Basically, we have three options for these kinds of words: “cooperate,” “co-operate,” and “coöperate.” Back when the magazine was just getting started, someone decided that the first misread and the second was ridiculous, and adopted the diaeresis as the most elegant solution with the broadest application. The diaeresis is the single thing that readers of the letter-writing variety complain about most.We do change our style from time to time. My predecessor (and the former keeper of the comma shaker) told me that she used to pester the style editor, Hobie Weekes, who had been at the magazine since 1928, to get rid of the diaeresis. She found it fussy. She said that once, in the elevator, he told her he was on the verge of changing that style and would be sending out a memo soon. And then he died.
This was in 1978. No one has had the nerve to raise the subject since.
After the End
Cue the End-of-an-Era music: Pep Guardiola has resigned. But from this vantage point what seems clear is that Pep’s departure, and all the accompanying verbiage — about the intensity of his personality, his perfectionism, the hardware his team has won over the past four years, the success of the Barcelona Way, Pep as the embodiment of the més que un club ethos, and on and on — are part of a vast mopping-up operation. The story really ended almost exactly a year ago, when El Clásico descended into melodrama and handbags. Barça hasn’t been the same since, and neither has Pep.I wrote at the time that “if I were Emperor of Soccer, I’d not allow these clubs to play each other for a couple of years.” But really, the damage had already been done. Too many overwrought encounters in too short a time had left Barcelona, Real Madrid, the Spanish soccer culture, and, hell, the whole soccer world emotionally exhausted. What had been the most exciting clash of styles in forever became instead an exercise in discovering new forms of pettiness: diving, stomping, pre- and post-match posturing, even a combination cheek-tweak and eye-gouge.
I am living proof that conservatives’ and liberals’ values are worlds apart.… I don’t believe that the Ten Commandments were delivered to Moses on tablets of stone, and I never cease to wonder what made the ancient Jews believe that God wanted them to “honor” their fathers and mothers. If I were trying to make up a precept that made no sense, I would be hard pressed to think of a better one. Although I was good to my mother in her declining years, I would have hit the ceiling if anyone had ever suggested that I was obliged to do anything for her.
When I was a child, and someone said to me, “Respect your elders,” I always asked, “Why?” The question was not rhetorical. By what logic does youth owe deference to age? The reverse is true. Older people ought to be able to bear discomfort and inconvenience better than kids or teenagers. While I usually offer my seat on a train or subway to a child or teenager, I would not dream of offering it to an older person. I once offered my seat to a toddler. His mother took it, and I demanded that she give it back. I let her know what a pig I thought she was, too. In my view, a mother who would sit and let her child stand deserves to be spat upon.
On telling parents to f*** themselves | The Righteous Mind. Actually, your account has nothing to do with liberalism and conservatism. Instead, you are living proof of the unassailable fact that the more absolute a jackass a person is the prouder he will be of his jackassery.
I quote this response to Jonathan Haidt’s Righteous MInd book because it raises an interesting question: How many people are there like this, people who think that they owe nothing to anyone? People who seem genuinely unaware that their parents raised them, fed them, protected them — that they would be dead without parental care, in constant danger from the cruelly powerful without laws and law enforcement, ignorant without teaching — people who, like Milton’s Satan, think themselves “self-begot.” How many such people are there in the world?
Balloon event from 1900 Paris Olympics (via things)
And why is competition important? Because it drives not just lower prices, but better products. And let’s face it, the products we have are ho-hum. E-readers are uninspired. They’re slabs of plastic with fiddly controls and display a badly-formatted, typographically impoverished rendering of a paper book. That’s not the electronic book I want. I want a gorgeous physical object, with paper pages, that can transform into any story I choose, perfectly presented on the page. I want a device from a fairytale, not a bargain bucket. Although, sure, I’d like it to be affordable, too. And that will not happen if one company controls the market. Why should it?
