kottke.org posts about books
In The Year of Living Biblically, AJ Jacobs followed all the rules in the Bible as literally as he could.
The book that came out of the year has several layers.
- An exploration of some of the Bible’s startlingly relevant rules. I tried not to covet, gossip, or lie for a year. I’m a journalist in New York. This was not easy.
- An investigation of the rules that baffle the 21st century brain. How to justify the laws about stoning homosexuals? Or smashing idols? Or sacrificing oxen? And how do you follow those in modern-day Manhattan?
Jacobs was recently interviewed by Jewish culture magazine Jewcy about the book and will be talking about his experience tomorrow at the 92nd St. Y.
Interview with chefs Grant Achatz of Alinea and Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck, mostly about the cookbooks that they’re working on. Achatz is self-publishing the Alinea Book and using the exact recipes from the restaurant:
For us, we felt the most important thing was to express the restaurant in its most accurate fashion, and try to convey to the reader what Alinea and the food are all about. We felt that if we eliminated some of the techniques because they were too difficult, or some of the ingredients because they were too hard to find, then you would be left with something that’s not representative of the restaurant or of the cuisine itself. So our effort was to convey the emotion, the expression, the essence of the restaurant, and also hopefully-if the recipes are written well enough-to dispel the myth that cooking in this style is impossible for somebody who isn’t a professional cook.
He also mentions that the ingredient amounts in the recipes are metric, meaning that a digital scale is required. Maybe they should make the cookbook itself a digital scale…just make the cover a little thicker, throw some sensors in there with a digital display in the lower right hand corner, and there you go!
Salon had an interview with Pamela Paul the other day, author of Parenting, Inc., a book about the business of parenting. Paul starts out by disparging the $800 stroller phenomenon. Ollie’s stroller was somewhat expensive (not $800 but not $100 either) but it’s well built, flexible in use, nicely designed (functionally speaking), and was far and away the best one for our needs. We didn’t feel good about spending so much money, but the eventual cost-per-use will be in the range of cents, so we’re really happy with our choice so far. Some parents buy expensive strollers more as a fashion statement, so I can see where Paul is coming from on this one.
I thought the rest of the interview was quite good. We’re still new to this parenting thing, but Paul seems to be on the right track. Here’s her take on the best toys for kids:
When you think back to the ’60s and ’70s, all the right-thinking progressive parents thought toys should be natural and open-ended. Crayola and Kinder Blocks and Lego were considered raise-your-kid-smart toys. Then, all this data that came out which said that kids need to be stimulated. They need sound! They need multi-sensory experiences! Now, the more bells and whistles a toy has, the supposedly better it is.
Our parents’ generation actually had it right. The less the toy does, the better. Everyone thinks: “Toys need to be interactive.” No, toys don’t need to be interactive. Children need to interact with toys. The best toys are 90 percent kid, 10 percent toy, the kind of thing that you can use 20 different ways, not because it has 20 different buttons to press, but because the kid, when they’re 6 months old is going to chew on it, and toss it, but when they’re a year they’re going to start stacking it.
And then later:
At the most basic level reuse, recycle, repurpose. The average American child gets 70 new toys a year. That is just so far beyond what is necessary. Most child gear, toys, books are a lot cheaper, relatively speaking, than they were decades ago. In the aggregate it ends up being a lot more expensive, because we’re buying a lot more of it, but kids just don’t need that many toys. Kids lose out when things become less special.
We’ve been avoiding toys that make noise and light up. Half of his toys are garbage — old toilet paper rolls, bags that our coffee pods come in, 20oz soda bottles filled with colored water or split peas, scraps of fabric, etc. — or not even toys at all — pots and pans, measuring spoons, etc. It seems like the right approach for us; Paul’s “90 percent kid, 10 percent toy” really resonates.
Paul also talks about not overstimulating kids. When I get up in the morning or come home from the office, it’s hard not to scoop Ollie up and give him constant attention until he goes to bed or down for a nap. Instead, I’ve been trying to leave him alone to play and explore by himself. He’s getting old enough that when he wants me involved, he’ll come to me. In this way, parenting is like employee management; give people the resources they need and then let them do their jobs.
