As you already know by now from Robin and Tim’s posts, DC comics is relaunching the continuity of its primary universe. While I’ll admit that my first reaction as a current collector of a handful of DC titles (Batman, Detective, Red Robin, Batgirl, Batwoman if it ever comes out, and anything with The Question—I’m new here, I have to establish my bona fides), is to geek out over all the details.

Barbara Gordon will be Batgirl again (and even better , written by Gail Simone)! Tim Drake loses his own title, but gets a new costume! Superman won’t be wearing red underwear over his tights anymore! Wonder Woman is keeping the pants! Other details, I’m sure! 

And before I try to make a bigger argument, let’s all focus on the fact that the details are all that really matter here. This isn’t the first time that DC has rebooted its continuity. 1985’s Crisis on Infinite Earths was arguably DC’s first attempt to bring all of its titles together into a common, consistent universe. Zero Hour followed in 1994, and Infinite Crisis in 2005.

There have been other big crossover storylines like Armageddon: 2001, Identity Crisis, Final Crisis, and Blackest Night, but while these storylines have had greater or smaller impacts of the status quo, they didn’t, for the most part, erase most or all of established storyline history.

In this light what’s really notable is that A.) we’re ahead of schedule (the next reboot shouldn’t be until 2014 or 2015), and B.) all title numbers are being reset to #1.

Which is, of course, a marketing ploy. Industry wisdom is that #1s sell better. If DC’s marketing department had their wish, every issue would be #1, every month. A world of one-shots! Every issue a collector’s item!

But all of this still misses what’s really interesting about the relaunch, and every Elseworlds title, every Crisis, every Age of Apocalypse, House of M, Ultimatum, and on, and on, and on.

Continuity is a storytelling technology. It’s a way of organizing information, conveying character over extended periods of time, giving depth to plot, and communicating history in a way that doesn’t demand retelling with each iteration.

It’s an enormously useful tool, with rewards for both writer and reader, but it also has limitations. It highlights any asymmetry in knowledge between writer and reader. If the story you’re reading demands familiarity with a previous story you missed, you can feel lost. If the writer contradicts a previous story, you can feel that something is wrong. In a medium, like superhero comics, where the suspension of disbelief is critical, a discontinuity can be fatal.

Or not. As the DC Universe in particular illustrates, continuity is nothing if not elastic. Between 1938 and 1985, it wasn’t even seen as particularly necessary. Each corner of the DC Universe largely concerned itself with its own particular space, and, in practice if not editorial principle, that’s largely true today as well. In fact, I’d argue that every new story recreates its own continuity. That is, this big thing that we’re spending all our time worrying about, hyping, ruing the lost of, it doesn’t really exist. Every writer constantly has to decide what to use, what to ignore, and what to re-invent. There’s even a word for changing continuity on the fly— retcon, for “retroactive continuity,” which is now both a noun and a verb.

Robin makes an excellent point that continuity, this depth of character and wealth of story, is the one major attraction that the big comic companies still hold for creators — and that if you have a lottery-ticket idea, the character and story that will be the next Batman, or Harry Potter, or Twilight, then you’d be a fool to sell it to Marvel or DC like Bob Kane, Jerry Siegel, and Joe Shuster did back in the 1930s. It would probably be more accurate to view Marvel and DC as they currently exist not as comic book companies, but intellectual property holding corporations that happen to print a handful of comic books, as just one way in which they manage and profit from their IP. I guarantee you that at the top levels, it’s how they view themselves. They have to.

But at the same time, it’s not really an either-or position. Jim Lee, one of the founding forces behind Image Comics — who may not have created creator-owned comics, but gave the proposition market power like few entities before — is also one of the driving forces behind the DC relaunch, which will introduce a number of his former Image franchises such as Grifter and Stormwatch into DC continuity.

This, of course, isn’t the first time that DC has integrated other universes into its own. Captain Marvel was originally a property competing with (and more popular) than Superman, until DC sued, shut down publication, and eventually acquired the character. Alan Moore’s groundbreaking Watchmen comic originally grew out of DC’s acquisition of Charleton Comics’ characters, but since Moore’s storyline made many of the characters, um, unusable, DC made him create new ones. (Captain Atom became Dr. Manhattan, The Question became Rorschach, etc.)

By rebooting its continuity, DC is, in effect, updating its operating system. We’ll know in a few months whether it’s Linux or Vista.

But rather than thinking of continuity as some sort of sacred history of tradition, let’s remember that it’s a technology. And like any technology, it might be most interesting once we start thinking about how it can be hacked.

