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I was all fired up to make eight from-scratch servings of ramen last night after looking through the Momofuku book, but ulitmately the book is a Trojan horse for enticing people into the restaurants. As in: “Konbu? 5 pounds of meaty pork bones? Fuck that, let’s just go to Noodle Bar.”
Marco Arment posted a thoughtful reply to my off-the-cuff post about e-readers and I wanted to respond to a couple of things.
Most people won’t instantly jump to buy ebook readers after seeing them in TV commercials or liveblogged keynotes. They need to be experienced in person. (The ability to do this easily will give Barnes & Noble a huge advantage over Amazon.) And they’ll spread via good, old-fashioned, in-person referrals from friends and coworkers.
I want a good e-reader more than anything…I instantly fell for the screen when I saw the Sony Libre a few years ago. I do a *ton* of reading, upwards of 100-150 pages a day when I’m working full-time. About 0.5% of those pages are from books. But the Kindle? I tried it and didn’t like it. The screen is still great…the rest of it didn’t work at all for me. And this is what is frustrating for me…the Kindle seemed right for buying books but not for what I want it for: reading all that other stuff. I know the functionality exists on these devices to read blogs, magazines, newspapers, etc., but they’re marketed as book readers (Arment even calls them “ebook readers” instead of “e-readers”), the user experience is optimized for book reading, and the companies (esp. Amazon and B&N) view them as portable bookstores.
But there are a lot of people — including, significantly, most people over age 40 - who don’t like reading tiny text on bright LCD screens in devices loaded with distractions that die after 5 hours without their electric lifeline.
Agreed. I don’t particularly enjoy reading text on the iPhone; I’d prefer a larger e-ink screen. Instapaper support on the Kindle was almost enough to make me get one…but not quite yet.
Most of Kottke’s problem with ebook readers can be solved in software
The problem isn’t that you can’t route around Amazon’s design decisions with clever hacks, but that Amazon chose to optimize the device for reading (and buying) books. I.e. the software *is* the problem. That is not so easily solved…to do so, Amazon has to address it. And maybe they will. I hope they do.
I’m not including RSS feeds or PDFs in the discussion. RSS feeds aren’t reading: they’re alerting, discovering and filtering.
Off-topic, but this isn’t my experience. I’d say about 30-50% of my reading is done directly in my newsreader…there are plently of blogs out there that aren’t link blogs or Tumblrs.
Sure, fine, make your single-use devices. But all these e-readers — the Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, et al — are all focused on the wrong single use: books. (And in the case of at least the Nook and Kindle, the focus is on buying books from B&N and Amazon. The Kindle is more like a 7-Eleven than a book.) The correct single use is reading. Your device should make it equally easy to read books, magazine articles, newspapers, web sites, RSS feeds, PDFs, etc. And keep in mind, all of these things have images that are integral to the reading experience. We want to read; help us do it.
In addition to being a painter of some repute, Peter Paul Rubens was also a diplomat:
In Master of Shadows, Mark Lamster tells the story of Rubens’s life and brilliantly re-creates the culture, religious conflicts, and political intrigues of his time. Commissions to paint military and political leaders drew Rubens from his Antwerp home to London, Madrid, Paris, and Rome. The Spanish crown, recognizing the value of his easy access to figures of power, enlisted him into diplomatic service. His uncommon intelligence, preternatural charm, and ability to navigate through ever-shifting political winds allowed him to negotiate a long-sought peace treaty between England and Spain even as Europe’s shrewdest statesmen plotted against him.
and a graphic designer.
Moretus was Rubens’s most frequent design client. To save his friend money, Rubens generally did his work for Plantin on holidays, so he would not have to charge Moretus his rather exorbitant day rate (Rubens was notorious for his high prices), and even then he agreed to be paid in books.
This is page 471 of The Anglo-American Telegraphic Code book (previously mentioned here).
Looks like the scanner caught one of Google’s pink-fingered elves at work. A quick search reveals several other such errors.
PBS will be airing a two-hour-long documentary based on Michael Pollan’s excellent The Botany of Desire (previously recommended here).
