Month: June 2012

A primer for the novice drinker:

I call our ability to translate taste into words “taste literacy.” We learn visual literacy from a tender age, and as adults can distinguish even subtle gradations in the visual field. If I say “brick red,” “fire engine red,” and “maroon,” you can readily imagine these colors and describe the differences between. But it’s harder with flavors. When I say “apple,” “pear,” and “quince,” do you quickly conjure all these flavors in your mind? What adjectives would you use to describe them? Apple might be reasonably easy, but how would you characterize quince? Now try guava, mango, and papaya.

Jesus Diaz gawks at a recent dermatology case published in the New England Journal of Medicine:

This guy is 69 years old, but half of his face looks much, much older than that. He was a trucker and, for 28 years, his face received much more sunlight on the left side, resulting on premature aging. We all knew that being exposed to the sun makes you age prematurely, but seeing the dramatic difference in a single face is just stunning. …

As the summer starts, this is a perfect reminder of the negative effects of excessive suntanning. If the risk of skin cancer is not enough for you, perhaps knowing that the sun will accelerate your ageing by a decade or two will stop you from being careless.

Daniel Kahneman examines why we love them:

We can't help but look at life retrospectively, and we want it to look good in retrospect. There was once an experiment in which the subjects were supposed to evaluate the life of a fictitious woman who had had a very happy life but then died in an accident. Astonishingly, whether she died at 30 or 60 had no effect whatsoever on their evaluation. But when the subjects were told that the woman had had 30 happy years followed by five that were no so happy, the scores got worse. …

And, from the evolutionary point of view, that makes sense. The duration of an experience is simply not relevant. What matters for survival is whether it ended well and how bad it got.

Blogger Apostropher assesses the screenshots seen above:

[Star Wars] Special Editions that made their way onto DVD were different to those already released on VHS. To be fair though, this time the changes weren't just indulgent tinkering, but an attempt to make connections between the classic trilogy and the new prequel trilogy which was busy crashing down around us. But once again, what started out sounding like a good idea resulted in confusion and disaster.

Anakin Skywalker's ghost, for example, which appears at the end of Return of the Jedi, was changed from Sebastian Shaw's time-of-death visage to the youthful, Prequel-era Hayden Christensen. What?! What's the significance of that? How come Yoda and Obi-Wan's ghosts didn't get to visit the Force fountain of eternal youth? Is Hayden somehow meant to represent a redeemed Darth Vader, perhaps? This is the same Hayden who slaughtered all those adorable little Jedi kiddies, right? Sigh.

Life in fast-forward:

A tearful tour through modern history.

Very bad. How to live among the ruins:

An interval — long or short, only the gods can say — of oligarchic, intensely surveilled, bread-and-circuses authoritarianism, Blade Runner- or Fahrenheit 451-style, seems the most likely outlook for the 21st and 22nd centuries. Still, if most humans are shallow and conformist, some are not. There is reason to hope that the ever fragile but somehow perennial traditions and virtues of solidarity, curiosity, self-reliance, courtesy, voluntary simplicity, and an instinct for beauty will survive, even if underground for long periods. And cultural rebirths do occur, or at any rate have occurred.

[Morris] Berman offers little comfort, but he does note a possible role for those who perceive the inevitability of our civilization’s decline. He calls it the “monastic option.” Our eclipse may, after all, not be permanent; and meanwhile individuals and small groups may preserve the best of our culture by living against the grain, within the interstices, by “creating ‘zones of intelligence’ in a private, local way, and then deliberately keeping them out of the public eye.” Even if one’s ideals ultimately perish, this may be the best way to live while they are dying.

(Photo: Getty Images.)

Benjamin Hale argues no:

The hype of the moment does not necessarily translate into lasting luminance. Just scroll down the list of all the past winners of the prize, and count how many you’ve ever heard of. Start at the bottom and move upward chronologically, and you’ll find the occurrence of familiar names increases as we move closer to the present. This is not because the Pulitzer Board has gradually been growing wiser — it’s because we’re living now, not a hundred years in the future. Then we’ll see. We can’t help it — we’re blinded by our own times; all prizes are like that, and that is why, as a measure of what is good and what is not in art, they are not exactly the trustworthiest oracles.

Steve Wasserman profiles Amazon and the immense power the company holds in the book world and beyond:

The bookstore wars are over. Independents are battered, Borders is dead, Barnes & Noble weakened but still standing and Amazon triumphant. Yet still there is no peace; a new war rages for the future of publishing. The recent Justice Department lawsuit accusing five of the country’s biggest publishers of illegally colluding with Apple to fix the price of e-books is, arguably, publishing’s Alamo.

What angered the government wasn’t the price, but the way the publishers seemed to have secretly arranged to raise it. Many publishers and authors were flabbergasted, accusing the Obama administration of having gone after the wrong culprit. Scott Turow, president of the Authors Guild, denounced the suit, as did David Carr, the media critic of the New York Times, who said it was "the modern equivalent of taking on Standard Oil but breaking up Ed’s Gas ‘N’ Groceries on Route 19 instead." On its face, the suit seemed an antitrust travesty, a failure to go after the "monopolistic monolith" that is, as the Times put it, "publishing’s real nemesis." In this view, the biggest threat is Amazon’s willingness to sell e-books at a loss in order to seduce millions of unwitting consumers into the leviathan’s cornucopia of online goods and services. 

(Image from Matej Kren's installation "Scanner", via Flavorwire)

I sat down this week with my old friend EJ Dionne to discuss his new book, "Our Divided Political Heart." We'll post the full 40 minute chat tomorrow (although it's available now on Youtube), but here's an early clip where EJ and I discuss my aversion to the whole concept of communitarianism. Check in tomorrow for the full conversation if you have some time. Watch it on TV if you are configured that way (I now find myself watching lots of Youtubes on Apple TV):

Michael Atkinson rants against a world in which six of the top 10 highest-grossing films in 2011 were released in 3-D:

I am probably America’s only monocular film critic – meaning 3-D films (along with binoculars and View-Masters) have never worked for me. I was born 90-percent cross-eyed and now have – thanks to a series of eye operations beginning when I was 18-months-old – perfect vision in one eye and negligible vision in the other. The two eyes do not synch up to produce a single 3-D image. So I am coming out of the closet to take a stand for the roughly 700 million humans like me – one out of every 10 people, it’s estimated – who cannot physically process 3-D cinema. That’s many more times the percentage of people who need wheelchair ramps to access a movie theater, which all theaters are legally bound to provide.