At a time when there were no driver’s licenses, speed limits or clear lane demarcations, the notion of a stop sign was revolutionary. In fact, aside from the occasional road markers letting riders on horseback know how far they were from the next city, there was no road or street signage at all. [William Phelps] Eno, scion of a wealthy New England family who never learned to drive, helped change all that. In a 1900 article titled “Reforming Our Street Traffic Urgently Needed,” for Rider and Driver magazine, he proposed placing stop signs at intersections. It was a civilizing notion.“That was a new concept and really did introduce the idea that you had to watch out for other people,” [Joshua] Schank says.
Starbucks is about to unveil a new store in suburban Seattle built primarily of four used shipping containers — the large steel boxes used to store goods as they are transported long distances on boats and trucks.Containers have become a hot commodity in the green building movement because so many of them are piling up at American ports and are in need of recycling, says Peter DeMaria, the principal in a design firm that does a lot of work with them. “Due to the trade imbalance with China, millions of containers are left in our ports every year,” he said.
And it just so happens the containers are perfect modular building blocks for construction. “We like the idea of up-cycling, that is, using a material and deploying it in nearly its original state,” Mr. DeMaria said. Adapting a container takes 5 percent of the energy needed to take steel, melt it down and create a new beam, he added.
For the near future, though, it seems like the trade-off is going to be worth it. Web email, for example, has so many advantages that I, for one, can’t imagine going back to running client software. But Gmail is going to keep changing, and some of that change is inevitably going to affect my workflow. The only thing to do in this situation is to adapt. To think of the workflow not as static, but as a malleable and constantly changing system. To meet every update with a willingness to refine or even radically change the way we do things, instead of obstinate indignation and victimhood. To form a meta-workflow that incorporates change as a constant. It’s the only way to stay sane in this brave new world in which more and more of our lives consist in ephemeral, increasingly amorphous software.
Think of the 18th–century artist Piranesi, for example, whose engravings of picturesquely decaying Rome are certainly fantastic in some respects—he places just enough disproportionately tiny people in his cityscapes to make us think those ancient buildings were absolutely colossal—but also reflect a real and deep desire to capture the ancient Romans’ remains and to make knowledge of the city available to distant lands and later generations. Or John James Audubon’s obsessive quest to paint all of America’s birds. That documentary impulse was once central to illustration, if not to what we now call “fine art,” and its passing is something to be lamented, especially since our belief that photography straightforwardly captures the–thing–in–itself is a sadly naïve one. (Beginning birdwatchers always want photographic guides because they think photography captures birds “as they really are,” but skillful paintings, like those of Roger Tory Peterson, are often more useful: they portray birds as the human eye sees them, or is likely to see them in the field, which is not invariably as the camera’s lens captures them. The common belief that photographs record simply and objectively both diminishes the documentary power of illustration and underrates the artfulness of photography.)So Gregory Blackstock’s drawings are a pleasant and instructive reminder of a time when the artist had to record the world because there was no other way to document its beauties. Such illustrations may not approach the depth and subtlety of truly “fine” art, but they represent a wonderful union of what the poet W. H. Auden, in an essay on “The Poet and the City,” calls the “gratuitous” and the “utile.” Auden reminds us that there was once a time when all the arts had a dimension of usefulness: poetry aided the memory, even on as humble a level as “Thirty days hath September,” and we should never forget the sheer and astonishing craftsmanship that enabled Bach to crank out all those cantatas, which were invariably useful to the church and as a bonus contain more beauty than seems possible.
The programmers of the commercial web have always seen their goal as the elimination of distance and friction from transactions, and that objective has, not surprisingly, come to shape online social networks. But, when carried too far, the minimization of transaction costs in personal relations ends up having the effect of reducing those relationships to mere transactions. Intimacy without distance is not intimacy, and sharing without friction is not sharing. Qualities of tenderness become, in the end, forms of commerce.
What I’m kind of hoping is that this is just kind of a pause, while we assimilate this gigantic new thing, ubiquitous computing and the Internet. And that at some point we’ll turn around and say, ‘Well, that was interesting — we have a whole set of new tools and capabilities that we didn’t have before the whole computer/Internet thing came along. Now let’s get back to work doing interesting and useful things.‘
Book art by Su Blackwell
You left the cocoon of Princeton when you were 16. Why?I was a rebellious adolescent. It was the ’60s. Everyone was rebellious. I hated high school. When they wouldn’t let me graduate early because I hadn’t taken gym, I quit altogether and went off to British Columbia. It was a time when a lot of kids ran away from home. My father didn’t stop me. At first, I worked with this guy who’d built his own boat, and we ran around the Northwest delivering things. I loved it. Canada had real wilderness. British Columbia was like Yosemite in the ocean. Being there was so liberating — getting my own food, making my own living. I built myself a boat in the style of the Aleut-Russian kayak, the baidarka. I’d work on tugboats and fishing boats for a while, and then I’d take my baidarka and explore. I did this for about 20 years.
And today you make your living as a historian of science and technology. How does a high school dropout get to do that?
Hey, this is America. You can do what you want! I love this idea that someone who didn’t finish high school can write books that get taken seriously. History is one of the only fields where contributions by amateurs are taken seriously, providing you follow the rules and document your sources. In history, it’s what you write, not what your credentials are.
‘We love [Meryl Streep’s] work,’ Callista Gingrich said. 'We love “Mama Mia.” We’ve seen it several times. Newt’s ring-tone is “Dancing Queen.”’
The sense of festivity, which corresponds to pity in tragedy, is always present at the end of a romantic comedy. This takes the part of a party, usually a wedding, in which we feel, to some degree, participants. We are invited to the festivity and we put the best face we can on whatever feelings we may still have about the recent behavior of some of the characters, often including the bridegroom. In Shakespeare the new society is remarkably catholic in its tolerance; but there is always a part of us that remains a spectator, detached and observant, aware of other nuances and values. This sense of alienation, which in tragedy is terror, is almost bound to be represented by somebody or something in the play, and even if, like Shylock, he disappears in the fourth act, we never quite forget him. We seldom consciously feel identified with him, for he himself wants no such identification: we may even hate or despise him, but he is there, the eternal questioning Satan who is still not quite silenced by the vindication of Job… . Participation and detachment, sympathy and ridicule, sociability and isolation, are inseparable in the complex we call comedy, a complex that is begotten by the paradox of life itself, in which merely to exist is both to be part of something else and yet never to be a part of it, and in which all freedom and joy are inseparably a belonging and an escape.