Posts by Tim

Dan Cohen:

Here in Washington, the compound adjective of the moment is

I’m typing this at the airport in Denver, at an open kiosk and charging station (!) and using free, ad-supported wi-fi supplied by the airport, while waiting for my connection. I’ve got my phone plugged in, too — there’s even a USB outlet to charge iPods or digital cameras.

This, friends, is genius. This is what we should have at every airport, train station, hotel, library, or other public gathering place where people come whilst in transit. Every place where you currently see a fifteen-year-old cluster of pay phones, you’re going to see one of these.

It’ll have internet-equpped voice and video calling too. There will be a touchscreen where you can get directions around town or order food. (Probably not at the library.)

What else will we find in the media carrels of the future?

Not to jinx anything, but I’m giving a job talk on Monday.

Please, please, please, let my plane get out of Philadelphia tomorrow. (They’re predicting snow.)

It’s been almost five years since I realized that I was in love with the Brooklyn-based, Baltimore-bred band Animal Collective. I had fired up Sung Tongs, expecting something vaguely similar to Iron and Wine’s The Creek Drank the Cradle, Devendra Banhart’s Rejoicing in the Hands, or Joanna Newsom’s “Bridges and Balloons,” all of which, like the Collective, had been branded as “freak-folk” by that year’s musical ethnographers. The other signposts indicated were the Smile-era Beach Boys.

Instead, there was this weird sound — “Leaf House” — that didn’t quite work in headphones or at parties or in your car, but rattled around in your brain. The harmonies on “Who Could Win A Rabbit” paid off the Beach Boys campfire rumors, but I still didn’t quite know what to do with it. Finally, “Kids on Holiday” won me over. Its lo-fi strum, its fleeting, wavering, erotic yelps, and solemnly intoned lyrics about a Felliniesque trip to the airport, replete with surreal details (“the smell of pajamas”) and quotable asides (“Where the hell have I got to?”). It was Pet Sounds, but polymorphously perverse.

This is a very roundabout way to say that AC’s new album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, is out — and it’s very different from those weird not-quite-folky sounds on Sung Tongs. But it’s even more awesome. I’m pencilling Animal Collective in as the best indie-alternative band of the decade.

Man, all of my old haunts in Hyde Park are now famous. The Los Angeles Times writes up Barack Obama’s favorite bookstore:

“Just a few days before the election, Barack was in here with his daughters,” Cella recalls in a soft voice. He smiles. “I suppose I should say, ‘the president-elect,’ right? People around here are just so excited.

“There was a crew from ‘Good Morning America’ in here the other day,” he adds. Journalists have been stopping by regularly to get a sense of the place that feeds Obama’s intellectual hunger.

What makes the Co-op appealing to discerning customers such as the Obama family is the atmosphere and eclectic yet also wide-ranging selection of books. Credit for those virtues, many say, belongs to Cella, who has run the place since 1968. The Co-op is like a theme park for the mind: Walking through it, each twist and turn is likely to reveal a new intellectual thrill. You might come across a book you didn’t know existed — but whose theme instantly intrigues you — or a book for which you’ve been searching all your life. The store is an adventure in itself, a series of forking, book-lined paths that wind around through room after room after room, and each subsequent area brims with amazing volumes. There is the philosophy room, the religion room, the history room, the language room — and on and on it goes, an enchanted forest of multicolored spines and preoccupied customers.

The Co-Op does bring the goods. I love David Derbes’s rat-a-tat catalogue of treasures:

“Want the ‘Oxford Classical Text of Tacitus’? ‘Annals’? The standard Freud in German? The Steinsaltz Talmud? A Hittite dictionary? Five volumes of Michael Spivak’s ‘Differential Geometry’? George F. Kennan’s memoirs? Carl Sandburg’s life of Lincoln? Sara Paretsky’s essays? They’re all on the shelves of the Seminary Co-op.”

