Month: January 2013

Andy Cush highlights a fascinating project called Geolocation:

Photographers Nate Larson and Marni Shindelman use Twitter as a location scout for their haunting, beautiful images. The two artists scan the social network for tweets with location information embedded but no picture, head to those locations to shoot, then caption each photograph with the tweet’s original text. If the photographs weren’t so good, the concept might come off as gimmicky. But in the hands of Larson and Shindelman, it is anything but–their images, always free of people, capture the loneliness and dread that underscores much of our online communication.

Jakob Schiller zooms out:

Last fall, Twitter reported that the service now handles half a billion messages a day. Facebook has more than a billion active users each month and in August, Instagram reported that it had 7.3 million daily active mobile users (surpassing Twitter). Instead of being overwhelmed, Larson and Shindelman see this vast expanse as a gold mine of sorts. For them it’s an under-tapped sociological resource that they’ve been mining for years to see what it can tell us about ourselves and our habits.

This weekend on the Dish, Andrew castigated Piers Morgan's "dumb, disgusting desperation" and defended Washington, DC, from its condescending critics. We also provided our customary coverage of religion, books, and culture, high, low, and in-between.

In matters of faith, doubt, and philosophy, David Bryant elaborated on faith in an unknowable God, Mark Galli meditated on grace and parenting, and Casey Cep remembered the idiosyncratic Christianity of Reynolds Price. John Jeremiah Sullivan considered his secular appreciation of gospel music, Lorin Stein praised the understanding God of Psalm 139, and Justin Erik Haldór Smith ruminated on the unlikely places he finds God. Jim Shepard thought about Flannery O'Connor and epiphanies, Richard Feynman riffed on the beauty of a flower, and Daniel Baird wondered just what justice requires.

In literary and arts coverage, David Mikics uncovered how Emerson and Freud compete for Harold Bloom's soul, Greg Olear argued that Nick Carraway of The Great Gatsby was gay, and Anthony Paletta detailed Oscar Wilde's trip to America. Rebecca Lemon showed how Shakespeare deployed alcohol in his plays, James Hall traced the difficulties the artist Raphael poses for biographers, Emily Elert highlighted the experiences for which English has no word, and Marcy Campbell plumbed her book club for insight into today's literary market. Megan Garber found a novel in your outbox, Michael Thomsen was disappointed by drug writing's inability to capture the psychadelic experience, readers continued our thread on fonts, and Stephen Marche believed the art bubble might be ready to pop. Read Saturday's poem here and Sunday's here.

In assorted news and views, a Dish reader honored the activist and polymath Aaron Swartz, Joshua Coen appreciated the public beauty of Central Park, and Dave Bry earned an Yglesias nomination for his thoughts on Chief Keef's latest album. The White House dashed the hopes of Star Wars fans, Daven Hiskey let down drinkers who think booze can keep them warm, and Devendra Banhart narrated the story of a great and crazy soul singer. Julian Baggini theorized why Nespresso won a taste-test, Gregory Ferenstein offered a cautionary tale about Wikipedia, Jon Brodkin reported on satellite companies providing broadband Internet access, and Derek Workman mused on the vagaries of foosball in a flat world.

We asked the Leveretts anything here and here. MHBs here and here, FOTDs here and here, VFYWs here and here, and the latest windown contest here.

– M.S.

(Photo of Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide this weekend, by Daniel J. Sieradski)

Author, photographer and ossuary expert Paul Koudounaris recently recounted the strange culture surrounding mummies in Italy's Palermo Catacombs:

For centuries people would pay to have their relatives mummified and put on display. And every November 2 you would dress your mummies in a new set of clothing. It was just a traditional family obligation. Eventually this stopped. Those catacombs are basically the finest fashion history museum in the world — what they’re wearing now is whatever they had on when their relatives stopped bringing them new clothes.

Generally this happened [around] the Enlightenment. It shows how drastically our conception of dealing with the dead changed at that point. If you consider Psycho, the one thing that makes Norman Bates absolutely unfit to be a member of human society is that he has his mother mummified and dresses her in clothes. That what marked him as a lunatic. But back in 1700 in Sicily that would have marked him as the paradigm of a loving son.

Language blogger S.A.P. over at The Economist confesses his morning ritual:

S.A.P. doesn't order a nonfat latte (easy on the foam) every morning. "Sam" usually does, though. I have a relatively popular male name: not ubiquitous, but familiar enough—in India. Stateside, Sam sounds vaguely related, so I've taken it on as my Starbucks name. Sam orders my coffees and makes restaurant reservations for me. He introduces me in short-lived conversations. His name is quick and perfectly dull, and unfailingly spelled correctly by the barista on my cup. I envy Sam sometimes.

(A cup belonging to Ann-Louise, posted on the tumblr Starbucks Spelling)

Kathryn Schulz considers the "beautiful fact that the underlying theory of the self-help industry is contradicted by the self-help industry’s existence" – that is, we don't really know what a "self" is:

The self-help movement seeks to account for and overcome the difficulties we experience when we are trying to make a desired change—but doing so by invoking an immortal soul and a mortal sinner (or an ego and an id, a homunculus and its minion) is not much different from saying that we "are of two minds," or "feel torn," or for that matter that we have a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. These are not explanations for the self. They are metaphors for the self. And metaphors, while evocative and illuminating, do not provide concrete causal explanations. Accordingly, they are not terribly likely to generate concrete solutions.

True, self-help literature is full of good advice, but good advice is not the issue; most of it has been around for centuries. The issue is how to implement it. In the words of the emphasis-happy Robbins, "Lots of people know what to do, but few people actually do what they know."