The tulip, by gratifying our desire for a certain kind of beauty, has gotten us to take it from its origins in Central Asia and disperse it around the world. Marijuana, by gratifying our desire to change consciousness, has gotten people to risk their lives, their freedom, in order to grow more of it and plant more of it. The potato, by gratifying our desire for control, control over nature so that we can feed ourselves has gotten itself out of South America and expanded its range far beyond where it was 500 years ago. And the apple, by gratifying our desire for sweetness begins in the forests of Kazakhstan and is now the universal fruit. These are great winners in the dance of domestication.
A five minute preview of the show is available on YouTube:
I’ve watched the whole program and it’s a worthy companion to the book.
Update: PBS has put the whole thing online for free. (via unlikely words)
One of the items in this year’s Christmas catalog from Neiman Marcus is a dinner for the buyer and a guest with “the brightest minds of modern literature, journalism, and the arts”. Among those who may be in attendance at said dinner are George Stephanopoulos, John Lithgow, Nora Ephron, and Malcolm Gladwell.
The price: $200,000.
In recent years, the gifts on offer have grown increasingly extravagant and ridiculous: a modern Zeppelin for $10 million, a 3-hole golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus for your back yard for $1 million, and a private concert with Elton John for $1.5 million. (via girlhacker)
A couple in London have found the ultimate space-saving solution for a city-dwelling book lover: a staircase bookshelf. UK-based Levitate Architects came up with the page-turning passage as a unique way to augment a loft sleeping space in the attic with discreet storage. If they could create a record crate bathroom, I’d be ready to move in.
The Informant (Steven Soderbergh, Matt Damon) is out in theaters now. I had no idea it was based on a true story…a genuinely crazy true story of corporate price fixing, FBI informants, and an eager-to-please executive. Kurt Eichenwald wrote a series of article about the case for The New York Times, which he fashioned into a book. This American Life devoted an entire hour to this story back in 2000…it’s a fascinating listen.
We hear from Kurt Eichenwald, whose book The Informant is about the price fixing conspiracy at the food company ADM, Archer Daniels Midland, and the executive who cooperated with the FBI in recording over 250 hours of secret video and audio tapes, probably the most remarkable videotapes ever made of an American company in the middle of a criminal act.
Two books by North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il are available at Amazon: Kim Jong Il on the Art of Opera and On the Art of the Cinema. From the preface of the latter:
The cinema is now one of the main objects on which efforts should be concentrated in order to conduct the revolution in art and literature. The cinema occupies an important place in the overall development of art and literature. As such it is a powerful ideological weapon for the revolution and construction. Therefore, concentrating efforts on the cinema, making breakthroughs and following up success in all areas of art and literature is the basic principle that we must adhere to in revolutionizing art and literature.
Here’s more information about Dear Leader’s cinematic and operatic interests.
On the Art of Opera describes how Kim and his dad, the late Great Leader Kim Il Sung, discovered the husk of a tired art form and gave it a much-needed shot of North Korean communism. Any impartial observer would agree that Kim’s aesthetic prescriptions are every bit as crowd-pleasing as his economic policies.
“In conventional operas,” Kim writes, “the personalities of the characters were abstract, their acting clumsy, and the flow of the drama tedious, because the singers were forced to sing unnaturally and their acting was neglected.” Furthermore, until the arrival of the Kims, “no one interwove dance and story very closely.”
And now? “The ‘Sea of Blood’-style opera,” he observes, “has opened up a new phase in dramaturgy.” In case you’ve been living in a cave, Sea of Blood is North Korea’s longest-running production, the Cats of Pyongyang. It has been staged 1,500 times, according to the official Korea News Service, which calls it an “immortal classical masterpiece.” Kim claims to have revamped the form by chucking the aria out the window and replacing all solo performance with a cunning Kim innovation: the pangchang, a more satisfying off-stage chorus representing groupthink.
Brian Joseph Davis takes a crack at editing some passages from the first two chapters of The Da Vinci Code.
Maybe using the adverb “slowly” seven times in your first 10 pages is the secret to good writing. That would make it 11,428,571 copies sold for every “slowly.”
See also Dan Brown’s worst sentences.
