Posts by Tim

James Fallows on Terry Gross:

[Gross] avoids the common pitfall of highbrow public broadcasting-style interviewers: giving in to the temptation to show off how much she knows and how smart she is in the set-up to the questions.

What she does instead, and what she shows brilliantly in this interview [with William Ayers], is: she listens, and she thinks. In my experience, 99% of the difference between a good interviewer (or a good panel moderator) and a bad one lies in what that person is doing while the interviewee talks. If the interviewer is mainly using that time to move down to the next item on the question list, the result will be terrible. But if the interviewer is listening, then he or she is in position to pick up leads (“Now, that’s an intriguing idea, tell us more about…”), to look for interesting tensions (“You used to say X, but now it sounds like…”), to sum up and give shape to what the subject has said (“It sounds as if you’re suggesting…”). And, having paid the interviewee the respect of actually listening to the comments, the interviewer is also positioned to ask truly tough questions without having to bluster or insult.

If you have this standard in mind — is the interviewer really listening? and thinking? — you will be shocked to see how rarely broadcast and on-stage figures do very much of either. But listen to this session by Gross to see how the thing should be done.

Gross’s Fresh Air interview with Ayers is here.

My friend Bethany Klein, communications professor at the University of Leeds, has a terrific interview in the new issue of Miller-McCune about her research on the relationship between pop music and advertising:

[Y]ou get people flippantly saying, “Sure, what’s the big deal? This is what people do now.” But when you further investigate, you find that everybody has some kind of internal checklist: “What kind of product is it? What’s my relationship to the product? What type of commercial is it going to be? Who’s directing the commercial?” If it truly was just submission to hyper-commercialism and an embrace of advertising, would it really matter? The other interesting tension I noticed in the interviews was that all these musicians were, of course, huge music fans. Many of them saw their own work as not very precious, that it couldn’t possibly be a big deal if they licensed a song, but then if you talked to them about instances in which their favorite musicians had licensed to advertising, they couldn’t help but feel that sadness of a fan about it. There was a difficulty in reconciling these two positions, thinking nobody could possibly care that much about your own work but knowing how much you care about other people’s. In my book, I devote a chapter to The Shins. They licensed “New Slang” to McDonald’s, relatively briefly, maybe just during the Olympics a few years ago. And that case was an amazing example of “Oh, people do still care.” You could see in all the interviews that James Mercer, their singer, did about this — and it got brought up in every interview — he was really struggling with the idea: “What’s the big deal? This is just a commercial — it happens all the time.” And, on the other hand, he could recognize how painful it would be if, say, The Smiths got used in a commercial and how terrible that would make him feel as a fan.

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I’ve always wondered whether the kind of video games you like (or whether you like video games at all) tells you about what kind of person you are. Early arcade games were built around reflexes, patterns, and a relatively limited set of moves, attracting the kind of guys featured in King of Kong. My older brother is pretty good at sports, but unbelievably good at any kind of sports game, even ones he hasn’t played before — even sports he hasn’t played before. Some people’s brains just seem to be wired for certain kinds of games. Me, I’m good at a lot of video games, but I really like Minesweeper, Final Fantasy II, and Wii Tennis.

Clive Thompson writes a little bit about the relationship between the brain and video games in his review of Mirror’s Edge, a new first-person video game that (Thompson says) uniquely leverages human neurology — specifically our sense of proprioception, “your body’s sense of its own physicality”:

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Roger Ebert — yes, that Roger Ebert — is writing one of the best blogs around. Not just about movies either. I think blog-writing has made Ebert’s movie reviews better — more fun, more adventurous. His review of Charlie Kaufmann’s Synecdoche, NY is a delight, and his own summary is the best: “Fair warning: I begin with a parable, continue with vast generalizations, finally get around to an argument with Entertainment Weekly, and move on to Greek gods, ‘I Love Lucy’ and a house on fire.”

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An industrial robot is scripting the bible, stroke by stroke:

The installation ‘bios [bible]’ consists of an industrial robot, which writes down the bible on rolls of paper. The machine draws the calligraphic lines with high precision. Like a monk in the scriptorium it creates step by step the text.

Starting with the old testament and the books of Moses