This last bit reminded me of our trip to Buy Buy Baby (subtle!!) to procure baby proofing supplies. They totally had a Wall of Death designed to entice parents to coat their entire house in cheap white plastic.
The baby-proofing industry completely preys on parents’ worst anxieties and fears. It really doesn’t take a brain surgeon to baby-proof a house, and every store has the “Wall of Death” with like 10,000 products in it that you can affix to any potentially sharp surface in your house, if you choose to go that route.
It’s difficult not to feel incredibly manipulated by the Wall of Death. You know deep down that it’s ridiculous; your parents didn’t have any of this crap and you turned out fine. But then the what-ifs start gnawing away at your still-shaky confidence as a new parent. Our encounter with the Wall paralyzed us, and with the exception of those plastic wall outlet plugs, we’ve punted on baby proofing for now. We’re letting Ollie show us where all the problem areas are before committing to any white plastic solutions.
How do you describe a smell or a taste? John Lanchester discusses that and a recent book of perfume reviews in this recent New Yorker article.
The language of taste has, therefore, reached something of an impasse. On the one hand, we have the Romantic route, in which you are free to compare a taste to the last unicorn or the sensation you had when you were told that you failed your driving test-and others are free to have no idea what you are talking about. On the other, we have the scientific route, which comes down to numbers, and risks missing the fundamental truth of all smells and tastes, which is that they are, by definition, experiences.
Tyler Cowen has a short review of Peter Moskos’ book, Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District.
This is one of the two or three best conceptual analyses of “cops and robbers” I have read. It is mandatory reading for all fans of The Wire and recommended for everyone else.
Sheeeeeeeeeeit.
This week’s New Yorker has a profile of David Chang, chef/owner of the Momofuku family of restaurants. The profile isn’t online but Ed Levine has a nice write-up with some quotes.
Just because we’re not Per Se, just because we’re not Daniel, just because we’re not a four-star restaurant, why can’t we have the same fucking standards? If we start being accountable for not only our own actions but for everyone else’s actions, we’re gonna do some awesome shit. […] I know we’ve won awards, all this stuff, but it’s not because we’re doing something special — I believe it’s really because we care more than the next guy.
Reading the article, it appears that Chang is using Michael Ruhlman’s The Soul of a Chef as a playbook here. Caring more than the next guy is right out of the Thomas Keller section of the book…with his perfectly cut green tape and fish swimming the correct way on ice, no one cares more than Keller.
Interesting gallery of Freakonomics book covers from around the world. I enjoyed the Turkish version — “just put a hot chick on the cover” — and the Penguin UK version.
The Novelists Guild of America strike is having no discernible impact on the nation.
“We must, as a people, achieve a resolution to this strike soon,” novelist David Foster Wallace said at a rally Monday at Pomona College in Claremont, CA, where he is a professor. “The thought of this country being deprived of its only source of book-length fiction is enough to give one the howling fantods.”
“I thank you both for coming,” he added.
Chef Dan Barber, proprietor of NYC’s Blue Hill, is planning on writing a book or two. I still fondly remember Barber’s Food Without Fear op-ed in the NY Times in 2004.
Rating the critics: the Economist’s More Intelligent Life blog picks their favorite movie and book critics. They will be offering picks in more categories in the coming days. (via mr)
I got two great things in the mail yesterday. I’ll talk about the second one in a bit, but the first is Kim Chinquee’s book of flash fictions and prose poems, Oh Baby. Here’s an excerpt:
She sent me pictures of the cake. They had a flaming onion, whisky sours, steak and fried potatoes. They gambled at the Soaring Eagle, losing hundreds and then thousands. “You got married to my mom,” I said to him on my end. I got married at the Justice of the Peace, picking up two people, offering to pay them. The first said no thanks and the second said he was too injured. We found another couple who seemed angelic, their voices a team, an echo. “She’s a catch,” he said, kind of laughing. I heard him on the exhale. He smoked on the back porch that faced a lake, where we’d once gone fishing, catching nothing worth keeping.