Captain Bezu Fache carried himself like an angry ox, with his wide shoulders thrown back and his chin tucked hard into his chest. His dark hair was slicked back with oil, accentuating an arrow-like widow’s peak that divided his jutting brow and preceded him like the prow of a battleship. As he advanced, his dark eyes seemed to scorch the earth before him, radiating a fiery clarity that forecast his reputation for unblinking severity in all matters.
PIG 05049 by Christien Meindertsma recently won the 2009 Index Award in the Play category. This book looks amazing.
05049 was an actual pig, raised and slaughtered on a commercial farm in the Netherlands. Rotterdam designer Christien Meindertsma was shocked to discover that she could document 185 products contributed to by the animal.
Meindertsma’s design includes the publication of her book, PIG 05049, which charts and pictures each of the products supported by the animal. The surprise is in the fact that elements of production contributed to by pig farming include not only predictable foodstuffs — pork chops and bacon — but far less expected non-food items: ammunition, train brakes, automobile paint, soap and washing powder, bone china, cigarettes.
The caption on the page reads:
Fatty acids derived from pork bone fat are used as a hardening agent in crayons and also gives them their distinctive smell.
Crayons smell like pig bone fat. I don’t think I’ll use crayons ever again without thinking of that little factoid.
See also I, Pencil. Nobody knows how to make a pencil and nobody knows where all the parts of a pig go either. (via design observer)
The two threads on book titles as if they were written today are still going strong…there are some really good ones in the comments.
Then: The Bible
Now: A Million Little Signs and Wonders
Then: The Sun Also Rises
Now: Drink, Bullfight, Mope
Then: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Now: Why Do Apples Fall Down and Not Up? Answers From The Cutting Edge of Physics
Then: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus
Now: Frankenstein: Wrath of the Supercorpse
Then: Declaration of Independence
Now: The Pursuit of Happiness: How to get control of your continent and have fun doing it!
Then: The Oxford English Dictionary
Now: Word Up! 300,000 proven ways to express yourself in speech and writing
Then: To Kill A Mockingbird
Now: To Kill A Mockingbird (A Novel)
Then: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
Now: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel: A Novel
Then: Cry, the Beloved Country
Now: Black. White.
Then: Little Women
Now: Concord 01742
Then: The Hobbit
Now: Hobbit
Then: The Art of War
Now: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Strategy Guide
Many of the entries took old fiction titles and converted them to contemporary non-fiction titles — e.g. Cinderella becomes How to Escape Being Bullied Without Once Standing Up for Yourself — which wasn’t really the point of the exercise but entertaining nonetheless.
Oh and if anyone wants to whip up book covers for any of these, feel free.
Using examples from Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, Jeff Atwood shows us how to keep our guard up against people trying to sell you things and, ultimately, ourselves.
Realize that some premium options exist as decoys — that is, they are there only to make the less expensive options look more appealing, because they’re easy to compare. Don’t make binding decisions solely based on how easy it is to compare two side-by-side options from the same vendor. Try comparing all the alternatives, even those from other vendors.
A great idea…this one in my favorite:
Then: The Gospel of Matthew
Now: 40 Days and a Mule: How One Man Quit His Job and Became the Boss
I’ve opened up the comments…let’s hear your best re-titlings. (via waxy)
What the Dog Saw is a collection of his writing from The New Yorker. Here’s an annotated table of contents with links to all the articles and the dates on which they originally appeared in the magazine:
The Pitchman - Ron Popeil and the conquest of the American kitchen. (Oct 30, 2000)
The Ketchup Conundrum - Mustard now comes in dozens of different varieties. Why has ketchup stayed the same? (Sept 6, 2004)
Blowing Up - How Nassim Taleb turned the inevitability of disaster into an investment strategy. (Apr 22, 2002)
True Colors - Hair dye and the hidden history of postwar America. (Mar 22, 1999)
John Rock’s Error - What the inventor of the birth control pill didn’t know about women’s health. (Mar 13, 2000)
What the Dog Saw - Cesar Millan and the movements of mastery. (May 22, 2006)
Open Secrets - Enron, intelligence and the perils of too much information. (Jan 8, 2007)
Million Dollar Murray - Why problems like homelessness may be easier to solve than to manage. (Feb 13, 2006)
The Picture Problem - Mammography, air power, and the limits of looking. (Dec 13, 2004)
Something Borrowed - Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life? (Nov 22, 2004)
Connecting the Dots - The paradoxes of intelligence reform. (Mar 10, 2003)
The Art of Failure - Why some people choke and others panic. (August 21, 2000)
Blowup - Who can be blamed for a disaster like the Challenger explosion? No one, and we’d better get used to it. (Jan 22, 1996)
Most Likely to Succeed - How do we hire when we can’t tell who’s right for the job. (Dec 15, 2008)
Dangerous Minds - Criminal profiling made easy. (Nov 12, 2007)
The Talent Myth - Are smart people over-rated? (Jul 22, 2002)
Late Bloomers - Why do we equate genius with precocity? (Oct 20, 2008)
The New Boy Network - What do job interviews really tell us? (May 29, 2000)
Troublemakers - What pit bulls can teach us about crime. (Feb 6, 2006)
Some really great stuff in there. Even though it’s all available online for free, this is a sure airport bestseller for years to come. (thx, kyösti)
Tom Scocca writes about the rise of books filled with useless information.
