Year: 2013

by Zoe Pollock

Spencer Woodman appreciates how the word “can introduce gratifying little flashes of surrealism into everyday conversation.” Exhibit A:

[I]n The Metamorphosis—in which Gregor Samsa, who carries out the vermin-like existence of a traveling salesman serving the debts of his parents, turns into an cockroach—Kafka purposely misuses the word. After Gregor’s well-meaning sister removes the furniture from along the walls of his bedroom to allow Gregor to more freely crawl along the walls and ceiling; “the sight of the bare walls literally made her heart bleed,” Kafka writes. (In lieu of any knowledge of German, I’m taking Joachim Neugroschel’s translation of the story at face value.) The sort of literalized metaphor that dictates the impossible story is shrunk down to a simple turn of phrase. …

Even for those not attempting a great modernist novel, the effect is possible in everyday conversation. “She literally exploded with anger” is a commonly mocked example of the word’s misuse. Although it’s admittedly cliché, it still generates a gratifying cartoonish flash for me: the person in question actually blows to pieces, which is funny and also descriptive.

His advice:

The rule of thumb could be simple: that if the word’s misuse doesn’t create an interesting picture, it’s probably best to use another adverb or adjective.

Previous Dish on the subject here and here.

by Brendan James

Jessica Love considers whether the human brain was designed to produce language, or whether its development was more accidental:

The ’90s was the era of the language instinct. Indeed, Steven Pinker’s book The Language Instinct overtook bestseller lists and inspired a whole generation of psycholinguists, including me. “Language is no more a cultural invention than is upright posture,” Pinker wrote. Bats use Doppler sonar to hunt insects, birds read constellations to navigate, and humans have a “biological adaptation to communicate information.” We must have helpful biases encoded in our genes: What else could explain the fact that the most complicated skill most humans will ever master is acquired by age four?

But during the last decade, the pendulum of scientific thought has begun its inevitable swing in the other direction. These days, general cognitive mechanisms, not language-specific ones, are all the rage. We humans are really smart. We’re fantastic at recognizing patterns in our environments—patterns that may have nothing to do with language. Who says that the same abilities that allow us to play the violin aren’t also sufficient for learning subject-verb agreement? Perhaps speech isn’t genetically privileged so much as babies are just really motivated to learn to communicate.

By Zoe Pollock

The title belongs to the New South China Mall in Guangdong province:

With more than 7 million square feet of leasable space, the mall was supposed to have over 2,300 stores and was meant to be the largest in the world. The developers estimated that the mega mall would attract at least an average of 70,000 visitors a day. As a comparison, the Mall of America in Minnesota, the largest in the US, is only about one-third of that size. Even the massive West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, the largest in North America, pales in comparison. In their initial promotional material, the developers boasted that the mall would become a “one stop consumption center” and “a global business model.”

However, since its opening, the mall has no more than a few dozen, mostly small tenants at any single time. Over 99% of the retail space has been vacant and will probably remain so. As a result of its disappointing performance, the planned luxurious Shangri-La hotel was never built; nor were some of the supporting facilities. Yet, given the magnitude of the project, the mall is not allowed to fail, and has even been designated as a tourist destination by the government.

(Photo from Wikimedia Commons)

by Zoe Pollock

Andy Greenwald praises the consistent pacing of Game Of Thrones:

Binge-watchers care little for how their meal is coursed out; all they want is to dig in. And Game of Thrones is particularly delicious when devoured in bulk. There’s little tonal variance between the hourly installments; everything is equally good. In fact, it’s the rare show that’s probably better served by such gluttony: Less time away makes it harder to mistake your Sansas from your Sandors, your Lothars from your Lorases. Game of Thrones is proof that more and more people are coming around to David Simon’s way of thinking: The drug war is a racist and failed institution Individual episodes aren’t works unto themselves but rather chapters in a carefully crafted novel. More than sex pirates and smoke babies, imp slaps or jokes about Littlefingers, this may be Game of Thrones‘s most enduring legacy. What we thought was an exercise in transforming a book into television may actually have helped turn television into a book.

