Alan Jacobs

The same rules apply to self-examination as apply to confession to a priest: be brief, be blunt, be gone. Be brief, be blunt, forget. The scrupuland is a nasty specimen.

One week, Bob Evans, a project manager at Google, challenged a cliché in software development, “Good, fast or cheap — pick two,” meaning you can’t have all three. To Mr. Evans, fast and cheap — and highly adaptable — is good by definition, allowing engineers to identify needed updates, repairs and new features. Creating a polished product before it is ever put to use is pointless, he told the class, because it will always need to be changed. “Software is one brief moment of creation and a lifetime of maintenance,” he said.

Summer, or rather the hint or promise of it, only arrives with the publication of Wisden. The cricketers’ almanack – the venerable almanack – celebrates its 150th anniversary this season. It has been quite an innings. John Wisden created an institution that, happily, shows no sign of flagging. This year’s almanack clocks in at a chunky 1584 pages and is a fine edition that pays proper tribute to the Yellow Brick’s past.

This second edition stewarded by Lawrence Booth confirms the impression fostered last season that his editorship is a considerable upgrade upon his predecessor’s. His prejudices are sound. Quite correctly, Booth is a conservative but not a reactionary. If the editor of Wisden cannot be counted upon to uphold the greater, immemorial interests of the game who can?

eastmanhouse:

Imogen Cunningham (American, 1883-1976) Magnolia Bud, 1929, gelatin silver print, museum Purchase, © 1929, 2012 Imogen Cunningham Trust.

thingsmagazine:

Belmont Park Air Meet, New York, 1910

How has your decision to write affected your health? Has it had negative effects on your personal life?

I was sitting in a grandstand seat behind the third-base-side lower boxes, pretty close to the field, there as a Giants fan of long standing but not as yet a baseball writer. Never mind the score or the pitchers; this was a trifling midseason meeting—if any Giants-Dodgers game could be called trifling—with stretches of empty seats in the oblong upper reaches of the stands. Robinson, a Dodger base runner, had reached third and was standing on the bag, not far from me, when he suddenly came apart. I don’t know what happened, what brought it on, but it must have been something ugly and far too familiar to him, another racial taunt—I didn’t hear it—that reached him from the stands and this time struck home.

I didn’t quite hear Jackie, either, but his head was down and a stream of sound and profanity poured out of him. His head was down and his shoulders were barely holding in something more. The game stopped. The Dodgers’ third-base coach came over, and then the Giants’ third baseman—it must have been Sid Gordon—who talked to him quietly and consolingly. The third-base umpire walked in at last to join them, and put one hand on Robinson’s arm. The stands fell silent—what’s going on?—but the moment passed too quickly to require any kind of an explanation. The men parted, and Jackie took his lead off third while the Giants pitcher looked in for his sign. The game went on.

Simon Russell Beale is fond of describing acting as three-dimensional literary criticism. And in my personal experience, the most mind-expanding insights into Shakespeare have come from actors in the rehearsal room, usually without the long introductory preamble with which directors generally preface even the most banal of suggestions. As a tribe, we can barely ask an actor to move to the left without making a speech about it – but actors just get on with it. One day in rehearsal, without warning, David Calder – who played Polonius in Hamlet – approached the end of his speech of advice to Laertes and flinched. He seemed to dry. And then, under the heavy weight of what felt like deep personal shame, he said: “This above all: to thine own self be true,/ And it must follow, as the night the day,/ Thou canst not then be false to any man.” From the heart, like many fathers, Polonius wants his son not to make his own mistakes. But, mired in a corrupt court, he is incapable of dealing truthfully with others, and of being true to himself. And Calder’s Polonius knew it.

It would be equally plausible to present the Polonius of tradition, a man devoid of self-knowledge, puffed up with self-regard. But I was electrified by Calder’s illumination of three lines worn thin by their relentless repetition, out of context, often by habitual liars. I knew immediately that the Calder Polonius had helped Claudius assassinate the old king, and was tortured by his own treachery. I started to think that the old king was probably a disaster for Denmark, that – like Richard II – he had to go. This was the real Shakespeare: an actor who provides for other actors a myriad of ways of telling his stories and of being his characters. His intuitive openness to interpretation is mistaken for complexity. His relish for ambiguity is taken as a challenge to those who would pin him down. But they are functions of his calling: he writes plays.

No, they aren’t right about the Gosnell story. If you’ve never heard of the Gosnell story, it’s not because of a coverup by the liberal mainstream media. It’s probably because you failed to pay attention to the copious coverage among pro-choice and feminist journalists, as well as the big news organizations, when the news first broke in 2011. There would be something rich, if it weren’t so infuriating, about these (almost uniformly male, as it happens) reporters and commentators scrambling to break open this shocking untold story. You know, the one that was written about here, here and here, to name some disparate sources.

natgeofound:

Landing signal officer and assistant wear experimental ear protection aboard the USS Midway, August 1955.
Photograph by Luis Marden, National Geographic