Indeed, Bezos doesn’t consider the Fire a mere device, preferring to call it a “media service.” While he takes pride in the Fire, he really sees it as an advanced mobile portal to Amazon’s cloud universe. That’s how Amazon has always treated the Kindle: New models simply offer improved ways of buying and reading the content. Replacing the hardware is no more complicated or emotionally involved than changing a flashlight battery. (That’s why, in a sense, some of the iPad comparisons and cavils you may read today in the hands-on reviews of Fire are somewhat irrelevant in light of this larger issue. Yes, the Fire lacks the industrial-design pyrotechnics that make fanboys foam at the mouth like the iPad does. But who cares? Like a lizard shedding its skin, next year there will be another Fire and in three years the original will look as antiquated as the bizarre-looking Kindle 1 appears today. When you pay $199 for Fire, you’re not buying a gadget—you’re filing citizen papers for the digital duchy of Amazonia.)
Last week, some mediocre California mayoress announced that she wasn’t going to attend a Veterans Day event in her city of Richmond. Gayle McLaughlin, in fact, was down with the “Occupy” guys and gals instead. You can easily picture the response she got: the city of Richmond insulted, along with the memory of its brave men and women in uniform. Indeed, there might not even be a Richmond if not for those unforgettable volunteers. But if this were true, then the writing of history would always be simple. So would the composition of morality stories. Both Kipling and Owen came to the conclusion that too many lives had been “taken” rather than offered or accepted, and that too many bureaucrats had complacently accepted the sacrifice as if they themselves had earned it.And this has made a lot of difference. It means, for example, that each case needs to be argued on its own merits. I am convinced that the contingents who went to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, though badly led on a scale almost equal to that of 1914 to 1918, are to be praised and supported. But I take no comfort from the idea that this should be an official position. I must say I think that La McLaughlin expressed herself with awful casualness (because November 11 is, after all, truly—still—a solemn day on the calendar). But it’s still more important on such a day to discuss dissent, and to reflect on whether it might have been your own enemy, or your deeply mistaken father, who brought you bound to the pit and alive to the burning.
Nashville might seem like an archetype of the death-of-the-bookstore-everywhere narrative, but its story turns out to be different. The cashier who checked me out at the Brentwood store, Nancy DeVille, had transferred from the Nashville location when it closed, and she said both outlets were constantly packed with regulars drawn to the sight, feel, and smell of books. David Beddow, a supervisor at the Nashville store from 2005 to 2008, remembered costumed crowds snaking around the corner for the release of the latest Harry Potter. He said revenue there had actually increased during his tenure, from $5.5 million to around $7 million a year.Despite rising online book sales and digital downloads and the Great Recession, bookstores in the area were profitable—right up until they closed. Even Davis-Kidd, locally owned until the Joseph-Beth Booksellers chain purchased it in 1997, had been solvent, undone not by the collapse of the local market but by the bankruptcy of the parent company. (The local Barnes & Noble, at the Opry Mills mall, was closed after a 2010 flood.) Nashville lost its bookstores not because people there had abandoned physical books and retailers. For the most part, it lost them remotely, at the corporate level.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7_0SOTQLIQ?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=187]
Lullaby. Via The Atlantic Wire.
In the 1950s I was an athlete. Those were the days before joggers clogged the highway, so it was unusual for me to see another runner when I was training. We fell into the habit of meeting up and pounding the miles together for company.He was stocky, barrel-chested, with a high-pitched, donnish voice and the aerodynamics of a brick. He was funny and witty and he talked endlessly, but I understood very little of what he was saying, and it became clear that he ran in order to think. He seemed to be obsessed by mathematics and biology. That much I could work out.
We had one thing in common: a fascination with Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, especially the transformation of the Wicked Queen into the Witch. He used to go over the scene in detail, dwelling on the ambiguity of the apple, red on one side, green on the other, one of which gave death. We had both been traumatised by Walt.
On one occasion he asked me whether, in my opinion as a classical linguist, artificial intelligence was possible. After a couple of miles of silence I said that, in my opinion, it was not. And that was that.
He killed himself when an ignorant and uncouth judge gave him the choice of a prison sentence or chemical castration; and I was overwhelmed by fury at the salacious, gloating humiliation imposed on my friend, and by a sense of guilt that I did not, could not, help him; which lasted for decades, and was made only worse when the Official Secrets Act revealed his true heroism.
He died of cyanide poisoning. By his body was an apple, partly eaten. The apple was not tested for cyanide. His name was Alan Turing.
When cars entered the fray, the fact that their owners were usually rich added an element of class war. After Charles Gates, a broker, was caught in 1906 driving 25 miles per hour in an 8-mile-an-hour zone in the Bronx, The Times carefully noted that he appeared in court wearing “a blue serge suit and light-colored spats.” He expected to get off, but Magistrate Leroy Crane told him, “You are a Wall Street man with millions, and you think that you can do what you please.”
Before the crisis years of the AIDS epidemic I had that sense that one does of a long, expansive living ahead of me. When my friends and my partner began to sicken and die around me, that shifted everything in a sense that you just don’t know what prospect is ahead of you. For me, that exacerbates desire. On the other hand you have to negotiate because desire enflamed can become a blinder. It’s a balancing act I have never felt especially good at.Secretly, I believe balance is boring. I used to take yoga classes and there’s these exercises where you’re supposed to be standing on one leg in this position as a stork, and I was terrible at them! I would get annoyed because they would always turn it into metaphor: “If you don’t have physical balance it means you need to seek balance…” No I don’t!
I’ve got a good bit of student-loan debt myself, acquired studying philosophy in grad school. And then I dropped out before finishing my Ph.D.! Well, I don’t regret it. Sometimes in grad school you’ll hear students and faculty both speak with a certain dread of “the real world.” It turns out, however, that universities aren’t actually located outside this here space-time continuum, but are part of the real world, and a pretty great part, too, if you’re lucky enough to get into it. I don’t know that when I took out student loans to help support myself that I thought I was taking some kind of “gamble.” I knew I was redistributing income from my future to my present self, and not really because I needed the money to make an investment that would payoff, but because I wanted to study philosophy and I couldn’t otherwise afford it. I was buying the rarefied leisure of grad school and knowledge of philosophy. Now I know all about philosophy, will for the rest of my live, and I love it! Did I get some remunerative skills in the bargain? I reckon I did. I certainly sharpened my analytical and argumentative abilities, which came in handy as a think-tank fellow, and come in handy now as a semi-employed blogger for The Economist and Big Think. But so what! I spent years reading and thinking about Aristotle and Kant and Quine and Rawls, which is not everyone’s idea of a holiday, but I’ll always treasure that time in my life, and I’ve got more to show for it than a scrapbook of exotic snapshots. It remade my mind.