The canonical example of a continuity hack may be Watchmen — but I’d also throw in Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, and Steven T. Seagle’s It’s a Bird. All of these stories play with continuity, not in order to retcon, reboot, or reinforce it, but to use that root access for their own idiosyncratic purposes. And it’s these interventions, not the big events, that ultimately bring the stories back to their foundations and move the whole industry forward.

I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M DOING THIS

I’m going to jump in the middle of Robin and Gavin’s exchange on the DC Comics reboot, even though I explicitly told both of them that I didn’t want to read about it and had nothing to say about any of it, because some things Robin just wrote sparked some ideas that I want to follow here.

Today, you don’t go work at Marvel and DC because of what they are; you go because of what they have. It’s almost like a natural resource. Superman and Batman are potent substances. They have this incredible innate energy, this incredible mythic density, built up over decades. They really are like petroleum—a bright eon of individual organic contributions all compressed into this powerful stuff that we can now burn for light, for entertainment, for money… How do you weigh the opportunity to work on an old titan like Superman against the opportunity to create something wholly new, and to potentially profit from that creation? Is it only sentimental or emotional value that draws an artist to the former—or is there more?… Maybe what we’re talking about here is the difference between being an entrepreneur and being a custodian. We tend to think of artists as entrepreneurs, right?—inventors, trailblazers, risk-takers. To make meaningful art is often simply to try something new.

Now before I start, I want to stipulate a few things. First, I want to take seriously Robin’s two primary arguments in his post:

1. “I want to talk not about Superman’s universe, but our own—because I think this strategy says something interesting about creative economics today.” Let’s call this the explicit argument.
2. Comic books themselves, as content, not just the strategies of their publishers and artists, have something to say about this. Let’s call this the implicit argument.

And I want to add a third point, that I’ll call the unconscious argument. It’s something I don’t think Robin necessarily intended, but which is entailed in the way he formulates the problem:

Everywhere in Robin’s post where he writes “artists,” you can substitute “journalists“—and probably many other nodes in creative economies, broadly construed.

What a thing, this link that’s being passed around, posted on Boing Boing and tweeted all over the place! The letters to the children of Troy: congratulatory messages solicited from writers, politicians, and other famous folk to commemorate the opening of the first stand-alone library in Troy, Michigan, way back in 1971.

Isaac Asimov’s index-card letter has gotten a lot of play:

E. B. White’s speaks more seriously to me, and mostly for his last line:

But it’s the letter from Clifton Wharton, then-president of MSU, that strikes me most deeply. You wouldn’t be able to guess just by reading it, I don’t think—it’s solid, but not soaring:

On the surface, this whole collection is such a cute little thing, so easy to write off: just a bunch of folksy letters sent to a new library in a suburban town. (By the way: who would even send such letters today? Or ask for them?) Lovely. Let’s move on to the next link.

But here’s the thing. I grew up in Troy, Michigan; this library, the subject of all this celebration, was my library. I spent a significant fraction of the mid-80s and early 90s in there, migrating from the Choose Your Own Adventure books on the spinning wire racks to the science fiction and fantasy novels on the long low shelves. I can still draw you a map of the place, and roughly plot Dewey decimal ranges. I can still remember the mechanical swish of the automatic door, the cold AC in the foyer, the lignin smell. I can remember whole sensory macros: my dad pulling the car up to the curb; me hopping out, hustling to the entrance; the whoosh-thunk of books going down the after-hours chute; the turn, the sprint.

And here’s the other thing. I went to school at Michigan State and grew into myself on the campus that Clifton Wharton helped build. I walked past the building marked with his name hundreds of times—maybe more. Maybe a thousand. And I mean, my god: I met Tim Carmody on that campus!

So this little correspondence cracked like lightning in my head. I mean, it’s no big deal; it’s a small thing, it’s a letter, they were both in Michigan, it makes perfect sense. And yet, and yet. Clifton Wharton, president of Michigan State University, and Marguerite Hart, librarian of Troy: a tangible thread connected them. And as soon as you realize that, you can’t help but imagine the other threads, the other connections, that all together make a net, woven before you were born, before you were even dreamed of—a net to catch you, support you, lift you up. Libraries and universities, books and free spaces—all for us, all of us, the children of Troy everywhere.

What fortune. Born at the right time.

