Year: 2013

“Whatever is vibrating on the iPhone just isn’t as valuable as the eye contact you are making right now,” – Douglas Rushkoff, in Present Shock.

After an airline mix-up, Freddie deBoer was forced to take the bus from Vegas to Indiana. He reflects on the experience:

My seatmate for a long while was a man named Muy. He spoke very little English. He told me he was going to Chicago. It occurred to me, in a vague way, that were he a promising young engineer from China, I might have worked with him in my campus’s oral English program, working on his prosodic quality, his phrasal stress, his morphosyntax. Instead he was from Mexico, trying to get from Las Vegas to Chicago via Greyhound bus.

In Kansas City, they wouldn’t let him get back on the bus.

He had missed a transfer somewhere. It seemed easy enough to do; I worried about it the whole time. I loaded up while he talked to them. It became clear that they wouldn’t let him back on. His leather coat was in the storage space above our seats. I grabbed it and came to get off the bus to give it to him. The Greyhound employees wouldn’t let me off the bus. They said if I got off the bus I wouldn’t be able to get back on, and I’d have to purchase a new ticket for the bus that left the next afternoon. I said to the guy, here, this is that guy’s leather jacket, he’s 25 feet away, can you bring it to him. But they wouldn’t. They just wouldn’t. I wanted nothing more than to just walk out past them and hand it to him. But I didn’t have enough money in my bank account to buy another ticket, and my suitcase was stored in the bus, and I was so tired. So I got back on and put his jacket back up in the storage. Then I had nothing to do but sit and think about it.

My politics exists to understand the difference between him and me, between both of us and the people who will never worry about how to get home. It is political. Perhaps if he were me, if he were white and spoke the English that power speaks like I do, he would have been able to get back on that bus, or to talk them into letting him have his leather jacket. But it’s not just political. It’s the way that human beings can help others, simply, at no costs to themselves, and don’t, every day, every day.

Ursus Wehrli specializes in organizing items, people, even paintings; his new book tackles life’s smaller moments. From an interview with the artist:

I think it speaks to our complicated world because our days are full of decisions and sometimes it is really hard to decide what is right, what’s wrong and we have to fight against the mess and the chaos. I wouldn’t say it is a manifesto for a neat world, but I’m happy if it makes people think about the balance between chaos and order. Of course, we realise we need both poles and it’s the balance that makes life worth living.

More on Wehrli’s process here.

(Image from The Art Of Clean Up, hat tip: Mark Frauenfelder)

Elizabeth Ferris checks in on Iraqi refugees:

Today Iraqi refugees throughout the region face dwindling donor support, particularly as the needs of Syrian refugees increase. For the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who remain in Syria, the situation is particularly dire. Some have been displaced within Syria. Some Iraqis have moved to other countries in the region (though they have faced an uncertain welcome by governments facing new inflows of Syrians.) Many — perhaps 100,000 — Iraqis have chosen to return to Iraq in the past year (though given the violence in Syria, it is hard to see this as a voluntary decision). Those that have returned to Iraq have either congregated in a hastily-constructed camp along the Iraq-Syrian border (which has often been closed) or have simply become [internally displaced persons (IDPs)].

Jason Heller has given up collecting LPs:

Like some people who say they have fibromyalgia or gluten intolerance, far more vinyl collectors think they’re audiophiles than actually are. Owning a decent turntable does not turn your ears into trembling flowers, unable to bear the bitmapped harshness of digital. It began to dawn on me—me, someone who had preached the sanctity of vinyl from my record-store pulpit for so long—that I couldn’t really tell the difference between a 7-inch and an MP3. Or rather, I could tell there was a slight difference, but it wasn’t enough to justify the huge portion of my income that I was spending on vinyl.

Sarah Marshall revisits an odd relic from America’s past – a series of grim “Bicentennial Minutes” that aired every night for two-and-a-half years during the 1970s. Her takeaway from the one starring Jessica Tandy (seen above):

No ambiguity hangs over the story: the Redcoats cut down the “Liberty Tree” not because they wanted firewood, but because it “bore the name of Liberty.” History has only one version, and it can be parceled into one-minute increments and sponsored by Shell, then slipped in before the evening news as testament to the fact that whatever happened today can’t be as bad as what happened two hundred years ago today.

Her feelings about America’s self-seriousness:

For Americans, our country’s legacy—and in particular the legacy of our founding has calcified into myth, and our Founding Fathers have become inhuman and larger-than-life. To have such an inflated sense of our own importance as a country is both a blessing and a curse; envisioning our forefathers as flawless men who could do no wrong, we are both ill-prepared to acknowledge our mistakes and somewhat overwhelmed at the prospect of living up to their example. If we regard our national history with more humility—and a keener eye for the wonderfully absurd—we may feel far more ready to contribute to it, knowing that, as anxious and overreaching misfits, we would fit in with our Founding Fathers far better than our schoolteachers would have us know.

D. J. Hoek isn’t a fan of an image (seen below) that has been bouncing around social media recently:

[L]ibraries, as we know, do not exist for free. They cost their communities—whether composed of taxpayers, tuition-payers, donors, or a combination—a substantial amount of money. It’s well-intentioned to emphasize that libraries
provide materials and services without exacting immediate payment from users for each transaction. But today it is at best a mistake and at worst self-destructive to underrepresent the considerable ongoing investment that the members of a community make to have library collections, technology, personnel, and facilities available to them. … Rather than promote the “free library,” let’s remind our communities of their great investment and of the tremendous wealth of returns they derive from that investment: materials, specialized assistance, and programming. That doesn’t mean libraries are free. It means that the cost of libraries is worth every cent.

Claire Kelley considers one possible solution to library budget cuts:

As libraries respond to the challenges facing them, some have suggested adding a small circulation fee—something like fifty cents—to make up for cut funding. Last year in The Atlantic, Keith Michael Fiels, executive director of the American Library Association, responded to an Atlantic editorial that argued for instituting such a policy. He worried that collecting fees would be a barrier for entry for the people who needed library access most, and that the amount of revenue generated would be less than what public support and municipal budgets could provide.