A few years ago, when I was beginning to work on my book about the American college, I came across a manuscript diary kept in the early 1850s by a student at a small Methodist college in southwest Virginia. One spring evening, after attending a sermon by the college president that left him troubled and apprehensive, he made the following entry: “Oh that the Lord would show me how to think and how to choose.” That sentence, poised somewhere between a wish and a plea, sounds archaic today. But even if the religious note is dissonant to some of us, it seems hard to come up with a better formulation of what a college should strive to be: an aid to reflection, a place and process whereby young people take stock of their talents and passions and begin to sort out their lives in a way that is true to themselves and responsible to others. “Show me how to think and how to choose.”
What can we do with this information? Gutman offers suggestions. Smile. Smile at strangers. Smile at yourself. Smile the first thing on waking. Smile when you’re skydiving. Smile while you’re giving natural childbirth. Offers one smiley devotee, “I smiled through my natural, drug-free labor and fully believe it transformed the whole experience. I recommend smiling to all women going through childbirth.” I would love to have seen this woman recommend that to my wife as she was being wheeled down the hall for a c-section after 40 hours of labor and 4 hours of pushing. In fact, to test the astonishing power of this recommendation, I just now read it aloud to my wife. Her reaction makes me long to see this woman offer her this advice even now. She wouldn’t be smiling when she finished.I don’t mean to be cruel. I’m actually fairly smiley myself. But this book, which as a TED book is supposed to be about “a powerful idea,” is a fatty concoction of neuropop, adventure travel, self-help, California woo, and Palo Alto entrepreneurial gush. It pushes positive thinking across some mathematical warp zone that renders it negative. I suspect it would make even the father of positive thinking, Norman Vincent Peale, just fwow wight up.
More than at any point in our history, the smartest people generally go to high school and certainly to college with one another, move en masse to “creative cities” after college, marry their fellow high achievers and then raise their kids in the cocoons of what Murray calls the SuperZips. The problem with this system isn’t that the meritocrats look down on working-class culture (though “Coming Apart” does get in plenty of digs at elite snobbery). Rather, it’s that the meritocrats don’t participate in working class culture, and that “assortative mating” and geographic clustering have deprived lower-income communities of the social capital (and with it, strong civic institutions, political influence, and so on) that the smart and diligent possess. In this sense, Murray’s analysis follows the late, great Christopher Lasch in arguing that meritocracy works almost too well: Plucking the best and brightest from every walk of life and then encouraging them to live in community almost exclusively with one another means that the rest of the country is deprived of people who otherwise would have been local leaders, local entrepreneurs, the hubs of local social networks, etc.
For some, the typewriter can be about yearning for a simpler time, a younger self, a lost integrity, a relation to the text that seems as authentic as writing with pen and paper. One thinks more carefully, and one means what one writes on a typewriter in a way that one never does on a computer, in which the text is always subject to revision. On a typewriter, the thought is fixed forever. It makes one believe that the computer has magnified the pathologies of our culture in which everything solid melts away. Only the typewriter can make us whole again.Isn’t it pretty to think so.
Elephant on the UndergroundClick the image to link to a menagerie of animals on the London Underground
But there’s another, more self-serving reason that a particular type of superannuated rocker likes to put out an album of standards. These songs—penned by Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Rodgers & Hart (or Hammerstein) to name just a few of their most famous composers—represent the sturdy foundation on which all popular music is based. If you’re a pop singer or songwriter concerned about your legacy, linking yourself to the great American songbook confers a kind of late-stage artisanal legitimacy onto your entire career. It shows that you, too, have always possessed a deep and sophisticated understanding of authentic songcraft. If you’re worried that the world may remember you primarily for wearing Spandex pants and snarling “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?,” what better penance than to croon “Isn’t It Romantic?” in a rakish coat and tie, carried along by a lush string section?
How many times have you written something, published it, and then realized in retrospect that what you thought you said was not in fact what came through? (Even if you’ve never done this yourself, you’ve certainly witnessed it in others.) What if you could revise a work after publishing it, and release it again, making clear the relationship between the first version and the new one. What if you could publish iteratively, bit by bit, at each step gathering feedback from your readers and refining the text. Would our writing be better?Iteration in public is a principle of nearly all good product design; you release a version, then see how people use it, then revise and release again. With tangible products (hardware, furniture, appliances, etc.), that release cycle is long, just as with books. But when the product is weightless, the time between one release and the next can be reduced from months or years to days or even hours. The faster the release cycle, the more opportunities for revision—and, often, the better the product itself.
Writing has (so far) not generally benefited from this kind of process; but now that the text has been fully liberated from the tyranny of the printing press, we are presented with an opportunity: to deploy texts, instead of merely publishing them.
Via Matt Milliner on Twitter, sandwich art.
Now that’s what I call an infographic. From a terrific new project, “the newest member of Smithsonian’s digital family,” Design Decoded.