Archive for September, 2007
‘Rendering in Real-Time’
This might be the best metaphor I have heard about a person’s brain, ever. Jon Stewart on Stephen Colbert:
“[The whole show] depends on Stephen’s ability to process information as this other person,” says Stewart. “I’ve seen talk-show hosts who can’t do that for real. … And then you watch Colbert and it’s like the first time you use broadband: ‘How the fuck did that happen?’ He’s rendering in real time.”
From the Vanity Fair piece, which is good.
Density
I’ve mentioned Radio Lab before, but Tim just posted about an episode I hadn’t heard and I downloaded it and IT BLEW MY MIND.
You’ve got to give it a listen if you haven’t already. Immediately, you’ll hear a huge difference from the boring march of words that characterizes every other radio show, ever. On Radio Lab, the words and sonic interjections are fragmented, tiled, cross-cut, layered. There’s just so much more to absorb; it lights your brain up. Radio Lab is DENSE.
This is how all explanatory media should feel. We’re ready for it.
P.S. I don’t want to focus entirely on the meta-method stuff, though, ’cause the ideas and the reporting are also sublime. This is a must-listen.
Shaun Tan
Blog of a Bookslut has been posting links to the work of Shaun Tan. Pure gorgeous. Check out the wordless panels (courtesy of New York Magazine) from Tan’s The Arrival.
American Stakeholders, Part II
Remember this spring, when I was gushing about the American Stakeholder Act ($6,000 given to every child at birth for capital investments)? Apparently, no less bright a light than Hillary Clinton is all over the idea. Awesome. I wonder if the New America Foundation is working some kind of Manchurian Candidate-fu?
High and Low
Awesome riff on music over at n+1:
If you could write perfectly, you would write the way Charles Mingus composed music: uncompromising intelligence and seriousness married to shit-kicking raunch.
Frustratingly sans permalink — it’s just the site front page — so get it while it lasts.
P.S. n+1 seemingly in parody of itself: “Against Email.”
Genre
LoadingReadyRun.com gives Halo 3 the EPIC treatment. Funny how the visual language is so recognizable — and actually quite a bit slicker in this execution! I’m impressed. (Though the voice has got nothing on Matt, and the music’s no Minus Kelvin.)
Reading Roundup
Today at work, I convened a tiny confab of colleagues for an inaugural, bimonthly, lunchtime essay-reading series. We kicked it off with the National Magazine Award-winning essay Russell and Mary, by Michael Donohue, a work he apparently spent five years putting together.
Kevin Drum linked this Vanity Fair piece tracing the last 50 years of the life of the two women depicted in this sad photograph, taken at the integration of a school in Little Rock, Arkansas.
I’ve been enjoying the blog Nonfiction Readers Anonymous for its choice snippets of random tomes.
All Aunt Hagar’s Children is finally out in paperback.
Democratization of Manipulation, Part 4
Somehow this relates to the theme, but I’m not sure quite what to make of it yet. (Previously.) (Via.)
Maximum Mumbai
Enjoyed this NYT slideshow about Mumbai. Want to visit. Bad.