So anyway, Wharton’s letter is my favorite. But close on its heels is the long one from then-Hawaii governor John Burns. It’s a little dorky and preachy in parts, but near the end, he writes:

If you are a child reading this, you should go home and make a Hawaiian flower lei—you get a needle and thread and sew the flowers together into a ring—and put it around the neck of the City of Troy librarian. It will tell her that you are grateful for the gift of books and of wisdom and of aloha found in the libraries of the world, and especially—for you—in Troy. And if she laughs and cries at the same time, pay no attention. That’s the way librarians always act when they’re very happy and grateful […]

And it’s not the librarian laughing and crying at the same time here; it’s me. Every time I’ve read these letters, it’s me.

Eli Pariser’s op-ed in the New York Times, When the Internet Thinks It Knows You:

Democracy depends on the citizen’s ability to engage with multiple viewpoints; the Internet limits such engagement when it offers up only information that reflects your already established point of view. While it’s sometimes convenient to see only what you want to see, it’s critical at other times that you see things that you don’t.

The Times had run an earlier story on Pariser’s The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You. It takes the easiest possible reading of this idea, applying it to media choices and political disagreement:

If you want to test your own views on personalization, you could try a party trick Mr. Pariser demonstrated earlier this year during a talk at the TED conference: ask some friends to simultaneously search Google for a controversial term like gun control or abortion. Then compare results…

With television, people can limit their exposure to dissenting opinions simply by flipping the channel, to, say, Fox from MSNBC. And, of course, viewers are aware they’re actively choosing shows. The concern with personalization algorithms is that many consumers don’t understand, or may not even be aware of, the filtering methodology.

Reading Pariser’s op-ed, though, I got the sense that he’s not nearly as concerned about narrowing of opinions on the web as he is about the narrowing of interests.

“[I]f algorithms are taking over the editing function and determining what we see,” he writes, “we need to make sure they weigh variables beyond a narrow ‘relevance.’ They need to show us Afghanistan and Libya as well as Apple and Kanye.”

If you spend much time on the Internet, you know that there’s clearly no shortage of disagreement. But it’s more likely that you spend most of your time and energy disagreeing with people who care deeply about the same things about which you already care deeply.

You’ll argue about whether LeBron James or Derrick Rose should have won the MVP, whether or not Mitt Romney has a shot in the Iowa caucuses, or why Apple decided to pre-release information about the WWDC keynote.

We dive deeply into a range of pre-defined topics, tied to our professions, hobbies, needs, and histories, and sharpen our swords with opponents who do the same.

And on the margins, maybe that’s okay. Mass culture throws a whole lot of stuff at its audience that I, like you, have no intrinsic interest in. The time, energy, and cognitive surplus we once devoted to those things we used to consume only because “they were on” are all much better put to use tackling subjects we actually care about.

But it does mean that we’re often unaware of what’s happening in the next room, where there is frequently plenty of useful stuff that we could port into our own special areas of interest. We need to make sure we’re taking advantage of the web’s built-in ability to move laterally.

More to the point: those of us who produce and share content that other people read — and at this point, that’s almost all of us — need to trust that our readers are lateral movers too, and encourage them to do so.

I’m reminded of this blog post from last year, predicting the death of the niche blog and the rise of the lens blog. The lens blog can tackle any subject, but always from the point of view of a subset of enthusiasms or perspectives that find clever ways to find the same in the different, and vice versa.

Hyper-specialization, like information overload, is an old, old problem. But exactly for that reason, we shouldn’t be surprised to see it pop up as a potential problem with our new tools and new media, too.

In short, if you’re really worried about search engines or social media overfiltering what you see, worry less about your reading being one-sided and more about it being one-dimensional.

(For more smart takes on Pariser’s argument, see also Mat Ingram at GigaOm, Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing)

An observation from the terrific composer Nico Muhly:

[…] Although my parents had classical music on LP’s in the house, the childhood music I remember the most vividly is fragments from either live performances or, strangely, video games at my friends’ houses¹.

For me, living in the country, playing a video game was sort of like music minus one: The actions of my hands informed, in a strange way, the things I heard. Collect a coin, and a delighted glockenspiel sounds. Move from navigating a level above ground to one below ground, and the eager French chromaticism of the score changes to a spare, beat-driven minimal texture. Hit a star, and suddenly the score does a metric modulation. All of these things come to bear in a later musical education; I’m positive I understand how augmented chords change an emotional texture because of Nintendo music.

Don’t miss the clip embedded at the bottom of the post, either: it’s only three minutes long, and exhilarating at precisely 1:50. Oh the glory of the horn.

