Each year, I keep a running list of the most exceptional nonfiction that I encounter while publishing my twice-weekly newsletter The Best of Journalism. Along with my curating work for Byliner, this hoovering of great stories affords me the opportunity to read as many impressive narratives as any single person possibly can. The annual result is my Best of Journalism List, now in its fourth year. I could not, of course, read every worthy piece published during the year. But everything that follows deserves wider attention.
I started bringing a bag of oranges with me for long bus rides, primarily because they quench thirst and smell delicious. I quickly learned that many Thai and Burmese busgoers sniff the peels to stave off nausea, and that kids love oranges. Really: kids LOVE oranges. So for those who want to bring something for the bus ride but rightfully worry about giving sweets to kids, oranges are your friend. You will win over the parents, make the kids happy, occupy your hours and eventually get fed by everyone on the bus. Trust me. You should always have a bag of oranges on hand, the smaller the orange the better.
She also lists the five things she always carries with her while traveling…one of which, unusually, is a doorstop. I’m guessing that’s for keeping people out of rooms without door locks?
Robert Frank was a one-man revolution. Before him pictures for the most part were pretty and clean and pre-visualized, and shot from a tripod. Frank came along and tore a new A-hole in that aesthetic. Fortunately he had something to replace it with: a strong personal vision. Most young photographers who follow in his footsteps don’t. They mistake grain, guts, and verve with substance. Sorry folks, but hitting three out of four doesn’t count. I know it took cajones to shoot that cowboy bar at 1 am pushing your film to 3200, but that doesn’t keep your photo from being boring. Time to shoot something you care about, and don’t try to convince me it’s flags or the underclass.
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.
Mark Twain made the American vernacular a literary language; Salinger tried to do the same for the American adolescent whine. We who read Catcher as teenagers in the 1950s and ’60s at once considered ourselves free to babble on paper just the way we did over coffee and cigarettes. It was certainly easier than learning how to write a straightforward sentence expressing something more than teen angst.
I wonder if there might be a similar list for designers or artists?
Speaking of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, animator Chuck Jones and his team were said to follow these simple rules when creating the cartoons:
The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going “meep, meep.”
No outside force can harm the Coyote — only his own ineptitude or the failure of Acme products. Trains and trucks were the exception from time to time.
The Coyote could stop anytime — if he were not a fanatic.
No dialogue ever, except “meep, meep” and yowling in pain.
The Road Runner must stay on the road — for no other reason than that he’s a roadrunner.
All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters — the southwest American desert.
All tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation.
Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote’s greatest enemy.
The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.
The audience’s sympathy must remain with the Coyote.
The Coyote is not allowed to catch or eat the Road Runner.
The rules are made only slightly less interesting by their fiction; according to Wikipedia, long-time Jones collaborator Michael Maltese said he’d never heard of the rules.
By the time we were finished with Rabbit of Seville, Ollie had literally peed his pants from laughing so hard. I think I’m gonna get the Looney Tunes collection on Blu-ray so we can watch more but I’m a bit afraid of what the hijinks of Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner might do to my boy’s pants.
The Player: “In the years before this movie, the age of the director who had a free hand came to an end. And yet Altman kept experimenting with different kinds of actor, different approaches to narrative, different equipment, until finally he hit it with this movie, which took him off onto a whole other level.”
1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it — but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.
What jobs did people do in medieval Europe? Here’s a list, broken down by category. Criminals had jobs too:
silk-snatcher - one who steals bonnets
stewsman - probably a brothel keeper - “since the words stew and stewholder both mean a bawd, I’m guessing that a stewsman would be a brothel-keeper as well. Whether bawdry counts as a criminal activity varies at different times and places.”
thimblerigger - a professional sharper who runs a thimblerig (a game in which a pea is ostensibly hidden under a thimble and players guess which thimble it is under)
The idea is simple: I invite a group of writers, educators, type makers and type users to look back at 2011 and pick the release that excited them most.
Still cleaning out some tabs from over the break…this list of the best “best of 2011” lists is worth looking at, even if you’ve got list fatigue. It includes lists like “10 Films Hypothetically Starring Ryan Gosling”, “Top 10 Classical Performances”, and “Top 10 Films of John Waters”.
While they may not yet have a common name, and their causes overlap but are hardly identical, the worldwide protests that began in December 2010 in Tunisia and swept through Egypt, the Middle East, Spain, Greece, the United Kingdom, every state in the U.S then thousands of worldwide cities — these, collectively, are the single most important event of 2011. It was so significant that the year itself may be the only possible name for these people’s revolutions and protests: the same way we talk about 1968 or Sept. 11 or Feb. 15, 2003: perhaps just “2011.”
