Month: August 2013

by Jessie Roberts

In a review of Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, Kevin Driscoll touches on a very contemporary genre:

“Litspam,” writes [author Finn] Brunton, came in the form of “cut-up literary texts statistically reassembled to take advantage of flaws in the design and deployment of [probabilistic] filters.” Drawing on the deep well of public domain texts available on sites like Project Gutenberg, this new spam could read like “fractured textual experiments”: automated Dada-like poetry combining such disparate material as Jules Verne novels, Nelly lyrics, and a long-lost recipe for pecan sandies. These “litspam generators,” the agents of what Brunton calls “spam’s modernism,” were designed to incorporate enough hostage literature to trick the probabilistic spam filters into classifying their output as authentically human. A 2005 email from “Clyde Blankenship” titled “Observations on my first Cia1!s experience” illustrates the “pure arbitrary utility” of a typical litspam pastiche:

forsaken is multiple gaseous a balmy not stannous cool.
indefatigable is pigtail coed is
bracket a commodious cyclist good.
lotus is greenberg catch a haulage not regis cool.
actaeon is elsinore mud is
familiarly a expiable toe good.

Brunton hesitates to liken such “poisoned Bayesian spew” to the work of human poets — even those employing avant-garde cut-up techniques — instead comparing litspam to “flipping through channels on a television.” To date, none of the anonymous programmers responsible for the machinery behind litspam have stepped forward to claim authorship, but their voices would lend an intriguing new dimension to this period.

by Matt Sitman

It rarely comes down to finances, as Kaya Genç realized when she revisited George Orwell’s essay, “Books v. Cigarettes,” written after he had heard that factory workers found books too expensive:

[Orwell] calculated his expenditure on books over a period of 15 years. He took note of them (“bought,” “given to me or bought with book tokens,” “review copies and complimentary copies,” “borrowed and not returned,” “temporarily on loan”) and learned that over this course of time he had purchased a total of 442 titles. Since he had roughly the same amount of books stored in another place he doubled the figure for a final calculation. “[I]t seems that I possess altogether nearly 900 books, at a cost of £165 15s,” he wrote.

To fully estimate his reading expenses he added to the sum the cost of newspapers and periodicals. Orwell typically read two daily papers, an evening paper, two Sunday papers, a weekly magazine, and “one or two” monthly magazines. He added these and the cost of his library subscriptions. In the end he concluded that his “total reading expenses over the past fifteen years have been in the neighbourhood of £25 a year.”

In contrast, he had spent £40 a year on cigarettes. His reading habit was cheaper than his smoking one. The workers had had little reason to complain about the cost of books, he decided. If they were not reading literature it was probably because they found books boring — not because they couldn’t afford them.

She updates Orwell’s self-inventory for the age of tablet reading and Starbucks:

My e-reading expenditures … cost me around $385 — less than my coffee expenditures for the same period, which were in the neighborhood of $1,800. My e-reading habit thus costs only a fifth of my drinking one (maybe a little more when I’m not working on a novel). For every dollar I spent on the likes of Tolstoy I spent four on coffee beans.

(Photo by Fabrizio Salvetti)

by Patrick Appel

A reason why research on the subject has been mixed:

Heavy coffee drinkers in the study were more likely to be smokers – which makes sense, since the data was collected beginning more than 40 years ago. [Rob van Dam, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health] thinks the research didn’t do enough to control for smoking. In fact, as we’ve previously reported, lots of studies in the 1980s failed to control for the link between coffee drinking and smoking, which is one big reason why early research appeared to give coffee a bad rep. Evidence suggesting health benefits from coffee began to emerge only as studies separated the two habits.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader casts a skeptical eye on the story:

Andrew’s take on the detention of Greenwald’s partner is mostly on the mark, but he says that Mr. Miranda appears to have been held only because his partner embarrassed the US government. This is possible, but the circumstances also suggest that he may have been acting as a courier between Greenwald and Poitras and thus made himself a part of the Snowden case. By no means do I mean to suggest that there would be anything wrong with acting as a courier, or that his detention was justified under British law – only that there is some reason to believe Mr. Miranda may have been directly involved in the disclosure of Snowden information, in which case his detention – however inappropriate – would have been in connection with his own actions, not just Greenwald’s.

Another points to the following excerpt from a NYT report and says “it sure sounds like he was acting as a courier”:

Mr. Miranda was in Berlin to deliver documents related to Mr. Greenwald’s investigation into government surveillance to Ms. Poitras, Mr. Greenwald said. Ms. Poitras, in turn, gave Mr. Miranda different documents to pass to Mr. Greenwald. Those documents, which were stored on encrypted thumb drives, were confiscated by airport security.

Another wonders:

Was that sloppiness on Greenwald’s part? Was it a deliberate attempt to solicit sympathy, to manipulate people’s emotions? I’ll admit that on the first read of what happened, I was angry that Miranda was detained, because Greenwald made it sound as though there was no good reason. But obviously there was.

