulation of white over everything, happily barring us from vigorous activity, wonderfully sucking the heat from the air.
The cold is a state of cosmic neutrality, in a way. Though life requires sunlight and heat, the universe is a cold place. Heat is an exception to the rule, an anomaly that mostly secrets itself within stars and those objects within their orbits. Life may want heat, but Everything Else tends to cold.
Is it tougher to, say, drive to the store because of snow? That’s okay. I’ll go slowly, or I’ll wait it out. I work from home these days, but even if I didn’t, well, did the snow make me late for work? How awful. So bring on the winter! From my heated-to-comfort home, I will pass the season unbothered, barely aware.
Or so it once was.
Today, I am a father of two small, wonderful children, now aged 1 and 3 1/2. These two children require transport to daycare every weekday. They require transport to activities and doctors. Have you ever tried wrangling two struggling, grouchy small children into a car, while trudging through two feet of snow in the bitter cold? Also, these children require amusement at an incredible rate, and unlike their daddy, they are not satisfied by remaining indoors, even in the heat, even in the cold. No longer burdened by gym class or other obligations to outdoor activities for myself, my kids must play. The boy must run and yell and throw, the girl must crawl and explore and toddle. They can’t do that exclusively indoors.
In the summer, this is not a happy state of affairs by any means, for as much as they may enjoy galavanting in the sun, I am as miserable under its oppressive radiation as ever. I suffer for their delight. Fine.
But in the winter, when the temperature is too low or the ground is deluged with impassible mounds of snowfall, I can’t even do that much for them. Apart from brief stints climbing about the snow and slush for the boy, the winter forces us all indoors, which makes for stir-crazy, cranky kids. Stir-crazy, cranky kids makes for a raw-nerved daddy. (And mommy.) Mitigating my children’s discontent is now a greater priority than mitigating my sports-and-heat-related humiliations. Winter, in Maine at least, has become an enemy of my middle adulthood.
“Enemy” is too strong. Let’s say “respected adversary.”
Winter has another benefit I have as yet not mentioned. Really, this is more of an appreciation of its true power, which is exemplified by its keeping me and everyone else from being pummeled by the sun and humidity.
Winter’s true power, what makes it beautiful to me, is its place as a great pause button on the ecosystem around us. Apart from heat, humidity, and sun, I am also at odds with much of the rest of the natural world. Insects invade my home, violate my person, and attempt to feast on the blood of me and mine. Summer rains drench the ground and soil, bringing mud and a sickly haze. Moisture in the air makes the wood in my house sticky, leaves a film of condensation on bathroom fixtures and metal. Sun not only overheats my home, but blazes through windows causing glare on my prized electronic screens. Summer brings about a slime of life that I would do without.
Winter, a force of nature itself, puts a damper on, and often kills or makes dormant, the rest of nature. It is a respite from the summer miasma, which I so badly crave. It is necessary death so that life can start over.
So I will handle my kids. Winter is not the utter joy it once was, but it is still wanted. When it comes, though I will brace for new difficulties, it will also have my welcome.
Summer, meanwhile, can bite me. And so it does.
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Threats, Trade-offs, and a Tinderbox
Pratap Bhanu Mehta at the Financial Times compares American perceptions of threat and the liberty-security balance, which leads me to contemplate an unpleasant state of affairs coming our way. Mehta says:
How do societies draw the line on what constitutes an acceptable trade-off? The American debate is peculiar because the standards seem perversely different in different contexts. By all accounts, gun violence kills upwards of 20,000 people a year in the US – yet the trade-off between security and the right to bear arms seems doggedly to ignore considerations that would make society safe.
This is because we have a gun lobby that has taken an already machismo- and paranoia-prone constituency and convinced it that these guns are not a safety problem, but a safety solution. This is, of course, so they will buy more and more guns and make the manufacturers, represented by that lobby, richer. Simple.
Meanwhile, most Americans aren’t interested in the whole PRISM-spying thing. To Mehta, this constitutes consent from our society for the whole enterprise. Mostly true I think. He says:
[M]any would argue – though this is debatable – that casualties from terrorist violence have been limited because a full measure of methods have been used against it. But even if we accept these arguments at face value, is there something more going on? Why would a society so willing to ignore security in one domain embrace it so uncompromisingly in another? Is it merely because an exaggerated threat of the foreigner makes it easier to immobilise other considerations?
You have to understand exactly who the American people feel threatened by. Yes, they feel threatened by “terrorists,” but many also feel threatened by each other and their own government. Think of it; here we have a situation where most Americans don’t know or care about the NSA situation, largely because they fear terrorism.
But how’s this for a tinderbox: for those who are upset about the NSA, they have new reason to fear the government. These folks also overlap, I’d presume, very much with those who the gun lobby has convinced are under threat by, who else, the government–and minorities. And OMG! Both the government and minorities come together in the form of Obama!