Previous Dish on the series here and here.

by Chris Bodenner

According to a new report from the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), “three out of four people found with drugs by the border agency are U.S. citizens.” But you wouldn’t know that by reading the press releases from the Border Patrol:

Of nearly 2,000 press releases from the Border Patrol and its parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, between 2005 and 2011 that mentioned a drug-trafficking suspect, 38 percent noted a Mexican national had been arrested. U.S. citizens, meanwhile, were mentioned roughly 30 percent of the time, even though they represent a much higher percentage of those busted, according to the analysis.

Robert Beckhusen highlights one reason so many Americans get involved in drug running:

The CIR interviewed one former trafficker who said the cartels seek out U.S. citizens — particularly of middle-age — because they’re less likely to draw suspicion.

Jackie Brown fit that bill nicely.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader flags a promising story from across the Pond:

Considering what you’ve done with the Dish in recent months, this is right up your alley: in the Netherlands a new online “newspaper”, De Correspondent, crowd-funded over 1 million euros in a matter of days.

More details:

[Rob Wijnberg] needed 15.000 people to give him €60 a year for something that doesn’t exist yet — he succeeded within 8 days. His idea is called De Correspondent and its goal is to provide news in a different way. While traditional newspapers serve you daily hot news, Wijnberg says De Correspondent will be a new quality online “newspaper” which could be described as “slow journalism”. They’ll cover daily news and mix it with long-form journalism, providing in-depth analysis of news on a custom built platform.

On a much smaller scale and back on the homefront, a Tinypass-supported site called Bklynr recently met its own presubscription goal of $10K and is launching its first issue tomorrow. Every two weeks it will publish three long-form pieces about Brooklyn, for $20 a year (or $2 month). The broader thread on paid content is here. How it relates to the Dish model is here.

Today on the Dish, Andrew expressed his disbelief on the advances of the gay rights movement while readers vented over yesterday’s guest post from Mr. Rick Astley. Ed Kilgore doubted that the GOP’s libertarians will threaten its Christianists, Frum raised his eyebrow at a Hillary victory, and we sized up the new Democratic coalition. Bernstein encouraged one Supreme Court Justice to step downa and Judis spotlighted the problems with America’s trickledown recovery. On the foreign beat, Graeme Wood took a hyperinflation vacation in Iran, Larison rebuked Jackson Diehl on the legacy of Iraq, and David Bosco warned of a new African intervention for the UN.

In assorted coverage, readers kept up the debate on taking husbands’ names, Oppenheimer demanded conservatives stay consistent on the “decline” of marriage, Dylan Matthews measured the exponential rise of Senatorial support for equality. A reader gave a personal account of narcoanalysis, we measured the benefits of early marriage, and found out that Google is against sponsored content (Vice, not so much). Tahir Hemphill pieced together an almanac of rap and Megan Garber paid respects to the word “whom,’ and Jordan Weissman analyzed Amazon’s buyout of Goodreads. We also looked out from a whale’s eyes and checked in on Ware while Mark Graham did a global survey of Wikipedia editors.

Later, we tested the limits of working out of the office, Steve Mann showed us his proto-proto Google Glass, and we tracked how dull food gets tasty. Ian Crouch muted the blaring Inception trailer music and we detected evidence of the class structure in reality TV. We met some of the activists in Uruguay’s marriage equality movement in the Face of the Day,  sat in awe of another beatboxer for the MHB before visiting Tirana, Albania in today’s VFYW contest and Shannon, Ireland in the regular VFYW.

–B.J.

(Photo: Members of the Port Authority Police stand near the windows in the One World Observatory from the 100th floor of One World Trade Center at the Ground Zero site on April 2, 2013. One World Observatory, which is situated more than 1,250 feet over lower Manhattan, will open to the public in 2015 and will include a pre-show theater, multiple spaces that allow for panoramas of the New York City region and numerous dining options. When completed, One World Trade Center will be the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere at 1776 feet. By Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

by Matthew Sitman

Tom Jacobs takes stock of his life thus far and the lessons he’s learned. While making the case for incautious love, he quotes Brian Doyle’s “Joyas Voladoras“:

When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words ‘I have something to tell you,’ a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.