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Today’s Tweets, Lightly Annotated
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I had an eclectic but perhaps extra-fulfilling day using Twitter today. First, I wrote a lot of tweets: I hand-counted 165, including @-replies but excluding DMs. But it didn’t strike me as all that atypical a day, which might be all the more striking. It was Twitter at its best. I was reading and writing all day, just having a great time carrying on half-overheard conversations in public.

I wanted to hang on to just a few of those conversation nodes here, inspired partly by two tweets in particular:

@robinsloan @amichel @jayrosen_nyu I love how the Stock & Flow post is perennially always both. Like a geyser waiting for a chance to burst.less than a minute ago via YoruFukurou Favorite Retweet Reply

Robin’s “Stock and Flow” post was flowing again today, helped along by Jay Rosen’s plug via — you guessed it — Twitter.

Today was almost entirely a flow day for me. Call it navel-gazing if you want, but I want to hang onto it, mostly for the following reason:

When I was 7-10 years old, if you’d told me there’d be a machine that would let me read new things all day, I’d have fainted from happiness.less than a minute ago via YoruFukurou Favorite Retweet Reply

So here’s a little of what was flowing in my Twitter stream today.

1.

The NEH’s Brett Bobley was talking about recently donating a slew of old classic paperbacks to charity. After a short catalog of titles (Descartes, Thucydides, et al), he wrote, “I blame UChicago.”

Goaded by U of C alum/UC-Berkeley PhD Natalia Cecire, I came up with some examples, including:

“My contribution to way too many conversations consists of ‘in the original Greek, that translates to _______’ ” #IBlameUChicagoless than a minute ago via YoruFukurou Favorite Retweet Reply

2.

The New York Times’ Bill Keller wrote a post today proposing civil-unions-for-all, getting government out of the “marriage” business entirely. We engaged on Twitter about it. Here’s one of my tweets that Keller later RTed:

@vosdscott @nytkeller This is why I like it better as thought experiment–let’s call it a primary debate question–than a platform plank.less than a minute ago via YoruFukurou Favorite Retweet Reply

3.

@FDbytheword One of my longstanding back-burner projects: modernist reappreciation of comedy, filtered through Joyce, Proust, Nietzsche etalless than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhone Favorite Retweet Reply

4.

Later, I watched some Wimbledon.

Second-set tiebreak to stay alive. GO SERENA GO #VamosSerenaVamosless than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhone Favorite Retweet Reply

I’d been joking with Gavin Craig’s little girls all weekend that Serena Williams was “my girlfriend,” in response to Gavin’s oldest calling Lightning McQueen her “boyfriend.” Today, my girlfriend lost.

And that’s match. I feel like Prince Humperdinck. “Someone has beaten a giant… They were both masters. It ranged all over.”less than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhone Favorite Retweet Reply

5.

I had a looong, wide-ranging conversation with Aaron Bady covering what’s great about Marshall McLuhan’s cameo scene in Annie Hall.

@zunguzungu Apparently the fallacy line is loosely based on something McLuhan ad-libbed: http://t.co/OaOuf6Iless than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhone Favorite Retweet Reply

6.

Responding to today’s NYT “Mechanic Muse” column — and BTW, starting up a literature + technology column AND naming it after one of my favorite Hugh Kenner books? NYT editors, you have struck me to the quick — I observed that the “distant-reading” plus graphic-representation approach advocated by Franco Moretti and others had somehow come full-circle to early French theoretical approaches to lit:

Lévi-Strauss’s “big data sets” were IBM cards w/the structural elements of myths/poetry. That was computational humanities/social science.less than a minute ago via YoruFukurou Favorite Retweet Reply

7.

Just got a note from Josh Glenn that my @HILOBROW HiLo Hero piece on Proust goes on just a little too long. <chuckles> Of course it does.less than a minute ago via YoruFukurou Favorite Retweet Reply

8.

One of the most pleasantly goofy exchanges I got into today was #latkesongs, led by University of Maryland’s Neil Fraistat:

@fraistat @GeorgeOnline Bob Dylan really broke ground here with Blonde on Blonde’s “Just Like A Latke” #latkesongsless than a minute ago via YoruFukurou Favorite Retweet Reply

@fraistat @georgeonline @mkgold @minakowski The earliest source I can find for #latkesongs is Charley Patton’s “Fried Latkes Everywhere”less than a minute ago via YoruFukurou Favorite Retweet Reply

9.

I took up the cause of positive representations of redheads in Pixar movies, spurred on by Brave‘s forthcoming ginger protagonist:

Let’s look, shall we? The Incredibles’ Syndrome: Redhead + villain. Finding Nemo’s Darla: Redhead + villain. Ratatouille’s Linguini: Moron.less than a minute ago via YoruFukurou Favorite Retweet Reply

10.

Yoni Applebaum asked why scholarly databases don’t incorporate social and popularity metrics into search results. Zeynep Tufekci thinks people gravitate too much towards the most-cited articles as it is.

@techsoc @YAppelbaum Yes, algorithms can shape and misshape practice. But currently they don’t even reflect it, because of the biz model.less than a minute ago via YoruFukurou Favorite Retweet Reply

11.

Robert Hernandez wrote a great post about the recent Jose Antonio Vargas kerfuffle. Here’s one thing I wrote in response:

@webjournalist What strikes me most is that @joseiswriting lied to his employers in part to avoid making them accessories to his “crime.”less than a minute ago via YoruFukurou Favorite Retweet Reply

As with all of these tweet embeds, if you want to get the full flow of our Vargas discussion, you’ve got to go there to know there.

12.

This, on the other hand, needs no additional context:

“It’s like you can see those calories converting themselves into rebounds!” PHOTO: Young Charles Barkley Eating A Pizza http://j.mp/mxioRlless than a minute ago via Reeder Favorite Retweet Reply

June 27, 2011 / Uncategorized

3 comments

For the record I am pretty embarrassed at how weird the Blackbird Pie Tweet embeds look here on Snarkmarket. #whomadethat

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Tim Carmody says…

The “favorite,” “retweet,” “reply” buttons don’t look right. Somebody should find the coder and beat the shit out of him.

But also for the record: this is awesome, all of it.

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