The principal large mammals in Białowieża are the bison, moose, wolf, boar, bobcat, and graduate student. The last spends a lengthy juvenile period studying forest theory in Western Europe before migrating in to do field work and possibly mate. The nutrient-rich graduate student is a cornerstone of the forest food pyramid, a conveniently mobile, heated feed bag for a variety of small cosmic horrors. Since there is so little real forest left in Europe, the supply of these initially pink-cheeked graduate students is limitless and easily replenished. If you step quietly, so as not to spook them, you can see them sometimes through the trees, catching frogs with nets, cataloguing the various insects buried in their skin, or peering resignedly into bird holes. They look pale.As Romek and I walk deeper into the brambles, I find my own interest in the forest reciprocated by a dismaying variety of parasites. Anything with legs, wings and a bloodsucking proboscis has perked up and come to greet us as we enter areas that have gone a long, hungry time since their last warm mammal. The ticks are the most horrifying. Romek is talking to me about the subtleties of forest ecology when I see something with far too many legs run up from his collar directly into his ear canal. He doesn’t notice and keeps talking, but unconsciously pokes at his ear with an idle fingertip as I die on the inside. Moments later, of course, I feel a certain scrabbling at my own hairline. Whatever Romek says for the next hour is lost to me as I claw at myself, every once in a while catching a little facehugger that makes a tiny popping sound between my fingernails.
We can have what Turkle terms a “big gulp of real conversation” — through a chat window that keeps us connected, all day, to a best friend on the other side of the country. We can embrace the value of solitude and self-reflection, writing a blog post that digs deeply into a personal challenge — perhaps choosing to write anonymously in order to share a deeper level of self-revelation than we’d brave offline. We can truly listen, and truly be heard, because online affinity groups help us find or rediscover friends who are prepared to meet us as we really are.These are the tools, practices, and communities that can make online life not a flight from conversation, but a flight to it. But we will not realize these opportunities as long as we cling to a nostalgia for conversation as we remember it, describe the emergence of digital culture in generational terms, or absolve ourselves of responsibility for creating an online world in which meaningful connection is the norm rather than the exception. We are making that digital shift together — old and young, geeky and trepidatious — and we are only as alone as we choose to be.
Nothing inspires fear like the end of the world, and ever since Y2K, the media’s tendency toward overwrought speculation has been increasingly married to the rhetoric of apocalypse. Today, nearly any event can be explained through apocalyptic language, from birds falling out of the sky (the Birdocalypse?) to a major nor’easter (Snowmageddon!) to a double-dip recession (Barackalypse! Obamageddon!). Armageddon is here at last — and your local news team is live on the scene! We’ve seen the equivalent of grade inflation (A for Apocalypse!) for every social, political, or ecological challenge before us, an escalating game of one-upmanship to gain the public’s attention. Why worry about global warming and rising sea levels when the collapse of the housing bubble has already put your mortgage underwater? Why worry that increasing droughts will threaten the supply of drinking water in America’s major cities when a far greater threat lies in the possibility of an Arab terrorist poisoning that drinking supply, resulting in millions of casualties?
In the last 50 years, the sheer density of the information environment has reached and surpassed the point at which privacy might be maintained by walls. And a legal system built on a presumption of information scarcity has no chance at protecting privacy when personal information is ubiquitous. We shouldn’t worry about particular technologies of broadcast or snooping—for instance, the way Facebook trumpets our personal information or deep packet inspection allows governments to trawl through oceans of Internet data. The most important change is not the particular technologies but, rather, the increase in the number of pathways through which information flows.
I would not speak of this dilemma if it were only mine, but I watch many others race again and again through the cycle of widening concern, frenzied effort, and exhaustion. Whatever the source of conscience—parents, God, solemn books, earnest friends, the dictates of biology—it is adapted to a narrower space than the one we inhabit. Limited to a small tribe or a community of a few hundred people, conscience may prompt us to serve others in a balanced and wholesome way. But when television and newspapers and the Internet bring us word of dangers by the thousands and miseries by the millions and needful creatures by the billions; when pleas for help reach us around the clock; when aching faces greet us on every street—then conscience either goes numb or punishes us with a sense of failure.I often lie awake at night, rehearsing the names of those I’ve disappointed by failing to give them all they asked. I don’t say this to make myself out as a generous soul. I am hardly that; I feel defenseless rather than virtuous. The truth is that I’ve come to fear the claims that other beings make on me, because their numbers grow relentlessly. I wish to love my neighbor, but the neighborhood has expanded so far, and the neighbors have become so many, that my love is stretched to the breaking point. I’m tempted to run away, beyond reach of the needy voices. So I make of this hut a hiding place.