In a world where useful and important answers come looking for you, it is the idea of unimportance that is the primary selling point of the miscellanies. The books promise to guide the reader somewhere older and slower, to create a little world in which information can serve as amusement rather than currency. A carefully done miscellany appears random, but it achieves a sort of quiet intellectual bustle, set apart from the roar of the daily info-chaos. The miscellanies are information as art, and art for art’s sake.
(thx, choire)
As Tyler Cowen seemingly reads every new book published in English each year (and I’m not even sure about the “seemingly”), a rave review from him directs my finger from its holster to Amazon’s 1-Click trigger. This week Cowen is on about The Inheritance of Rome by Chris Wickham. From the review:
What can I say? I have to count this tome as one of the best history books I have read, ever.
Having just finished, coincidentially, Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy (more on that soon), I *am* looking for another book to read.
A book listing the top 100 wineries in the world will retail for $1,000,000. To be fair, the purchase price also includes 600 bottles of wine from said wineries. (via eat me daily)
Dave Eggers has written a young adult novel called The Wild Things that is based loosely on Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and the screenplay he co-wrote with Spike Jonze for the movie version. The New Yorker published an excerpt of the book this week.
Max left the room and found Gary lying on the couch in his work clothes, his frog eyes closed, his chin entirely receded into his neck. Max gritted his teeth and let out a low, simmering growl.
Gary opened his eyes and rubbed them.
“Uh, hey, Max. I’m baggin’ a few after-work Z’s. How goes it?”
Max looked at the floor. This was one of Gary’s typical questions: Another day, huh? How goes it? No play for the playa, right? None of his questions had answers. Gary never seemed to say anything that meant anything at all.
“Cool suit,” Gary said. “Maybe I’ll get me one of those. What are you, like a rabbit or something?”
Eggers explains how the idea for the book came about in an associated interview.
But while I was working on the book, it was funny, because I started going in new directions, different from any of the screenplay versions, pushing it into some territory that was personal to me. So in a way the movie is more Spike’s version of Maurice’s book, and this novel is more my version.
Here’s the latest trailer for the movie.
To sum up: children’s book, movie, young adult book. Oh, and a movie soundtrack.
The influential design magazine Emigre stopped publishing issues back in 2005, but now they’re releasing issue No. 70, which is actually a hardcover book celebrating the best of Emigre from the past 25 years.
This book, designed and edited by Emigre co-founder and designer Rudy VanderLans, is a selection of reprints, using original digital files, tracing Emigre’s development from its early bitmap design days in the late 1980s through to the experimental layouts that defined the so called “Legibility Wars” of the late 1990s, to the critical design writing of the early 2000s.
(via quipsologies)
This little tidbit at the end of this look back at David Foster Wallace’s career gives me hope for The Pale King, the forthcoming (and posthumous and unfinished) novel by Wallace.
Pressed for more details, Pietsch cites a commencement speech that Wallace gave at Kenyon University in 2005, which he says is “very much a distillation” of the novel’s material. “The really important kind of freedom,” said Wallace, “involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom… The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”
I loves me that commencement speech.