As Joanne McNeil noted, hindsight provides clarity with questions like this. Events that are invisible at the time become important five or ten years later. Take 1993 for instance. At the time, the European Community eliminating customs barriers or Bill Clinton’s swearing-in or the first bombing of the WTC might have seemed most significant, but with hindsight, Tim Berners-Lee’s quiet invention of the World Wide Web in an office at CERN is clearly the year’s most significant and far-reaching happening.
Update: TBL invented the WWW in 1991, not 1993. ‘91 was a bit busier news-wise, what with the first Iraq war and Gorbachev’s resignation, but the Web’s invention ranks right up there in hindsight. (thx, sean)
If your idea of a holiday workout is lifting glasses of beer late into the night, then it’s not just the extra calories you need to worry about. Randy Nelson and his team at Ohio State University in Columbus found that mice exposed to light at night weighed 10 per cent more at the end of the eight-week study than mice that had experienced a standard light/dark cycle, even though they ate the same total number of calories and did the same amount of exercise.
With this in mind, for an eighth year, we asked some of our favorite writers, thinkers, and readers to look back, reflect, and share. Their charge was to name, from all the books they read this year, the one(s) that meant the most to them, regardless of publication date. Grouped together, these ruminations, cheers, squibs, and essays will be a chronicle of reading and good books from every era. We hope you find in them seeds that will help make your year in reading in 2012 a fruitful one.
Contributors include Duff McKagan, Mayim Bialik, Jennifer Egan, Colum McCann, and Rosecrans Baldwin.
4. You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise. Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But that’s mysterious - clearly it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the “now.” Experiments have shown that the lag between things happening and us experiencing them is about 80 milliseconds.
5. Your memory isn’t as good as you think. When you remember an event in the past, your brain uses a very similar technique to imagining the future. The process is less like “replaying a video” than “putting on a play from a script.” If the script is wrong for whatever reason, you can have a false memory that is just as vivid as a true one. Eyewitness testimony, it turns out, is one of the least reliable forms of evidence allowed into courtrooms.
2. Box Another toy that is quite versatile, Box also comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. Need proof? Depending on the number and size you have, Boxes can be turned into furniture or a kitchen playset. You can turn your kids into cardboard robots or create elaborate Star Wars costumes. A large Box can be used as a fort or house and the smaller Box can be used to hide away a special treasure. Got a Stick? Use it as an oar and Box becomes a boat. One particularly famous kid has used the Box as a key component of a time machine, a duplicator and a transmogrifier, among other things.
Lists of travel tips usually suck (get to the aiport early! make sure your passport is up to date!) but this list contains a number of good ideas that I haven’t really seen before.
13. Buy your own fruit. It sounds simple. It is simple. Just do it. You’ll love it. And I don’t mean, if there happens to be a fruit stand outside your hotel door you should buy some, because you need to have 9 servings a day. What I mean is, find fruit and buy it. Make it a daily task that you’re going to track down a fruit stand, a farmers’ market (they’re not just in San Francisco) and get some good fresh fruit. The entire process will expose you to elements of daily life you would have otherwise ignored. Trust me: You’ll have memories from your trips to buy fresh fruit.
This one is absolutely vital — don’t interfere with others’ privacy. New York is a very crowded place. The way people deal with it is to create their own space. Thus, what outsiders often see as aloofness and isolation is, in fact, a sign of community; there is a shared ethos that everyone respects others’ privacy and expects others to respect his own. This is chiefly communicated through eye contact. If you stare at someone on the subway: if you linger in looking out your window into someone else’s bedroom; if you react to or interrupt a celebrity; or if you seem to be intentionally listening in to another’s conversation, you are violating one of New York’s most sacred unwritten rules. Keep yourself to yourself, buddy, and let others do the same.
From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
That first one…I can’t decide if it’s bad or the best analogy ever.
4. Stick to one lens Although Henri Cartier-Bresson shot with several different lenses while on-assignment working for Magnum, he would only shoot with a 50mm if he was shooting for himself. By being faithful to that lens for decades, the camera truly became “an extension of his eye”.
The Kid Stays in the Picture When We Were Kings Dogtown and Z-Boys Man on Wire Capturing the Friedmans Touching the Void The Fog of War Grizzly Man The Thin Blue Line Hoop Dreams
A lot of the suggestions were to be more like Microsoft and embrace the Windows platform. Apple, obviously, rejected that path and has benefitted greatly from doing so. It’s hard to remember now, but many people thought that Apple should drop their operating system and instead turn to making high end Windows PCs. I think we’re all glad they never went that route.
Stay Connected