“So we aren’t any closer to unification than we were in Einstein’s time?” the historian asked.Feynman grew angry. “It’s a crazy question! … We’re certainly closer. We know more. And if there’s a finite amount to be known, we obviously must be closer to having the knowledge, okay? I don’t know how to make this into a sensible question…. It’s all so stupid. All these interviews are always so damned useless.”
He rose from his desk and walked out the door and down the corridor, drumming his knuckles along the wall. The writer heard him shout, just before he disappeared: “It’s goddamned useless to talk about these things! It’s a complete waste of time! The history of these things is nonsense! You’re trying to make something difficult and complicated out of something that’s simple and beautiful.”
Across the hall Murray Gell-Mann looked out of his office. “I see you’ve met Dick,” he said.
I love infographics like this as much as the next guy, maybe more than the next guy, but let’s face it: they’re posters. The only way they really work is if you print them out at 2’ x 3’, which of course no one is going to do. What I want to see more of is infographics designed for the internet, like this. Yeah, it’s a little busy, but it’s clearly made for the computer screen. We need more stuff like that and less like the NPR chart.
Writers are defined, in large measure, by what they can’t do. The mass of things that lie beyond their abilities force them to concentrate on the things they can. “I can’t do this,” exclaims the distraught Mother-Writer in “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” Lorrie Moore’s famous story about a young child dying of cancer. “I can do quasi-amusing phone dialogue. I do the careful ironies of daydreams. I do the marshy ideas upon which intimate life is built …” From the sum total of these apparent trivialities emerges a fiction which succeeds in doing precisely what it claims it can’t.Or take a more extreme example: Franz Kafka. Was ever a writer so consumed by the things he couldn’t do? Stitch together all the things Kafka couldn’t do and you have a draft of War and Peace. The corollary of this is that what he was left with was stuff no one else could do – or had ever done. Stepping over into music, wasn’t it partly Beethoven’s inability to conjure melodies as effortlessly as Mozart that encouraged the development of his transcendent rhythmic power? How reassuring to know that the same problems that afflict journeymen artists also operate at the level of genius.
How to write fiction: Geoff Dyer on freedom | Books | guardian.co.uk
I think this is profoundly important for young artists and intellectuals to know. Similarly, a story I often tell: when he was a young trumpet player in New York, Miles Davis was so intimidated by Dizzy Gillespie that he almost gave up music. He knew he could never match Dizzy’s virtuosity, his speed, his brilliance of tone. So Miles became the anti-Dizzy. He played slowly, using few notes; he tried to avoid vibrato, instead creating a thin, clean tone; he often played with a mute. The result: The Birth of the Cool.
All this proved a bit too much for Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, who was moved to make an impassioned plea this week for a cultural reality check, warning about the possibility of the incursion of “a right-wing political agenda” into seemingly apolitical discussions of how best to fight the effects of a devastating economy on the nation’s most vulnerable.Berg’s critique, which he focused, online, on Sesame Street, then widened, with me, on the phone this week, might, on the surface seem surprising: a kale and burdock root-munching Brooklyn mom would appear, at first glance, to have little in common with a Tea Party stalwart, and Sesame Street is hardly a hotbed of political reaction.
Yet in these, and in much of the well-meaning progressive response to the twin problems of hunger and obesity in our country, there is, indeed, a common thread: a deep-rooted, unthinking do-it-yourself individualism. It’s so ingrained as to be virtually unconscious. And at a time when nearly 49 million Americans are living in “food-insecure households” — i.e. homes where family members sometimes go hungry — it’s a tendency that, if unchecked, can do a great deal of harm.
Don’t Make Fighting Hunger Trendy | TIME Ideas | TIME.com
Absolutely! — I mean, people making thoughtful, responsible, financially prudent decisions about their own eating habits? My God, what next? Tearing up credit cards? Once people start trying to address political and economic problems by changing their own behavior, the Ruin of All Things must be just around the corner. We must stamp out such nonsense now!