Stock your bunkers, folks. Things might get uglier before the apathetic urbanite and mainstream Americans have any idea what’s going on.
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The Enemies of All Mankind
I am no libertarian. I find them, frankly, scary in their bizarre faith in markets and contracts to keep civilization from eating itself alive. And very often, libertarianism is used as a thin veil to disguise things like institutionalized racism.
Which is why this post from Jason Kuznicki at the Libertarian Party’s blog was so goddamned refreshing, at least on one important issue; the libertarian view of the Confederacy, declaring, “Any affinity for the Confederacy marks one very clearly as an enemy of liberty.”
He then points out specific provisions of the Confederate Constitution that not only legalize but sanctify the practice of enslaving other human beings (and they are shocking), and says:
There is only one legal term that seems quite to do [these provisions] justice. That term is hostis humani generis: The founders of Confederacy were the enemies of all mankind . . . Anyone who cares about human liberty—to whatever degree—ought to despise the Confederacy, ought to mock and desecrate its symbols, and ought never to let Confederate apologists pass unchallenged. . . .
All friends of the Confederacy are my enemies.
Thank you, Jason, for spelling out so plainly what even many liberals are afraid to say for fear of alienating Southern voters (whom they will never win anyway).
I am no libertarian, but I sure do like how they so rarely fuck around with words.
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A Website You Can Talk Over: Assigning Responsibility for a Meaningful Blog
What do I want this blog to be? Perhaps using that very word, blog, assumes too much, imposing a definition. What to I want this website to be?
A little while back, I posited that perhaps the essay as a format was something that more bloggers ought to rely on, as opposed to, say, the hasty, knee-jerk missive. The reason, essentially, was to lessen the noise, the pointless butting of heads and scoring of points. To encourage more thinking and consideration, and to discourage an endless episode of “Crossfire.”
It turns out, however, that there is a contradiction. A lot of my feelings about essays stem from Andrew Sullivan, who led me to Montaigne, and on. But it is Sullivan who, in 2008, said this about blogs:
There is, after all, something simply irreplaceable about reading a piece of writing at length on paper, in a chair or on a couch or in bed. To use an obvious analogy, jazz entered our civilization much later than composed, formal music. But it hasn’t replaced it; and no jazz musician would ever claim that it could. Jazz merely demands a different way of playing and listening, just as blogging requires a different mode of writing and reading. Jazz and blogging are intimate, improvisational, and individual—but also inherently collective. And the audience talks over both.
The reason they talk while listening, and comment or link while reading, is that they understand that this is a kind of music that needs to be engaged rather than merely absorbed. To listen to jazz as one would listen to an aria is to miss the point. Reading at a monitor, at a desk, or on an iPhone provokes a querulous, impatient, distracted attitude, a demand for instant, usable information, that is simply not conducive to opening a novel or a favorite magazine on the couch. Reading on paper evokes a more relaxed and meditative response. The message dictates the medium. And each medium has its place—as long as one is not mistaken for the other.
Put aside the question of physical medium for a moment. In blogs, Sullivan is describing a back and forth, not just a conversational tone (like Montaigne pioneered), but an actual discussion, a real chat. Is that in conflict with what the essay, placed on a website, would offer or imply?
“Uh oh” was my first thought.
That’s gone, though. It seems to me that the author of a blog post can hope to engender conversation that is substantive and respectful with a thoughtful essay-like piece. But the audience has to acquiesce, to buy into this approach.
On an episode of “On the Media,” Ta-Nehisi Coates describes in some detail how he manages comments on his blog at The Atlantic. He doesn’t simply allow anything to happen; he carefully curates, mediates, and if necessary, gives folks the boot who aren’t playing by his rules. I like that.
But this is about more than comments. Coates can’t control what happens on the wider Internet as a result of his writing. But he can choose not to engage with the activity that doesn’t suit his or her overall approach. As Pour Me Coffee has said, he can “ruthlessly curate [his] online experience.” I really like that.
So. The first part is to write in such a way, and with such a voice, that meaningful conversation (in comments, on Twitter, what have you) is encouraged, is exemplified. But then, second, the readers and participants have to play along in that mode. Third, the author then must manage his or her online interactions in such a way that incentivize substance over vitriol and snark for its own sake.
Good then!
But what else? Obviously, I’ve not limited this blog, by any means, to wordy essays. Like Sullivan, there are plenty of one-off links and a smattering of commentary. Does that dilute the site, perhaps? It doesn’t for Sullivan and The Dish, but I think that’s because his site never stops generating content. One can skim through the shorter bits, and stop and pause to read his longer pieces (or as he calls them “keepers”).
John Gruber at Daring Fireball works in a similar fashion: The norm is that a post will be a “link post,” where Gruber highlights a bit of news or commentary, throws in a sentence of his own, and even has the headline’s link lead to the originating source, not is own post. Then he sets apart “keepers,” longer essays, by marking them with a star before the title of the post. He also has no comments section on his blog, and lets all conversation happen outside and around his blog, but not on it.
