Alan Jacobs

We don’t get a great deal of autumn color here in central Texas, but what we have comes now — in December — as people are putting up their Christmas lights. (If you look closely you’ll see a string of lights in the tree.) It’s all color-coded, you see: red and green, for the season.

Probably someone has made this point before, but it occurred to me a while back that you can better appreciate both a cover of a song and the original by reversing them: that is, listening to the cover as though it were the original and the original as though it were the cover. This works great for

• "Friday I'm in Love" — which Yo La Tengo first performed and was later covered by The Cure;
• "Take Me to the River" — who would've imagined that Al Green would cover a Talking Heads song?
• "All Along the Watchtower" — Hendrix's original is iconic, but Dylan's reimagining of it as a spooky mostly-acoustic mid-tempo number is pure genius.

Please think of other examples.

I really enjoyed this between-quarters interview, and not only because Pop’s hug for Sager (who has been away from the game for a long time being treated for cancer) is heartwarming. No, I was especially taken with Pop’s explanation for pulling his whole first unit out of the game early on: “They were playing like crap, so we put in different guys. You’d have done the same thing.”

Let’s look at that again: “They were playing like crap, so we put in different guys. You’d have done the same thing.” Maybe this is it — maybe this is what coaching at the very highest level amounts to, when you strip away all the typical rhetoric. Another coach would have said, “Yeah, the back-to-back may have had an effect on our energy levels” or “I just felt we needed a change of pace” or “We had some matchup problems that I wanted to address.” But Pop: “Nah, they were playing like crap, so we put in different guys.”

Coaching reduced to its purest and simplest: you put some guys out there; if they play like crap, you take them out and put in different guys. Iterate. Over time, the guys who play like crap move to the end of the bench, and eventually off the team; meanwhile, the guys who don’t play like crap get more and more minutes.

Phil Jackson has long been called the Zen Master, but that’s because he talks a Zen game. Pop seems really to be living it. And like all the true masters, Pop is making sure Sager knows, and we know, that there’s no mystery to this, that the aura of expertise is essentially a ruse coaches deploy to celebrate and elevate themselves — to increase their market value. Pop, with his long career and five championships, is beyond all that. If we just could strip away all the obfuscation and see the task as clearly and simply as Pop does, if we truly practice shoshin, then his words would indeed be true: “You’d have done the same thing.”

Here’s the handout I’m giving to my freshman seminar in a few minutes, as we meet for the last time. My guide to collegiate lifehacking, on one page!

Zuckerberg and Chan did not set up a charitable foundation, which has nonprofit status. He created a limited liability company, one that has already reaped enormous benefits as public relations coup for himself. His PR return-on-investment dwarfs that of his Facebook stock. Zuckerberg was depicted in breathless, glowing terms for having, in essence, moved money from one pocket to the other.

— Jesse Eisinger

Nick Bilton must have known Steve Jobs extremely well to know that other people who say they knew Steve Jobs really well didn’t know Steve Jobs at all. 

The media faces a growing challenge in how its content is spread and recycled. When I asked various law enforcement and forensic psychology experts what might explain America's rising tide of gun rampages, I heard the same two words over and over: social media. Although there is no definitive research yet, widespread anecdotal evidence suggests that the speed at which social media bombards us with memes and images exacerbates the copycat effect.

— Mark Follman in Mother Jones. And beyond any food you might be providing to attention-craving sociopaths, you're probably helping to arouse greater anger and agitation among your fellow Twitter users, which leads people to say extreme things that they regret later, and does absolutely nothing to help those who are suffering. So why not give it a rest? 

Coleridge on Measure for Measure — literally on Measure for Measure — from Adam Roberts’ wonderful blog documenting his ongoing engagement with the more recondite sites of Coleridgean scribbling. FYI, I reviewed Adam’s magnificent edition of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria here.

Over at The American Conservative, I have been unfolding a dialogue on democracy. There have been six installments so far —

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

— and several more are still to come.

As I finished writing Laurus , I told my wife I worked three years on this novel, and now you will read it, and so will my colleagues — but nobody else. It was so far from the mainstream. But it became so popular in Russia, and it received a big literary prize, one that was given previously only to mainstream books. This mistake was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It taught me that despite all the garbage I see in our bookstores or on TV, despite all of this, people need other things to live by. It is an illusion that they need this shit! If somebody has enough courage to speak with another voice, people will read it. The shock was that I asked myself the question: Is Laurus now mainstream?

Liberals and conservatives both liked my book. I tried to say with it that there is another way to live: the way of the saints. It is not an easy way to walk, but maybe we can walk alongside it. I’m not trying to teach people in this book, only to show them what this other way looks like. You know, maybe it was easier in the first ages of Christianity than it is now in our post-Christian culture. Nobody knew about Christianity back then. These people, these first Christians, brought the fire of a new faith, of a new religion. Now everybody knows everything, and gets very angry if somebody tries to explain something to them. In modern times, I think we need a new language to talk about such things.

— speaking to Rod Dreher here