Just like Amazon Web Services have enabled thousands of scaleable web startups and has made thousands of established companies more efficient, I predict that Amazon Publishing Services will enable thousands of new publishers and make thousands of established publishers more efficient. Amazon’s Editing Turk will connect thousands of writers to pools of editors who will work harder at a lower cost. Amazon Creative Services will provide illustrations and graphic design. Amazon Elastic Curation will match groups of consumers with new authors writing the books they want to read. And Amazon Creative Capital will help visionaries invest in promising projects and writers. Amazon will spend to achieve scale wherever scale drives economies, and everywhere else, Amazon will provide hypervisors to match talent with tasks.So the future of publishing will be dominated by publishers who take advantage of the various efficiencies of scale forged by Amazon (and Amazon competitors, we hope). The rest won’t be worth talking about, except as an expression of nostalgia. The efficiencies will have many unfortunate effects, which professors will write books about. But they won’t sell well. There are some things that even Amazon can’t do.
“Potato Head Blues” (1927). The song is great, the band is great, but there is nothing in 20th-century music better than Armstrong’s stop-time solo late in this song: stunning clarity of tone, absolutely mastery of phrasing, and unerring and uncanny movement around the beat. Sheer genius.
But the aspect that boomed out most loudly was his relentless pursuit of secular humanism in the face of ignorant religion. That came across even when his last doctor, Francis Collins, was speaking, addressing the memorial audience as a “follower of Jesus Christ”. Collins, head of the US National Institutes of Health, said Hitchens had helped forward the search for scientific answers to cancer by agreeing to try new therapies. Collins also revealed that, ironically, he had prayed for the great atheist in his final days.
Please explain: “ironically.”
What really motivates elementary particle physicists is a sense of how the world is ordered—it is, they believe, a world governed by simple universal principles that we are capable of discovering. But not everyone feels the importance of this. During the debate over the SSC, I was on the Larry King radio show with a congressman who opposed it. He said that he wasn’t against spending on science, but that we had to set priorities. I explained that the SSC was going to help us learn the laws of nature, and I asked if that didn’t deserve a high priority. I remember every word of his answer. It was “No.”What does motivate legislators is the immediate economic interests of their constituents. Big laboratories bring jobs and money into their neighborhood, so they attract the active support of legislators from that state, and apathy or hostility from many other members of Congress. Before the Texas site was chosen, a senator told me that at that time there were a hundred senators in favor of the SSC, but that once the site was chosen the number would drop to two. He wasn’t far wrong.
There’s a theory that technology eventually subverts whatever rational ends it’s supposed to promote. Grad Cafe seems to have been created to relieve anxiety, either by providing helpful information or just by puncturing the silence that lies between submitting an application and hearing back. Needless to say, it fails miserably. What could be more stressful than a screen full of useless data that one nonetheless feels compelled to master? What is more counterproductive than throwing a grad school applicant with no sense of perspective into an online mosh pit of other grad school applicants with no sense of perspective?The scrum at the Grad Cafe indicates that my generation’s safe space has been transformed into just another gold ring. As the obsessive chronicle of yeses and noes reveals, the process of finding a masters or doctorate program carries with it a sense of desperation—one actually reminiscent of the job search. In this rat race, the ivory tower morphs from a reassuring backup plan into a source of social and existential terror via its mysterious admissions policies. And the manic scrutiny to which sites like the Grad Cafe submit such policies only aggravates the problem.
laphamsquarterly:Are any of these fonts your favorite? Please don’t say it’s Papyrus.We heart fonts.
Over the past few decades it seems football has gone out of its way to alienate the paunchy, middle-aged fan. Modern players are so lean and fit they look like they have been vacuum‑packed. The Premier League has become another Hollywood. Earlier this year the only hope left to us, Norwich City’s impressively bulky Grant Holt, celebrated a goal against Swansea by stripping off his shirt to reveal a body that looked like sculpted marble rather than the moulded jelly many of us were hoping for.With Holt out of the equation and the reliably plump Adriano getting dumped by Corinthians last month, there is simply no one for the untoned spectator to identify with any more. This did not used to be the case. Once upon a time men such as Ernie Machin, Dave Mackay and Frannie Lee, all three of whom looked infinitely more likely to sink a six-pack than to own one, bestrode the pitch, while others such as Tommy “The Flying Pig” Lawrence stood between the sticks.
This, however, is not the most remarkable character of the sound of bells. This sound has a thousand secret relations with man. How oft, amid the profound tranquillity of night, has the heavy tolling of the death-bell, like the slow pulsations of an expiring heart, startled the adultress in her guilty pleasures! How often has it caught the ear of the atheist who, in his impious vigils, had perhaps the presumption to write that there is no God! The pen drops from his fingers. He hears with consternation the funeral knell which seems to say to him, And is there indeed no God? Oh, how such sounds disturbed the slumbers of our tyrants! Extraordinary religion, which, by the mere percussion of the magic metal, can change pleasures into torments, appal the atheist, and cause the dagger to drop from the hand of the assassin!
Chateaubriand, from The Genius of Christianity.
A supreme author of critically gifted prose, [Dwight] Macdonald at his dazzling best was just as open: anything produced by anyone, he would examine for its true quality. That’s what a cultural critic must do, and there are no shortcuts through theory. But deep down he knew that, or he would never have bothered to coin a phrase. Back again because they never really went away, Dwight Macdonald’s essays are a reminder that while very little critical prose is poetic, great critical prose always is: you want to say it aloud, because it fills the mouth as it fills the mind.