But again, Gruber is more prolific than I. He and Sullivan, of course, make their livings doing this, while I am lucky to find the time and energy to blog regularly, as much as I would love for it to be my main occupation.
So can I ape their styles in an effective way in order to make Near-Earth Object what I want it to be? I’m not sure. I’m not convinced that irregular and sparse posting makes that style work.
I may have to experiment, to blog more often than I am initially inclined, to get the machinery in my brain working at full power. I’d also have to accept that, at least for a while, I may post a lot of garbage. (Would anyone notice?) I may want to retool the look of the site so that “keepers” can be easily spotted (in a sidebar?). I’m going to think about it, and more important, start acting on thoughts.
Back to physical medium, briefly. Sullivan, in the above quote, distinguishes between the reader’s behavior based on what surface they are reading content off of; a screen or a piece of paper. That was written in 2008, and I have to imagine that he’d rethink this today. There was no iPad then, and the Kindle was an expensive novelty device. And no one had heard the term “Retina display.”
Today, we have those technologies that encourage and facilitate deeper, longer-form reading, such that Instapaper is an indispensable app, and so I think that today it’s not about screens and paper, but about presentation of content. And the onus for that is, yes, firstly on the author or outlet, but now just as much on the reader. If one opts to read a piece on their lunch break at a desktop display, the attitude and mindset may be very different than if that reader has saved the piece in Instapaper, and now reads it in a comfy chair from an iPad or Kindle, free (or freer) from distractions, windows, and notifications.
It is like jazz. You can, in fact, talk over it. But you can also buy the remastered CD, put on your pricey Bose headphones, and savor every note. Your call.
I like that, too.
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Rewarded for Cat Pictures (and Whatnot)
All Things D interviews Rod Humble, CEO of Linden Labs, home of the online virtual world Second Life. I have tried out Second Life a number of times over the years, but never stuck with it, for a multitude of reasons: my connection was too slow, my processor too weak, or I realized that true immersion in the game would require a level of time and energy investment I simply could not spare.
But Humble had one point about what makes his company’s game-world so unique, and what it might bode for the future:
Game makers are always trying to stay one step ahead of content creation, so you get these bigger and bigger budgets, trying to make more and more polished content. Second Life and YouTube are both rewarding their users for what they create. I believe there will be a day when you’ll log in to your social network and see, “Oh, I got five bucks because I posted my silly cat picture.” What I’m trying to do is position our company to take advantage of that and facilitate people being rewarded for the time they put in.
Now, the last time I remember anyone trying anything like that was with early-aughts browser plugins and homepages like “iWon” that encouraged you to click on ads in order to build up a virtual gambling currency which would be applied to drawings for prizes. But the idea that the content I put up on Facebook, Twitter, or Zod help me, on my blog, might actually generate real, actual, usable money? Now where have I heard this idea before?
Nah, I’m just being cute. I know where. Jaron Lanier:
The thing that I’m thinking about is the Ted Nelson [early Internet pioneer] approach … where people buy and sell each other information, and can live off of what they do with their hearts and minds as the machines get good enough to do what they would have done with their hands.
I did a whole post about that. Anyway, I think maybe Humble and Lanier should talk.
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To Be a Species is to Be Special
John S. Wilkins considers the argument that humans are somehow more than “just animals.”
The evolutionary view of human capacities is that they have precursors in ancestral traits, and these precursors can be found in other animals. Dogs, corvids, cetaceans, primates, and a host of other animals display moral, cognitive and conscious behaviour. Humans are special indeed in their capacities. But, and this is what what Tallis [a proponent of this view] overlooks, so are all other animals. The word “special” is merely the adjectival form of “species”. To be a species is to be special. Sure, humans are special in their own way. So is a cat, a mole or a mouse. If the target of your explanation was a mouse, then you would explain it having its abilities and social behaviours in terms of evolved dispositions inherited from ancestors. You may as well say a mouse is special in ways other animals (including humans) are not. Otherwise we couldn’t even tell it was a member of a species, by definition. Unless there are properties that mark it out from other species, it would be folded into other species.
So too with humans. If we were not different in our traits from other primate species like chimps, then we would be chimps. But we have our own special traits, and so we and chimps are distinct species. So the argument is a kind of fallacy (affirming the consequent). Humans can be special and yet be animals, just like every other animal species.I get it. Yes, we’re just like all other animals in that we’re essentially bags of meat consuming and excreting and multiplying, but then again we also have cities and symphonies and iPads and literature and universities and corporations and spaceships. But all those things, they are our eagle’s wings, our bat’s sonar, our cephalopod’s camouflage.
And with them we rule the universe!*
*HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA just kidding.
Near-Earth Object 