1. I really think “memories of video games at your friend’s house” are, like, a thing. Very special; very distinct. Maybe such memories are no longer produced; maybe every kid has a video game system nowadays. (But probably not?) All I know is I can remember Ninja Gaiden on Chris Hayes’ NES (he lived down the street) with crystal clarity. Note that I never actually played the game; it was too difficult, and I couldn’t make it past the first screen. So I would just watch Chris play, utterly rapt.

Editors’ Note: Last week, Ross Andersen told me he had an essay on filmmaker Terrence Malick that was “perfect for Snarkmarket.” At first, I thought he wanted me to link to it, but I quickly realized he meant it would be perfect to guest-post here, like our earlier Netflix sci-fi catalog post by the Snarkmatrix’s Matt Penniman. I happily agreed. And now, I’ve got TWO Malick movies I’m motivated to see as soon as I can.

POSSIBLE WORLDS

Ross Andersen

This is a tough week for the Terrence Malick fan. On Friday, The Tree of Life is due to hit theaters stateside, having premiered and won the Palme d’Or at Cannes earlier this month. Already the web is crackling with reactions to the film, flustering those of us too prole to have hopped a Gulfstream to the international debut. After watching the trailer to the point of emotional exhaustion, it occurred to me that a look back at Malick’s oeuvre might be in order, if nothing else as a more productive pre-release time killer. I was especially keen to revisit The Thin Red Line, the finest war film in a generation and the one that made Malick’s legend with those of us too young to have seen Badlands on the big screen.

When we say that a work of art is ahead of its time, often we intend only to convey its excellence, but there is another meaning. In the last weeks of 1998, The Thin Red Line lit up the silver screens of an America that had settled into a lasting peace. These were heady days; the abrupt end of the Cold War had given rise to ideas like ‘the end of history’, the notion that war itself had been vanquished, and that the peaceful spread of democracy was imminent. And while there may have been no bending of swords into ploughshares, the Internet, a brainchild of the Pentagon, had begun to turn a mighty harvest. It was as though the fog of war had suddenly lifted, burnt away forever by the hot shining stars on the American flag.

Thus, moviegoers can be forgiven for skipping out on Malick’s opus, which arrived alongside reviews keen to warn of its three-hour running time. In the San Francisco Examiner, Edvins Beitiks called the film “a long exercise in pseudo-philosophy… visually stunning but empty at its core.” Charles Taylor, writing for Salon, quipped that it was a “mixture of distanced estheticism and woozy imponderables” made by “a tin-pot Kurtz”, the latter a reference to the director’s various eccentricities. The film grossed a mere thirty-six million dollars at the box office; less than a sixth of the total hauled in by Armageddon, an entertainment more in keeping with the national mood. Of course history didn’t let us alone for long. No thief in the night, it roared right back into the American consciousness with a singularly traumatic spectacle: the smoky, shrieking collapse of the World Trade Center. All at once the fog of war returned, thick like the ash hovering just above the streets of lower Manhattan. The decade that followed is not easily summarized, nor has it altogether concluded, but one thing is certain: the war film is newly resonant in its wake.

Whatever its cultural import, as an exercise in pure cinema, The Thin Red Line is a visionary work. Like its source material, a novel by James Jones, the film’s narrative is a sprawling anthill of small stories dug into and around a battle on the island of Guadalcanal. Over the years the Second World War has proved a fertile subject for America’s filmmakers, many of them dull propagandists. It’s a credit to Malick that his film owes none of its considerable gravitas to “greatest generation” nostalgia, or “good war” moralizing. Instead, despite rich period detail, its historical particulars fade into the periphery, so that the war here is an abstraction, a canvas. In the early going Malick wrings a sublime sequence from the troops’ slow march into the island’s interior. The camera creeps through the slithering, violent jungle, awash in a quiet strangeness like you find in the very best science fiction. It’s a miracle that these scenes can feel so fresh to an audience steeped in the mythology of Vietnam; this is not the first time we’ve followed The American Soldier into an alien rainforest. Still, the film’s lush palette is of a marked contrast with the sepia tones of Iraq or Afghanistan, a reminder that no matter how timeless the trappings, we are firmly in the realm of history.

The second act tracks the slow, grinding assault of a hill in the center of Guadalcanal. A growling Nick Nolte dominates here as a careerist colonel, a lifer bent on bullying his men to their deaths if it means an extra star may adorn his shoulder. One unforgettable scene has Nolte stomping through a trench to reprimand an insubordinate, pausing only to ask a shirtless private the whereabouts of his “blouse”. As a ruddy ideal of martial machismo, Nolte makes Robert Duvall’s napalm huffing surfer in Apocalypse Now look effete by comparison.