Rachel Leow bookporned the Co-Op in March. You have to see her pictures for the close attention she pays to the (ahem) unique architecture of the shop. And I want Good Morning America to ask some hard questions about the strength of the Southeast Asia section!

I lived in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood for a year in 2001-2002. My state senator was this guy named Barack Obama.

My favorite show on local TV there was called “Check, Please.” Three people from all over Chicago would recommend their favorite restaurants — everything from casual neighborhood hangs to places with wine lists longer than your couch — and they would each go to all three, then review them together.

Well, Ezra Klein got a hold of an early, unaired episode of “Check, Please” featuring — yes — Barack Obama. He’s plugging the Dixie Kitchen, one of my favorite places for catfish. So this just made me happy today.

Jeffrey Goldberg, “Why I’m Not Blogging More About Gaza“:

The more complicated answer was provided by Marc Ambinder, who analyzed my personal situation correctly: Gaza has overdetermined me into paralysis. His point: I actually feel too close to this problem, a problem that symbolizes all problems. It’s true: I have friends in Gaza about whom I worry a great deal; I’ve seen many people killed in Gaza; I’ve served in the Israeli Army in Gaza; I’ve been kidnapped in Gaza; I’ve reported for years from Gaza; I hope my former army doesn’t kill the wrong people in Gaza; I hope Israeli soldiers all leave Gaza alive; I know they’ll be back in Gaza; I think this operation will work; and I have no actual hope that it will work for very long, because nothing works for very long in the Middle East. Gaza is where dreams of reconciliation go to die. Gaza is where the dream of Palestinian statehood goes to die; Gaza is where the Zionist dream might yet die. Or, more to the point, might be murdered. I’m not a J Street moral-equivalence sort of guy. Yes, Israel makes constant mistakes, which I note rather frequently, but this conflict reminds me once again that Israel is up against an implacable force, namely, an interpretation of Islam that disallows the idea of Jewish national equality.

My paralysis isn’t an analytical paralysis. It’s the paralysis that comes from thinking that maybe there’s no way out. Not out of Gaza, out of the whole thing.

The Edge Annual Question — “WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING? / What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?” — is here. The usual suspects give their often-too-usual answers, and I (as usual) am taking about a week to read and process it all.

However, I’m already charmed by “Never-Ending Childhood,” the entry from UC-Berkeley psychologist Allison Gopnik:

Humans already have a longer period of protected immaturity

I just read Kottke’s self-assessment of his best posts/threads from 2008. One in particular — a loooong comment thread on the intentional mispronunciation of words — was a surprise to me, since I don’t usually read comments on JK’s blog (often ’cause he doesn’t enable ’em).

But! This reminded me that Snarkmarket has probably got thousands of readers who hardly ever look at the comment threads after they digest the nice juicy post or link elsewhere. So I thought, as Snarkmarket’s long-time commenter-in-chief, I would put together Snarkmarket’s Best Threads of 2008.

Read more…

I just became a Boxee alpha tester, and while it isn’t flawless, it’s the best setup I’ve seen yet for watching TV shows and movies on the computer, particularly a computer hooked up to a television screen. Haven’t used its social recommendation engine yet (if you’re using it too, let me know), but the Hulu and Netflix integration set it apart from XBMC, Plex, Front Row, et al.

I watch a lot of computer-based TV, particularly since I don’t have cable. My setup — first-gen MacBook Pro with busted screen, Western Digital 500GB external, Wireless-G router, Samsung 26″ HDTV, Apple remote, and a Logitech keyboard (DiNovo wireless for Mac). I’ve got a DVI-HDMI cable and a simple stereo output running between the notebook and the HDTV. Best experiences – 30 Rock on Netflix and Hulu, The Daily Show at ComedyCentral.com, all five seasons of The Wire backed up on my external drive, and Yo Gabba Gabba through iTunes.

I’ve been mulling over a bunch of different ideas about this computer-media server-television hybrid, but first I guess I’ll just ask the ‘matrix — how do you guys watch TV with/without your computer? What do you like or not like about it? What are you still trying to figure out?