Previous Dish on the subject here.

"Faith is not the progressive unearthing of God's nature but a recognition that he/she is fundamentally unknowable. The signpost points not to growing certainty but towards increasing non-knowing. This is not as outrageous as it seems. An apophatic thread, a belief that the only way to conceive of God is through conceding that he is ineffable, runs throughout Christian history. Jan Van Ruysbroeck, the 14th century Augustinian and man of prayer, maintained that 'God is immeasurable and incomprehensible, unattainable and unfathomable'. St John of the Cross, one of the pillars of western mysticism, put it even more succinctly: 'If a man wishes to be sure of the road he travels on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark,'" – David Bryant

("Nimbus D’Aspremont 2012" by Berndnaut Smilde. Photo by Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk. Courtesy the artist and Ronchini Gallery.)

This NYT paragraph took my breath away:

One damp morning this winter, Jim Abdo was looking through architectural renderings at his office in Logan Circle, one of the many leafy Washington neighborhoods anchored by a statue of a long-dead guy riding a horse. Abdo got his start as a property developer by buying decrepit buildings and modernizing them, and his headquarters shows off the trick. The adjoining storefronts had been stripped bare and rebuilt, all warm wood and cold glass with exposed brick and beams. It looked like a Brooklyn design studio or a Silicon Valley start-up, or at least how those offices might look in a Nancy Meyers movie. But Abdo has built his business in the unstylish land of think tanks and tepid salmon lunches and boxy women’s suits.

Seriously, could you get any more contemptuous of the nation’s capital, one of the most pleasant, modern and livable cities in America. Unless you’re such a fucking snob you write paragraphs like that one. Makes me want to go back – just to stick it to Annie Lowrey, and her insufferable condescension.

One of the more hilarious statements from the White House’s petition website:

The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We’re working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.

The Administration does not support blowing up planets.

One thing we have never heard on his week-long ratings-seeking descent into Jerry Springer land is any sane, reasonable, calm and credible figure who can marshal facts and arguments against gun control. Don't get me wrong. I cannot fathom why assault weapons are somehow integral to either hunting or resistance to an Obama-led coup. But I do know that there are intelligent points to be made – about how gun control cannot truly work in a country with as many legal guns as the US, how the country's history and constitution make it incomparable to a place like Britain, how mass confiscation is impractical and could make matters much worse, etc, etc.

We absolutely should have this debate – in as reasonable and calm a fashion possible, if only out of some shred of respect to the twenty murdered children in Newtown and their families. Instead we got a rolling freak-show designed entirely for ratings, since Morgan has never actually practised anything but gutter tabloid journalism and once sent an email to a policeman aggrieved by Morgan's disgusting contempt for the privacy and dignity of anyone in public life: "fame and crime sends most of the usual rules out of the window." Hence the phone hacking which forced the closure of the newspaper, The News Of The World, he once edited, and his being fired from the second tabloid he edited for publishing fake photographs of supposed prisoner abuse by British soldiers.

If you want to have an idea of the sheer level or hatred and contempt for the man in his native Britain, check out this interview with Ian Hislop, the inspired editor of the British muck-raking and satirical magazine, Private Eye. Because Hislop offended Morgan on a TV show, Morgan put the Mirror on a six-month crusade to try and find every conceivably embarrassing detail of Hislop's private life, and had photographers camped outside his house:

Michael Moynihan reminds us of Morgan's record:

A quick look at Morgan’s oeuvre, which includes stints at the News of the World, which was shuttered during the phone hacking scandal, and the Daily Mirror, from which he was fired for publishing fake photos of British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners, and one understands that Morgan is incapable of nuance. Take his description of supermodel Kate Moss, whom he dismissed as a "drunken, foul-mouthed, ill-mannered, paranoid Croydon girl with a cocaine- desecrated hooter and spots." Her ex-boyfriend Pete Doherty, former guitar player in The Libertines, a seminal British post-punk band, is a "filthy talentless junkie who can’t sing." …

This is not an argument about the wisdom of owning an AR-15 or the judiciousness of outlawing certain high-capacity clips, but of the silliness of the Drudge and Morgan-style debate, which has abandoned reason for moral outrage. To disagree with Piers Morgan is to argue in bad faith, to be opposed to common sense, to be an uncaring, unfeeling tool of the gun lobby. Former CNN host Larry King, who Morgan replaced in 2011, told the Huffington Post this week that the show was now "all about the host," where "the guest becomes the prop to the host."

Update from a reader:

Aren’t you a little late to the party? No discussion of gun control? … haven’t you seen the tremendous takedown of this arrogant poseur by Ben Shapiro? It was masterful. Ben owned him, just demolished him. You can check it out here – it’s all over the internet tubes.

Megan Garber considers just how much writing we put into our emails over the course of a year:

Here's one estimate: 41,638 words. That's per the personal assistant app Cue, which integrates services like contacts, calendars, and especially email — and which recently released data based on a sampling of its users in 2012. While the average number of email messages each user received last year was (a relatively modest) 5,579 — and the average number of those messages each user sent was (an also modest) 879 — the output of words sent was comparatively colossal. To put those 41,638 discrete pieces of communication in perspective, that word count, in the aggregate, is roughly equivalent to a novel that is 166 pages in length. (The industry standard for page length is 250 words per page.) Which makes the average Cue user's email output slightly greater than The Old Man and the Sea (127 pages long), slightly less than The Great Gatsby (182 pages), and just about equal to The Turn of the Screw (165 pages).