When the attack begins, Malick sends the camera weaving low through the tall green grass, past orange explosions and streaming columns of helmeted GIs. Occasionally the combat scenes dissolve into flashbacks; moments from childhood, afternoons with a lover, each lit as though stilled in the amber of memory. These transitions should be more jarring, but instead through some movie magic we pass effortlessly from the adrenal warfare of the battlefield into the internal life of its combatants. As the campaign wears on, it exacts a gruesome toll; the brilliant green slope becomes, at once, a graveyard and an asylum. The second act closes with a delirious charge into enemy camp. The troops, rendered ecstatic by survival, amass like fire ants into a sprinting riot of cruelty. The saturnalia that ensues invites our horror, but also our empathy. We share in the troops’ release, and yet feel complicit in their excesses, much as we did while clicking through the lurid slideshows of Abu Ghraib.

Still, The Thin Red Line isn’t perfect. At times the script pays tribute to some unfortunate tropes, like when one soldier wonders aloud why the indigenous children never seem to fight. Or when Sean Penn (perhaps improvising) refuses a medal recommendation by muttering that “the whole thing’s about property.” These are the easy slogans of a lesser film, but thankfully they’re rare. The third act meanders a bit, but pleasurably, as though we’ve joined the troops for a boozy stretch of R&R. Along the way, Malick fills the margins with an extraordinary range of images: the swiveling eyes of an owl taking in the bloodshed; sea-soaked hermit crabs in the hands of a small boy; sunlight pouring slow like smoke through the spring canopy. Critics have dismissed these digressions as virtuosic preening, but in doing so they miss the larger point; that the wretchedness of war, itself of a piece with nature’s own fury, plays out in an illuminated context.

And indeed for all the attention he pays to trees and rivers, Malick’s ultimate subjects are flesh and blood. Our most ancient questions fill the mouths and minds of these soldiers, and yet we never stop seeing them in the totality of their condition. Yes, some are destroyed by sadism, and some shatter into hysterics when death hovers close, but others pour cool water on the heads of the wounded, and survive to float joyously in the shallow green surf. In this way the war is like a prism used by Malick to splinter the human character into its many brilliant and tragic forms.

In the film’s very first scene, an alligator sinks ominously into a murky stream while sunlight-hunting vines strangle a nearby tree trunk. A voice asks, “What’s this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself?” When the first humans appear, they are seraphic by comparison: children playing simple games with small stones, then swimming amidst a reef, silhouetted against the sea surface, like figures on stained glass. Critics like Charles Taylor have accused Malick of pursuing a false dualism in his work, of sending in a crude human archetype, boorish and unseemly, to “despoil the uncorrupted beauty of nature.” But Malick’s nature is not Milton’s; here it is the garden that is fallen. Oddly, in this, our most profound modern fable of war, humanity is a transfiguring force: the first of nature’s forms to buck its amino acid programming, to strain tragically at something beyond Hobbesian survival. In the end, The Thin Red Line is a work of humanism, not nature worship; a reminder that even if history and war should extinguish the first flickers of truth and beauty, they will linger on in human memory, as hints of a possible transcendence.

— Ross Andersen

PS: The Thin Red Line is on Netflix Watch Instantly. — TC

PPS: Anything short of Criterion Blu-ray is blasphemous. — RA

On a recent long jaunt around the Aegean, I realized something important about the Kindle: it’s the ultimate travel gadget.

I honestly didn’t expect this. I just brought mine so I’d have something to read! But here’s the deal:

• The Kindle has a web browser. It’s simple and slow, but solid enough to check Gmail and mobile.twitter.com. In fact, it works beautifully with the mobile versions of most sites.
• It’s almost miraculously connected. The browser wouldn’t mean much if Whispernet—Amazon’s set of carriage agreements with cell networks around the world—didn’t work everywhere. It does, and it’s also free. I was using Edge and 3G Whispernet reliably in remote-ish provinces and on sleepy islands. In fact, my Kindle generally got a stronger signal than my iPhone.
• It’s light and durable. There’s a big difference between older Kindles (which I’m toting) and newer ones in this regard; I’m considering snagging one of the latest simply because they’re so much smaller, slimmer and lighter. But any Kindle is more portable than any iPad, and I also felt a lot more comfortable tossing the Kindle into a bag or dragging it across the beach. (I had my iPad on this trip, too, but barely used it.)
• The Kindle works in direct sunlight. Especially when you’re traveling, this is a big deal. Standing on a busy corner or sitting on the beach, the Kindle is always totally usable. And this provides another contrast to the iPad, which always sends me scurrying to the shadows. (It really is a resolutely indoors device, isn’t it?)
• The battery lasts forever. You know this already. My Kindle was on a once-a-week charging schedule, and that’s with lots of reading and regular internet checks.
• Your Kindle is your itinerary. Using the Kindle as a virtual folder for travel documents was perhaps the biggest aha; it was my traveling companion who figured this out first. We got into the habit of forwarding tickets and reservations straight to our kindle.com addresses, which all Kindle owners have. (Oddly, this is the one part of international service that’s not free, but the price is negligible: $0.99 per megabyte for documents delivered this way.) It feels so good to have all of your information right there, in a format that’s so legible—not just to you, but to others. Once, in Turkey, I simply passed my Kindle to a ticket agent to help her understand where we were trying to go.
• Travel guides on the Kindle work great. I was a little skeptical about this—I think of the Kindle as being bad at random-access material, and a travel guide is definitely one of those books you want to be able to flip through freely. But as it turns out, we got a ton of use out of a Lonely Planet Kindle edition—purchased mid-trip, natch—and by the end of the trip, I felt like a dope for having bothered with a physical guide (which weighed in at about five Kindles).

Honestly, even if you are not ever going to read an e-book, but want a device to help you stay connected and organized while traveling—especially if you’re going a bit off the beaten track—the investment in a Kindle (barely more than a hundred bucks at this point) can’t be beat.

From Robert Krulwich’s 2011 commencement speech at UC-Berkeley’s Journalism School:

Some people when they look for a job in journalism ask themselves, What do I like to do and Who can take me there? Who can get me to a war zone? To a ballpark? To Wall Street? To politicians, to movie stars? Who’s got the vehicle? And you send them your resume and you say, “I want a seat in your car.” … And you wait.

But there are some people, who don’t wait.

I don’t know exactly what going on inside them; but they have this… hunger. It’s almost like an ache.

Something inside you says I can’t wait to be asked I just have to jump in and do it.

So for this age, for your time, I want you to just think about this: Think about NOT waiting your turn.

Instead, think about getting together with friends that you admire, or envy. Think about entrepeneuring. Think about NOT waiting for a company to call you up. Think about not giving your heart to a bunch of adults you don’t know. Think about horizontal loyalty. Think about turning to people you already know, who are your friends, or friends of their friends and making something that makes sense to you together, that is as beautiful or as true as you can make it.

And when it comes to security, to protection, your friends may take better care of you than CBS took care of Charles Kuralt in the end. In every career, your job is to make and tell stories, of course. You will build a body of work, but you will also build a body of affection, with the people you’ve helped who’ve helped you back.

And maybe that’s your way into Troy.

This speech makes me want to run around the entire internet, giving a million high-fives.

(via @edyong209, who gets high-five #001)

This is another quote that’s too good to be true. Joel Kotkin on the problem with the liveability index:

We need to ask, what makes a city great? If your idea of a great city is restful, orderly, clean, then that’s fine. You can go live in a gated community. These kinds of cities are what is called ‘productive resorts’. Descartes, writing about 17th-century Amsterdam, said that a great city should be ‘an inventory of the possible’. I like that description. [emphasis mine]

I like that description, too! Kotkin liked it so much, he put it in his book. I like it so much, I wanted to find out where it came from.

And it turns out Descartes didn’t say that. And the phrase doesn’t mean what Kotkin thinks it does. But there’s a reason both the philosopher and the new meaning got mixed into it.

Get the genealogical-detective lowdown in a Storify by my Twitter-co-archeologist Wilko von Hardenberg after the jump. (I really like his idea that this would make for a great game/exercise in the classroom.)

Also, if you missed it, see why Martin Luther King and Mark Twain didn’t say what you might think they did either. Similar psychology at work here, too. And it shows that it isn’t just the cut-and-pasters on the interwebs who make these mistakes.

Read more…

Hi gang. I’m spending the week in residence at kottke.org this week. Here’s what I’ve written so far:

• Napoleonic preproduction: On Stanley Kubrick’s never-filmed movie about Napoleon.
• The Beastie Boys, Annotated: A short guide to pop-culture references in the band’s lyrics.
• Fuck you, pay me (Simonides of Keos): The first Greek poet (probably) to write for money and to write poetry that was primarily intended to be read, not sung.

Join me throughout the week for more bunly blockquote goodness.