Proust Was a Neuroscientist is the story of how eight writers and artists anticipated our contemporary understanding of the human brain. From the preface:
This book is about artists who anticipated the discoveries of neuroscience. It is about writers and painters and composers who discovered truths about the human mind — real, tangible truths — that science is only now rediscovering. Their imaginations foretold the facts of the future.
I enjoyed the book quite a bit so I sent the author, Jonah Lehrer, a few questions via email. Here’s our brief conversation.
Jason Kottke: Your exploration of the intersection of neuroscience and culture begins with Proust; you were reading Swann’s Way while doing research in a neuroscience lab. Where did the idea come from for a collection of people who anticipated our modern understanding of the human brain? How did you find those other stories?
Jonah Lehrer: The lab I was working in was studying the chemistry of memory. The manual labor of science can get pretty tedious, and so I started reading Proust while waiting for my experiments to finish. After a few hundred pages of melodrama, I began to realize that the novelist had these very modern ideas about how our memory worked. His fiction, in other words, anticipated the very facts I was trying to uncover by studying the isolated neurons of sea slugs. Once I had this idea about looking at art through the prism of science, I began to see connections everywhere. I’d mutter about the visual cortex while looking at a Cezanne painting, or think about the somatosensory areas while reading Whitman on the “body electric”. Needless to say, my labmates mocked me mercilessly.
I’m always a little embarrassed to admit just how idiosyncratic my selection process was for the other artists in the book. I simply began with my favorite artists and tried to see what they had to say about the mind. The first thing that surprised me was just how much they had to say. Virginia Woolf, for instance, is always going on and on about her brain. “Nerves” has to be one of her favorite words.
Kottke: Which of your characters did you know the least about beforehand? Even a seeming polymath like yourself must have a blind spot or two.
Lehrer: Definitely Gertrude Stein. I actually found her through William James, the great American psychologist and philosopher. She worked in his Harvard lab, published a few scientific papers on “automatic writing,” and then went to med-school at Johns Hopkins before dropping out and moving to Paris to hang out with Picasso. So I knew she had this deep background in science, but I had only read snippets of her work. I then proceeded to fall asleep to the same page of “The Making of Americans” for a month.
Kottke: Are there other characters that you considered for inclusion? If so, why weren’t they included?
Lehrer: Lots of people were left on the cutting room floor. I had a long digression on Edgar Allen Poe and mirror neurons. (See, for instance, “The Purloined Letter,” where Poe has detective Dupin reveal his secret for reading the minds of criminals: “When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.”) I also had a chapter on Coleridge and the unconscious, but I think that chapter was really just me wanting to write about opium. But, for the most part, I can’t really say why some chapters survived the editing process and others didn’t. I certainly mean no disrespect to Poe. If they let me write a sequel, I’ll find a way to include him.
Kottke: I noticed that three out of the eight main characters in the book are women. Surveying the usually cited big thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries, it would have been easy to write this book with all male characters. Is there an implicit statement in there that science would be better off with a greater percentage of women participating?
Lehrer: While I certainly agree with the idea that the institution of science would benefit from more female scientists, I didn’t choose these female artists for that reason. I don’t think you need any ulterior motive to fall in love with the work of Virginia Woolf and George Eliot. Their art speaks for itself. That said, I think the psychological insights of women like Woolf were rooted, at least in part, in their womanhood. Woolf, for instance, rebelled against the stodgy old male novelists of her day. Their fiction, she complained, was all about “factories and utopias”. Woolf wanted to invert this hierarchy, so that the “task of the novelist” was to “examine an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.” There’s something very domestic about her modernism, so that the grandest epiphanies happen while someone is out buying flowers or eating a beef stew. Women might not be able to write novels about war or politics, but they could find an equal majesty by exploring the mind.