Claudia Goes to Class Wearing Sweatpants With Words On the Backside
Kristy’s Softball Friends Don’t Buy it That She’s Dating a Dude
Mary Anne Narcs On Her Roommate
When I was a kid, there were never enough books around the house that I hadn’t read (and I was apparently too lazy to go to the library) so when my younger sister started reading the Baby-Sitters Club series, I did too; she would finish a book and I’d pick it up right after her. At one point, I even got ahead of her and read the first six or seven in the series. This also explains why I’ve read all of the Anne of Green Gables series (yes, even Rilla of Ingleside), many of the Little House books, and quite a few Nancy Drew books. Anyway, great to see that Claudia, Kristy, Mary Anne, and Stacey made it to college!
As a kid, I read many of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books so I was interested to read that Laura’s daughter Rose may have co-authored them.
Wilder scholarship is a flourishing industry, particularly at universities in the Midwest, and much of it seeks to sift fiction from history. The best book among many good, if more pedestrian, ones, “The Ghost in the Little House,” by William Holtz, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Missouri, explores a controversy that first arose after Wilder bequeathed her original manuscripts to libraries in Detroit and California. It is the work of a fastidious stylist, and, in its way, a minor masterpiece of insight and research. Holtz’s subject, however, isn’t Laura Ingalls Wilder. It is her daughter and, he argues, her unacknowledged “ghost,” Rose Wilder Lane.
Rose was an interesting character; she escaped the prairie life of her parents and transformed into a “a stylish cosmopolite who acquired several languages, enjoyed smoking and fornication, and dined at La Rotonde when she wasn’t motoring around Europe in her Model T”.
Those of you still plugging away at Infinite Summer may not want to read this (i.e. spoilers!), but Brian Barone finished early and found some interesting mathematical themes in the book.
Now, here’s the part that really boggled me: the Consumption/Waste idea is a 1:1 correspondence (something in yields something out), what mathematicians call a linear function. The Parabola idea connects, pretty obviously, with parabolas — now we’re looking at x raised to the power of two. Annular Systems are modeled by circles which are given in analytic geometry by equations with both x^2 and y^2. Limits and Infinity, of course, become necessary in order to find the area of shapes under curves like parabolas and three-dimensional projections of circles.
Whoa. That is a tiny bit mind-blowing…do I really have time for a reread right now? (thx, nick)
Unsurprisingly, the MLB teams currently drawing the most benefit from the lessons of Moneyball are those with lots of money operating in big markets.
Well, of course, the big-market teams figured it out. They hired their own Ivy League consultants. They bought even better computers. Walks is only one tiny aspect in it … but who leads the American League in walks this year? The New York Yankees. Last year? The Boston Red Sox. The year before that? The Boston Red Sox. And so it goes. Now, six years later, it seems to me that the small-market teams are really grasping and trying to find some loophole, some opening that will allow them to win in this tough financial environment.
Of Wrestling with Moses, the story of how Jane Jacobs took on Robert Moses and his plans for two Manhattan freeways, Tyler Cowen says:
The parts of this book about Jacobs are splendid. The parts about Moses are good, though they were more familiar to me. I believe there has otherwise never been much biographical material on Jacobs’s life.
The New York Times has a lengthy excerpt from the book that recalls Jacobs’ arrival in NYC.
Writing about the city remained her passion. She often went up to the rooftop of her apartment building and watched the garbage trucks as they made their way through the city streets, picking the sidewalks clean. She would think, “What a complicated great place this is, and all these pieces of it that make it work.” The more she investigated and explored neighborhoods, infrastructure, and business districts for her stories, the more she began to see the city as a living, breathing thing — complex, wondrous, and self-perpetuating.
The trailer for The Lovely Bones, directed by Peter Jackson and based on the 2002 book by Alice Sebold.
It is the story of a teenage girl who, after being brutally raped and murdered, watches from heaven as her family and friends go on with their lives, while she herself comes to terms with her own death.
Jackson personally purchased the film rights to the book and from the trailer, it seems like this is a return to his Heavenly Creatures days, with a bit of the LOTR fantasy and special effects sprinkled in. Looking forward to this one.
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