Why such narratives are in demand by the general public is more mysterious. It could be that ordinary people find the surreal perplexity of the Internet—the stuff of WikiLeaks, Anonymous, Stuxnet, “Twitter revolutions”—so maddeningly complex and labyrinthine that they are ready to settle for whatever theory or pseudo-theory or theoretical uplift seems to make sense of the puzzling new situation. And what better way to make sense of it all than to claim that the source of their perplexity is in fact a part of some inexorable historical process that has been unfolding for centuries? Most Internet intellectuals simply choose a random point in the distant past—the honor almost invariably goes to the invention of the printing press—and proceed to draw a straight line from Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, as if the Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, the Reign of Terror, two world wars—and everything else—never happened.The ubiquitous references to Gutenberg are designed to lend some historical gravitas to wildly ahistorical notions. The failure of Internet intellectuals actually to grapple with the intervening centuries of momentous technological, social, and cultural development is glaring. For all their grandiosity about technology as the key to all of life’s riddles, they cannot see further than their iPads. And even their iPad is of interest to them only as a “platform”—another buzzword of the incurious—and not as an artifact that is assembled in dubious conditions somewhere in East Asian workshops so as to produce cultic devotion in its more fortunate owners. This lack of elementary intellectual curiosity is the defining feature of the Internet intellectual. History, after all, is about details, but no Internet intellectual wants to be accused of thinking small. And so they think big—sloppily, ignorantly, pretentiously, and without the slightest appreciation of the difference between critical thought and market propaganda.
Evgeny Morozov, going easy on Jeff Jarvis.
‘The Mariner on the Deck of the Ship’, by Mervyn Peake
For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.
One of the things I noticed in the obits and letters to the editor about Jobs was the recurrent notion that he enhanced our connectivity. This is something that strikes me as such an irony. We’re all connected now, we’re all wired, we have this complete ease of contact with everybody — but it’s also obvious that the more society becomes entrenched in these so-called connecting technologies, the more isolated we are as individuals… .Well there are these band-aids, these substitutes, of course there are. That’s the appeal, that’s why they’re popular, but in the meantime we’re more and more dispersed. And don’t get me wrong I use them too. I have a close friend in Serbia. How often am I going to see him? Not very often, so I rely on a fixed version of the technology you’re describing. But those are consolations, and you ultimately have to look at what’s being traded away. When you weigh the whole ensemble of this, the whole culture of this and you see the direction it’s going, and again getting back to community, which to me is really the key thing, it’s evaporating.
Q&A: A Proud Luddite On Steve Jobs’ Legacy
Here’s one way to know that you need to spend more time taking with people who don’t share your point of view: when you use the phrase “It’s obvious that… .”
And if we’re going to ask questions, let’s ask them genuinely: What in fact do you “trade away” by using digital technology to stay in touch with your friend in Serbia?
And one more thing, while I’m grumping out: if you use the very technologies you’re critiquing, should anyone call you a “Luddite”? What should you call yourself?
I’m endlessly fascinated by watching children play with technology. It all started when I saw a 4-year-old child swipe her hand across a television screen in frustration. What makes revolutionary touch and swipe technology so biologically natural?
Good grief. If “revolutionary touch and swipe technology” were “biologically natural,” children would have been swiping at TV screens for the past sixty years, and at magazines for more than a century. Yet somehow we failed to notice this behavior. Could it be that children who are swiping at screens and pages have been taught to do so by iPad-wielding parents? How absurd.
Many worthy thinkers fear that “the life of the mind” is being crowded out by the current explosion of scientific information and technological innovation. “We are living in an increasingly post-idea world,” warns Neal Gabler, in a New York Times op-ed essay mourning the loss of an era when “Marx pointed out the relationship between the means of production and our social and political systems [and] Freud taught us to explore our minds.”But in what sense is this a loss? Freud discovered nothing and cured nobody. Marx was a hypocrite whose theories failed in about as hideously spectacular a way as can be imagined.
What is fading, it seems to me, is not the world of ideas but the celebration of big, pretentious ideas untethered to facts. That world has fallen out of favor because fact-starved ideas, when put into practice, produced indefensible amounts of human suffering, and because we today know a lot more facts than was the case back when a Freud could be ranked with an Einstein.