kottke.org posts about books
James Randi offered a $1 million prize to any psychic who could remotely determine the contents of a box in his office. Cryptographer Matt Blaze and Jutta Degener correctly identified the object from a string of numbers that Randi published to assure contestants that he wouldn’t switch the object after a correct guess. The numbers referred to an entry in the 1995 edition of the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary that described the object. (via wired)
For the past five years, artist Jackie Sumell has been helping Herman Wallace, who has been in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary for the last 34 years, design his dream house, a house that will probably never be built. “Traces of a prison mindset crop up. When the placement of his computer meant his back would face the office door, Ms. Sumell said that he asked that a mirror be installed above, so he could see anyone entering the room. A sense of security is important to him, she explained. The master bedroom sits safely above the very center of the house. A wraparound porch adds a layer of perimeter, as does the surrounding garden. There is even a special door leading to an underground bunker, equipped with its own water supply.” A book on the project is available for a $20 donation and this PDF gives a good overview of the project.
Coming in July: Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design by Michael Bierut. Looks like some of those essays will be drawn from Design Observer.
Via VSL comes word of a new book that sounds interesting: The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything. “In 101 of the pettiest cultural categories — e.g., Bob Dylan cover songs, James Bond gadgets, bald guys — the authors and their team of contributors have pitted the 32 top entries against each other, in elegant NCAA-style brackets (created by design legend Nigel Holmes), and conclusively determined a winner in each field.” Here are some example brackets.
Not a joke: James Cameron claims to have discovered the burial cave of Jesus and his family. Includes the obligatory Da Vinci Code reference. “The [burial] boxes bear the names: Yeshua [Jesus] bar Yosef [son of Joseph]; Maria [the Latin version of Miriam, which is the English Mary]; Matia [the Hebrew equivalent of Matthew, a name common in the lineage of both Mary and Joseph]; Yose [the Gospel of Mark refers to Yose as a brother of Jesus]; Yehuda bar Yeshua, or Judah, son of Jesus; and in Greek, Mariamne e mara, meaning ‘Mariamne, known as the master.’ According to Harvard professor Francois Bovon, interviewed in the film, Mariamne was Mary Magdalene’s real name.”
LibraryThing has a feature called UnSuggester…just put in a book you dislike and it’ll return suggestions of stuff you might be interested in instead. Here’s what to read if you’re not a fan of Atlas Shrugged…#3 on the list is Advanced Perl Programming. (via fakeisthenewreal)
The WSJ reports on economist J.C. Bradbury’s new book The Baseball Economist, which sounds Moneyball-ariffic. Contrary to popular belief in “protection”, Bradbury found that “a weak on-deck hitter makes a batter more likely to get an extra-base hit”. Bradbury is also the author of the Sabernomics blog. (via biourbanist)
How to learn a foreign language: read Harry Potter in translation. “The plots and scenarios are familiar enough that I can pick up the gist of what is going on even if the grammar and vocabulary escape me; but after a few times reading about the impatient lechuza in Harry’s room, I can’t help but gather that it is not lettuce but an owl.”
Reagrding the 70-hour unabridged War and Peace audiobook I posted about back in December, the Washington Post has a short profile of the audiobook’s reader, Neville Jason. “But if the world has ever been ready for nearly three straight days of recorded Tolstoy it’s ready now. A few years ago, publishers had to beg retailers to stock audiobooks longer than three CDs. Now, that’s considered an ear snack. Unabridged is king. And abridged isn’t just on the wane. It’s basically stigmatized.” (thx, mr. d)
Authors who write naked. Literally naked, not literature that could be described as naked.
Rebecca Mead’s new book on the state of weddings in America is available for preorder on Amazon. Mead writes for the New Yorker; the book is out in May. “Mead takes us into a world populated by Bridezillas, ministers-for-hire, videographers, and heirloom manufacturers, exposing the forces behind the consumerist mindset of the American bride and the entrepreneurial zeal of the wedding industry that both serves and exploits her. “
We’re leaving tomorrow for a trip of the relaxing sort, so I went to the bookstore this morning to collect some reading material. I had decided not to read anything that felt too much like work or that I had to think about. What I needed was fiction like television: passive but engaging. Having procured a paperback copy of The Da Vinci Code in the B section, I wandered over to the Rs. Robbins. Roth. Rowlandson. Salinger. Hmm. No luck in the Teen section either. Finally I hit paydirt in the Kids section: the 1085 pages of the first three years of Harry Potter’s adventures at Hogwarts.
Perfect.
So, I’ll see you in a week. Posting will be light until then, but feel free to enjoy some random posts from the last 9 years of kottke.org, peruse the Best Links of 2006 list again, look at some of my photos from Anguilla in 2004, dream of NYC in the snow (will it ever again?), imagine if Manhattan visited other US cities, or visit the many fine sites in the sidebar of the front page. I’ll send you a postcard when I get back.
I wanted to write more about this, but I don’t have the throughput right now and the article is 5 days old at this point, so this shorter post will have to do. Michael Pollan, who is doing some of the best food writing out there right now, wrote an article in the most recent NY Times Magazine on how we should be thinking about eating. In it, he blames the rise of nutritionism (the emphasis on the nutrients contained in food rather than the food itself) for our increasingly poor diets. This goes in the must-read pile for sure, if only for the great “silence of the yams” pun. If you absolutely can’t handle the length, skip to the “Beyond Nutritionism” section at the end for Pollan’s rules of thumb for eating, my favorite of which is #5: “Pay more, eat less.”
Update: Meg summarizes Pollan’s rules of thumb with some notes of her own.
The latest Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is available for pre-order at Amazon and is currently the #1 seller in books.