Another responds to the latest news from Greenwald – that he’s planning to leak UK-specific national security documents to retaliate against his partner’s detention:

I understand why Greenwald is upset, but I’m uncomfortable with this type of personal and vengeful journalism. It is something I’ve always disliked about Greenwald and those like him. I wish I could better articulate why, but it just strikes me both as petty and dangerous – and not journalistic.

Update from a reader:

I’m not sure that I see the point these readers make. Even though Miranda may have been acting as a courier for Greenwald, he was detained by the UK government under an anti-terrorism statute – and journalism ain’t terrorism. It’s a perfect illustration of the exact corruption Greenwald’s been warning against, and a colossally stupid move to make for those invested in the security state’s continuation.

Another:

Reuters twisted Glenn’s statement beyond recognition. See his response here.

by Chris Bodenner

In case you’re confused by the multiple bylines today, last night Andrew unplugged for his annual fortnight away from the blog. But before doing so, he reflected on the first seven months of an independent Dish and praised the young staffers contributing to its slow but steady success. A new subscriber writes:

Well, your vacation going-away post finally got me. I am a religious RSS user and thus I haven’t “had” to pay yet. But I’ve been reading the Dish daily since your coverage of the Green Revolution and, yeah, I can afford it, so [tinypass_offer text=”take my money”]!

Also, for the “You Think ‘Weiner’ is Bad?” files, I bring you Dick Power, “an important Long Island, New York bike shop owner and bicycle maker.” Yes, Dick fucking Power.

Andrew also wrote a handful of other posts before signing off; he tore into the Cameron government for detaining Greenwald’s partner under an anti-terrorist law; he filled us in on the somber state of Eddy over her dearly departed roommate Dusty (prompting similar stories from readers); and he rallied beard-lovers everywhere, provoking readers to weigh the pros and cons of pogonophilia. One more from the con side:

Howard Jacobson’s argument, and the vanity-free high ground, can be owned only by that tiny subset of beard wearers that do not “interfere in the process” and proudly display their long, scraggly, unkempt beards. Cheers to them. But the bearded men I know groom their prized facial hair meticulously, with more attention and effort than goes into my two-minute daily shave in the shower sans mirror. Simply scraping all the hair off is easier (and just maybe, less vain) than all of that obsessive trimming and sculpting.

Another narrates the above video:

I trust you’ve been getting updates on the bearded Daniel Bryan, the Dish’s favourite pro wrestler. But in case you haven’t, I thought I’d pass along news from last night’s Summerslam (WWE’s second-biggest annual show), where Bryan defeated John Cena to become WWE Champion in one of the most triumphant moments in recent wrestling history. Unfortunately, he also became one of history’s shortest-lived champions after getting screwed by a conspiracy between WWE’s top brass (COO Triple H was the special guest referee) and one of its veteran heels, Randy Orton. So Bryan’s reign lasted about five minutes in total. It was heartbreaking, but also thrilling.

But far more importantly on the Dish today, we continued to chronicle the escalating carnage in Egypt, something that National Review and Commentary seemed to endorse by backing the military crackdown. (Maybe instead of sending the junta billions of dollars, the US should start sending civilians bulletproof whiteboards.) The increasingly violent Muslim Brotherhood already looks doomed while the Egyptian press is under threat by both sides of the conflict.

Death seemed to be the overriding theme of today’s Dish; we honored the passing of Christian political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain, drew larger lessons from a sports journalist who killed himself on his birthday, continued to joke about suicide, and studied the science of near-death experiences.

A better note to end on: another scenic window view from a reader on the can.

by Matt Sitman

R.R. Reno meditates on the way certain books become “existentially arresting” for us because of “the time and place when they happen to fall into our hands”:

I read Herman Hesse and J.D. Salinger at a teenager. Like many others I thrilled to their intimations of philosophy. But they did not become touchstones, perhaps because I quickly grew out of the superficial angst and feelings of alienation that I was told should characterize the life of a serious teenager. Instead, my first important book was The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann.

I read it while living as a climbing bum in Yosemite Valley in the late 1970s. The title was of the sort to attract a climber’s attention. And the book’s many pages promised hours of diversion. What I got instead was a modicum of self-knowledge. Hans Castorp, the main character, goes to visit a relative at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Switzerland, and ends up staying indefinitely. Situated literally above everyday concerns about career, family, and class, his life is pleasantly suspended. Such is the mountain’s magic. Yet, as Mann develops the story over hundreds of pages, the mountain turns out to work a black magic of self-deception and false innocence. The novel did not diminish Yosemite’s seductions, but it allowed me for the first time to see the darkness in my dreams.

His concluding thoughts:

I started The Magic Mountain imagining myself in control. I planned to use the book to entertain myself during the evening hours at the campsite. But soon enough Mann’s novel bewitched me, and I was a patient operated upon by a master surgeon, which is what St. Augustine’s sense of enjoyment brings about. It’s this vulnerability to influence, an anesthesia to the self and its purposes—that we need to cultivate if books are to be important for us.