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.
great expectations
How many times am I going to get suckered by technological promises? I was so excited when I heard that iOS 5 was going to have wireless syncing for iTunes: finally, I won’t have to deal with plugging the iPhone in and letting the syncing process chug away interminably!
Well. For one thing, the wireless syncing only works (a) if you have your iPhone on and (b) have your Mac running and © have iTunes running and — here’s the big one — (d) have your iPhone plugged into an outlet. So it’s not wireless at all. Your choice is whether to plug your iPhone into your Mac and let the syncing happen via USB or plug it into the wall outlet and let your syncing happen wirelessly (and therefore in most cases more slowly).
Not really much of an improvement, is it?
Also, I have my iPhone plugged in and my laptop open and running iTunes … let’s see … that would be “never.” If I had a desktop machine I would be far more likely to leave it running when I’m not using it. But like most people with laptops, especially lightweight ones like the Air, when I’m not using it I close it and put it away. No syncing can happen while the machine’s asleep.
So yet another apparently welcome technological innovation that leaves me right where I was. Lots of cool things in iOs 5! — but the “wireless” syncing isn’t one of them.
UPDATE: I’m told that it’s possible to force a wi-fi sync even when the device is unplugged, but on my iPhone the “Sync Now” button in the Preferences stays grayed out until I plug the phone in.
I am buying this book just for the cover.
There was a divide between the grad student crowd gathered to hear Zizek and the more rough-looking youth in the western part of the park who were camping out on cardboard and sleeping bags. I asked one twenty-something what he thought of a world renowned philosopher coming to speak at the park. He told me, he had “zero interest. People come, people go,” he said, “Cameras come and go. I’ve never heard of him.”
From Sociologist Jonathan Wynn’s post in the Everyday Sociology Blog, which describes the order and organization within the community at Zuccotti Park.
(via nortonsoc)
Of course he’s never heard of Zizek. Who has? I’d guess maybe .01 percent of the population of the U.S., or about 300,000.
The problem is always that, at the end of the day, I can sit on my butt and make things up and write them down, and get paid for it, so it’s hard to get me interested in doing in anything that involves leaving my house, or dealing with other human beings.
My hero.
The Angry Birds have been captured and illustrated out in the wild by artist Mohamed Raoof. With help with actual photographers (proper credit given on all illustrations), he gave each angry little bird a more “natural” look.
Something is missing from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child. He’s left out the explicit sex scenes that were a signature feature of his four previous novels, and the absence amounts to something of a riddle. Why does Hollinghurst avoid the fleshy details? Why the sudden prudery?
If Alan Hollinghurst can be accused of “prudery,” who’s safe from the charge? Larry Flynt? I probably shouldn’t say anything, because a lede like this is just how Slate does business, but seriously: Have we come to a point where writing explicitly about sex is obligatory, at least for writers who have done so in the past?
Though, come to think of it, this may have less to do with sex per se than with the expectations readers bring to books. How dare Hollinghurst try something he hasn’t tried before? How dare he surprise me?
I can’t imagine this was the poem Will expected when he asked for one, but I’m committed to the idea that most of these postcard poems will grow from the actual odd conversations and experiences I’m having these days. So a conversation whispered during church, as the pastor talked about several playful Jesus interpreting scripture stories in Mark 12 sent me searching for info on the Sadducees. Given our shared antipathy towards angels, I might’ve made a good Sadducee. And if I DO believe in angels, it’s only the OT ones who scare the crap out of you.
The aforementioned Harold Davidson in the lion’s den.
One of the other things that a producer can do is to think of ways to get people out of their habits. Any group of people who has worked together for a long period of time tends to fall into habits about how things are done. One person always tends to be the person who leads the process; another is the one who supports the leader; another, the one who comes in late and who doesn’t say much until the very end; and another one is the stubborn one, counterbalancing the enthusiastic one. And that’s all fine—that’s part of the chemistry of a group of people working together. But it gets very habitual and it gets quite boring, so I think of ways of upsetting that, turning it into a game actually. So saying today, “You are going to give all the orders; and you, the person who normally does all the talking, you’re going to just do what you’re told. And you are going to play this instrument that you normally don’t ever touch, and in fact that you can’t play.” [Laughs] So sometimes that does actually yield an immediately usable result. But what does very often happen is that it loosens people up. And it enlarges the envelope of possibilities within which they navigate. I mean, if you tell somebody else to play drums, you have a very simple drumbeat normally, because the person who has taken over the drums isn’t the drummer, and, therefore, you start writing and thinking in a different way. It just immediately takes you out of the normal course you would have followed.