Plus, I think Woolf learned a lot about the brain from her mental illness. As a woman, she was subjected to all sorts of terrible psychiatric treatments, which made her rather skeptical of doctors. (In Mrs. Dalloway, she refers to the paternalistic Dr. Bradshaw as an “obscurely evil” person, whose insistence that the mental illness was “physical, purely physical” causes a suicide.) Introspection was Woolf’s only medicine. “I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it’s ripe,” she once wrote. “It will be exquisite by September.”
Kottke: Are there other books/media out there that share a third culture kinship with yours? I received a copy of Lawrence Weschler’s Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences for Christmas…that seems to fit. Steven Johnson’s books. Anything else you can recommend?
Lehrer: I’ve stolen ideas from so many people it’s hard to know where to begin. Certainly Weschler and Johnson have both been major influences. I’ve always worshipped Oliver Sacks; Richard Powers has more neuroscience in his novels than most issues of Nature; I just saw Olafur Eliasson’s new show at SFMOMA and that was rather inspiring. I could go on and on. It’s really an exciting time to be interested in the intersection of art and science.
But I’d also recommend traveling back in time a little bit, before our two cultures were so divided. We don’t think of people like George Eliot as third-culture figures, but she famously described her novels as a “a set of experiments in life.” Virginia Woolf, before she wrote Mrs. Dalloway, said that in her new novel the “psychology should be done very realistically.” Whitman worked in Civil War hospitals and corresponded for years with the neurologist who discovered phantom limb syndrome. (He also kept up with phrenology, the brain science of his day.) Or look at Coleridge. When the poet was asked why he attended so many lectures on chemistry, he gave a great answer: “To improve my stock of metaphors”. In other words, trying to merge art and science isn’t some newfangled idea.
—
Thanks, Jonah. You can read more of Lehrer’s writing at his frequently updated blog, The Frontal Cortex.
The programmers profiled in the 1986 book, Programmers at Work…where are they now?
Bill Gates. Then: founder of Microsoft, popularizer of the word “super”. Now: richest guy in the world. After a stint in the 90s as pure evil, semi-retired to focus on philanthropic work.
Did Alexander Graham Bell drink Elisha Gray’s telephone-flavored milkshake?
On May 22, 1886, The Washington Post published a shocking front-page scoop: Zenas F. Wilber, a former Washington patent examiner, swore in an affidavit that he’d been bribed by an attorney for Alexander Graham Bell to award Bell the patent for the telephone over a rival inventor, Elisha Gray, who’d filed a patent document on the same day as Bell in 1876.
Even though Bell has been legally vindicated on this issue, Seth Shulman’s new book, The Telephone Gambit, suggests that he did in fact steal a key idea from Elisha Gray. (via house next door)
Interview with book cover designer Peter Mendelsund. I will read any interview in which the subject replies “I still don’t know” when asked how they got their job. I really like what I’ve seen of Mendelsund’s work (sorry…his site resizes the browser window…no, wait, I’m not sorry, *he* should apologize for that); his cover for War and Peace is lovely.
Adam Shepard had $25 and the clothes on his back. As a challenge, he set himself a year to get an apartment, a car, and $2500 in savings.
To make his quest even more challenging, he decided not to use any of his previous contacts or mention his education. During his first 70 days in Charleston, Shepard lived in a shelter and received food stamps. He also made new friends, finding work as a day laborer, which led to a steady job with a moving company.
The whole thing is recounted in Shepard’s book, Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream. (via cyn-c)
The fellow/lady behind the excellent Strange Maps blog is doing a book, The Atlas of Strange Maps. In my mind, I have pre-pre-ordered this book…I hope it gets the well-designed cover it deserves.
Duncan Watts’ research is challenging the theory that a small group of influential people are responsible for triggering trends as explained in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.
“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one—and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”
Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires: There are thousands a year, but only a few become roaring monsters. That’s because in those rare situations, the landscape was ripe: sparse rain, dry woods, badly equipped fire departments. If these conditions exist, any old match will do. “And nobody,” Watts says wryly, “will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire.”
I’ve previously covered some of what Clive talks about in the article.
Julian Dibbell’s seminal and out-of-print My Tiny Life is once again available through Lulu as a $18 paperbakc and a completely free PDF. Dibbell wanted to release it under a Creative Commons license but didn’t have the worldwide rights fully secured.