Jeffrey Toobin, the New Yorker’s legal writer, has penned a piece about Google’s book scanning efforts and the legal challenges it faces. Interestingly, both Google and the publishers who are suing them say that the lawsuit is basically a business negotiation tactic. However, according to Larry Lessig, settling the lawsuit might not be the best thing for anyone outside the lawsuit: “Google wants to be able to get this done, and get permission to resume scanning copyrighted material at all the libraries. For the publishers, if Google gives them anything at all, it creates a practical precedent, if not a legal precedent, that no one has the right to scan this material without their consent. That’s a win for them. The problem is that even though a settlement would be good for Google and good for the publishers, it would be bad for everyone else.”
A review of Nicholas Negroponte’s influential Being Digital, 12 years after its publication. “Page 204: Today a game like Tetris is fully understandable too quickly. All that changes is the speed. We are likely to see members of a Tetris generation who are much better at packing a station wagon, but not much more.” He wrong about Tetris *and* the future availability of station wagons. (via matt)
An update on Bryant Simon, the fellow who’s studying Starbucks from around the world in order to write a book about the company. An observation from Britain: “Starbucks is dirtier in Britain. Americans have been taught to do part of the labour, and they clean up after themselves. In the US, part of Starbucks’ appeal is its cleanness.” 2006 New Yorker piece about Simon and his Temple University page. (via bb)
Map of the Land of Oz. “Oz is completely surrounded by deserts, insulating the country from invasion and discovery. The isolation may be splendid, it is not total: children from our world got through, as well as the Wizard of Oz and the more sinister Nome King. To prevent further incursions, Glinda created a barrier of invisibility around Oz.”
David Shenk is writing a book about genius, specifically “how science is unveiling a rich new understanding of talent, ‘giftedness,’ and brilliance — and the lessons we can all apply to our own lives”, and he’s using a blog to help him while he researches and writes it.
Long audio interview with Michael Lewis by economist Russ Roberts on “the hidden economics of baseball and football”. “Michael Lewis talks about the economics of sports — the financial and decision-making side of baseball and football — using the insights from his bestselling books on baseball and football: Moneyball and The Blind Side. Along the way he discusses the implications of Moneyball for the movie business and other industries, the peculiar ways that Moneyball influenced the strategies of baseball teams, the corruption of college football, and the challenge and tragedy of kids who live on the streets with little education or prospects for success.”
Finally, a book unafraid to speak the truth: MySpace for Dummies. I keed, I keed.
One of the most interesting articles I’ve read in the New Yorker in recent months is Raffi Khatchadourian’s piece on Adam Gadahn, an American who is a member of Al Qaeda and “one of Osama bin Laden’s senior operatives”. In it, Khatchadourian describes how a kid from Southern California coverts to Islam, becomes a radical activist, and ends up making anti-American videos in Pakistan for ObL. Near the end of the article, we’re told about the work of forensic psychiatrist Marc Sagemam, whose study of Al Qaeda members and their motivations formed the basis of his book, Understanding Terror Networks (on Google Book Search):
Sageman discovered that most Al Qaeda operatives had been radicalized in the West and were from caring, intact families that had solidly middle- or upper-class economic backgrounds. Their families were religious but generally mainstream. The vast majority of the men did not have criminal records or any history of mental disorders. Moreover, there was little evidence of coordinated recruitment, coercion, or brainwashing. Al Qaeda’s leaders waited for aspiring jihadists to come to them — and then accepted only a small percentage. Joining the jihad, Sageman realized, was like trying to get into a highly selective college: many apply, but only a few are accepted.
Perhaps his most unexpected conclusion was that ideology and political grievances played a minimal role during the initial stages of enlistment. “The only significant finding was that the future terrorists felt isolated, lonely, and emotionally alienated,” Sageman told the September 11th Commission in 2003, during a debriefing about his research. These lost men would congregate at mosques and find others like them. Eventually, they would move into apartments near their mosques and build friendships around their faith and its obligations. He has called his model the “halal theory of terrorism” — since bonds were often formed while sharing halal meals — or the “bunch of guys” theory. The bunch of guys constituted a closed society that provided a sense of meaning that did not exist in the larger world.
Within the “bunch of guys,” Sageman found, men often became radicalized through a process akin to oneupmanship, in which members try to outdo one another in demonstrations of religious zeal. (Gregory Saathoff, a research psychiatrist at the University of Virginia and a consultant to the F.B.I., told me, “We’re seeing in some of the casework that once they get the fever they are white-hot to move forward.”) Generally, the distinction between converts and men with mainstream Islamic backgrounds is less meaningful than it might seem, Sageman said, since “they all become born again.” Many Muslims who accept radical Salafist beliefs consider themselves “reverts.” They typically renounce their former lives and friends — and often their families.
It’s easy to see the power of this approach. A recruiter only needs to use the potential recruit’s own feelings of isolation, loneliness, and social alienation against him and after that it’s like a stone rolling downhill. Reading this, I thought about similar the situation sounds to recruitment at college fraternities or the armed forces. Different ends of course, but the technique is similar: give a guy in a tough spot a comforting social framework, some self-esteem, and a bit of responsibility and eventually he’ll go to war with you, sometimes literally. Anyway, fascinating article.
Jargon watch: “book” as a synonym for “cool”. Sample usage: “That YouTube video is so book.” As books are decidedly uncool, you might wonder how this usage came about. Book is a T9onym of cool…both words require pressing 2665 on the keypad of a mobile phone but book comes up before cool in the T9 dictionary, leading to inadvertent uses of the former for the latter. (thx, david)
On the site for his new novel, The End As I Know It, Kevin Shay is blogging pre-Y2K internet postings. “On This Day Pre-Y2K is updated daily with one or more verbatim quotations drawn from a variety of online sources, from today’s date, eight years ago.” One of my favorite posts describes “the great geek exodus from the cities late next year”.
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