Using “favorite books” data from Facebook and the average SAT/ACT scores from the colleges the people in the data set attend, Virgil Griffith plotted a graph of “books that make you dumb”. Lolita, 100 Years of Solitude, and Crime and Punishment were the “smartest” books while the Zane erotica books are the “dumbest”. (via o’reilly radar)
A list of the 100 books every child should read. No Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and probably a little Brit-heavy for those in other countries but otherwise solid. Plenty of Roald Dahl (I still occasionally reread Danny, the Champion of the World).
Will Ashford takes used books and creates art and new meanings out of them.
At some unpredictable point along the way, in my mind, the images start to invent themselves. Using colored vellums, graphite and or India ink to highlight or obscure my words; I create the image of that invention. Though I strive to make each document visually engaging I find it is the words that I value most.
(via monoscope)
Update: Ashford’s work is quite similar to Tom Phillips’ A Humument, which was first published in 1970. (thx, joel)
Two-hour special on the History Channel called Life After People, 9pm tonight and rerunning throughout the week.
What would happen to planet earth if the human race were to suddenly disappear forever? Would ecosystems thrive? What remnants of our industrialized world would survive? What would crumble fastest? From the ruins of ancient civilizations to present day cities devastated by natural disasters, history gives us clues to these questions and many more.
This appears to be unrelated to Alan Weisman’s well-reviewed The World Without Us. If it comes down to watching this or Killer of Sheep, watch Sheep.
Short teaser for Generation Kill, David Simon and Ed Burns’ next project for HBO about the Iraq War. It’s from October but I hadn’t seen it until now so maybe you hadn’t either? The 7-hour miniseries is based on Evan Wright’s book of the same name. This video discusses the book and its subject matter. (thx, david)
Hey, New Yorker classical music critic (and blogger, and my summer neighbor, and Kottke interviewee) Alex Ross was quite rightly nominated for a National Book Critics Award over the weekend. (How could any book blurbed by Bjork not be?)
Late last week, Marc Andreessen pulled a quote from a New Yorker article written in 1951 about television:
The most encouraging word we have so far had about television came from a grade-school principal we encountered the other afternoon.
“They say it’s going to bring back vaudeville,” he said, “but I think it’s going to bring back the book.”
Before television, he told us, his pupils never read; that is, they knew how to read and could do it in school, but their reading ended there. Their entertainment was predominantly pictorial and auditory — movies, comic books, radio.
Now, the principal said, news summaries are typed out and displayed on the television screen to the accompaniment of soothing music, the opening pages of dramatized novels are shown, words are written on blackboards in quiz and panel programs, commercials are spelled out in letters made up of dancing cigarettes, and even the packages of cleansers and breakfast foods and the announcers exhibit for identification bear printed messages.
It’s only a question of time, our principal felt, before the new literacy of the television audience reaches the point where whole books can be held up to the screen and all their pages slowly turned.
This sounds far fetched and Andreessen belittles the prediction, but is it really that outlandish? Literacy rates in the US have risen since the advent of television (I am not suggesting a correlation) and Steven Johnson suggests in Everything Bad Is Good For You that TV is making us smarter.
If you stop thinking of TV in the specific sense as a box on which ABC, CBS, and NBC are shown and instead imagine it in the general sense as a service that pipes content into the home to be shown on a screen, the prediction hits pretty close to the mark. The experience of using the web is not so different than reading pages of words that are “held up to the screen” while we scroll slowly through them. If we can imagine that what Paul Otlet and Vannevar Bush described as the “televised book” and the “memex” corresponds to today’s web, why not give our high school principal here the same benefit of the doubt?
Very few science and ideas books made it on to the 2007 “best of” lists so Edge has provided a list of their picks for the year. I didn’t read any of the books on this list, although I’m currently 1/3 of the way through Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist.
Barnes & Noble’s Media section is filling out nicely with audio and video interviews, readings, and conversations with a wide range of interesting authors.
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