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Bottle Rocket is out on Criterion Blu-Ray. Dave Kehr writes a lovestruck review:

Stylistically,

My skepticism about the signal-to-noise ratio of Atlantic bloggers has a big asterisk next to it pointing to James Fallows. I like Fallows not least because of his tone — he prefers chiming the triangle to banging the gong, although he can blow the horn when he wants to.

His coverage of the Eric Shinseki and Steven Chu cabinet picks show off Fallows at his blogly best. And today he has a follow-up about the Chu pick, with feedback from a writer (Steve Corneliussen) with contacts in the physics community. (Where else in journalism besides a blog can you cut-and-paste an email without chopping it up, paraphrasing it, or otherwise interjecting yourself all over perfectly well-reported and well-written analysis?)

Read more…

… is incandescent tonight. Do give a look.

Really, really love the Washington Post’s extended Best Books of the year — better I think than the NYT’s list or their own top tens.

Only serious omission — no poetry. I’d feel worse about this if the other best books list didn’t practically ignore poetry already.

Also, it’s set up as a “holiday guide,” which I think makes it easier somehow to get you interested.

Question: Is anybody else on board with the notion that the Atlantic‘s blogs have outpaced the mag itself for interestingness? Last month’s issue had a ton of interesting stuff, so I picked it up, and enjoyed it, but kept finding myself going to the respective authors’ spots online to read what they and their commenters wrote about the article. Is it just me?

I started to post this on Newsless, but I think it might be more Snark-appropriate.

I’m trying to articulate some of the values and expectations I bring to my media consumption. I wonder whether my tendencies are typical, or how I might benefit from cultivating different values and expectations.

When I visit most local news sites, I have this sense that the editors of the site are trying to foster a sort of “ambient awareness.” That is, there’s not really an organizing purpose behind the information they provide. I suspect they don’t typically expect me to do anything with this information, but they just thought I should be aware of it, or that I might find it interesting.

Although I care about Minneapolis, I don’t really have a strong desire to be ambiently aware about it. Having very shallow information on a vast range of Minneapolis-related topics actually makes me a little crazy. I’m not sure if this makes me a bad citizen or an idiosyncratic news consumer or what. But it’s a filter I find myself employing when I read a local news site.

There are many domains in which I value ambient awareness. I think that’s what I get out of my New Yorker subscription, for example — not particularly deep knowledge on any given subject, but a sort of conversational familiarity with a well-curated variety of current affairs. I like to think of myself as ambiently aware of what’s happening in things like video games and Web development and gay culture and Minneapolis arts.

But in the domain of local news, I seem to value information that makes me “functionally aware” — that might actually affect my behavior or circumstances. So I’d pass over a headline like “City likely to OK $5.3M for Target Center green roof”, but “Paperless boarding passes coming to MSP” interests me.

Besides local news, I seek functional awareness in a few more specific contexts, such as Web design and health and nutrition. I read publications on those topics that keep me informed of products or practices or developments that might affect me.

And then there are a select few topics on which I’m looking for what I might call “expert awareness.” Online journalism, for example. And at this level, communities, not publications, are my highest priority.

I think my tendencies might be unique in several regards, but I wonder how many folks are like me. Is there a generational thrust to this sort of thing? And if everyone were like me, how would we draw attention to boring-but-important stories?

I love the word “sportswriter.” No need for a hyphen (like “letter-writer”), or dressing up the word “write” by writing as “graph” instead (“biographer,” “pornographer”) or the suffix “-er” with “-ist” or “-ian.” “Sportswriter” keeps close company with “screenwriter,” “typewriter,” and “underwriter,” and a wall separates it from “playwright” and “author.”

But at the same time, nobody writes with more authority than a sportswriter — if you don’t act like you’re pope of the game, nobody takes you seriously — in part because every serious fan has their own equally infallible proclamations to make about the game, the value of players, coaches’ decisions.

And the syntax makes it seem as though “sports” is what’s written, not the thing written about; a parallel universe brought into being by the talk about the game, the recording of statistics, and the narratives of players, seasons, teams, the sport itself.

Sportswriters were the first writers I was aware of who actually got paid for writing down what they thought. In particular, it was Mitch Albom — who before becoming a schmalzy best-selling novelist was a funny, knowledgable columnist whose super-cool photo in the Free Press fascinated me as a kid.

I am a paperwriter, a bookwriter, a blogwriter, a poemwriter. But secretly, I wish I could do all of these things the way a good sportswriter does them; following my object of affection around the country, hashing out opinions and arguments through daily viva voce argument — in print, on the web, on the radio, on TV.

What if our attachment to all of culture was like our attachment to sports — democratic, celebrating knowledge, unwavering in its fidelity? There are plenty of things that are deeply unhealthy about our sports-obsessed culture (cf. Burress, Plaxico, et. al.) — but I still feel like the ideal of sportswriting is as salutary as it is unshakable.

Greg Maddux is retiring, after 355 wins, four Cy Young awards for pitching, and 18 (!) Gold Glove awards for fielding. (Maddux has more wins than any living pitcher; does he have more Gold Gloves than any living player?)

The NYT story also links to this appreciation by sportswriter Joe Posnaski, who breaks down Maddux pitch-by-pitch in a 1997 Braves-Yankees game. I especially like his reading of Maddux’s fluttering “wiffleball” cut fastball; the way Maddux earned and got deferential treatment from umps; how three pitches strikes out Tino Martinez, who “was so baffled during this at-bat it was probably better to just send him back to the dugout where it was safe”; and how he managed to retire Mark Whiten:

When Maddux was going good, the only way anyone seemed likely to get a hit off him was if they could somehow fist his up-and-in fastball over an infielder

Speaking of objects and our attachment to them, I’m excited to see that Helvetica director Gary Hustwit is making a new film about “the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets.” Sounds like a natural extension of that ingenious first film.

The Objectified site also has a blog for designers talking about everyday objects that they love. I really liked Marian Bantjes’s praise of what she first thought was an overdesigned toothbrush:

If everything in our lives were afforded the design attention that my toothbrush has, we would sit in chairs that floated while tickling our troubled backs, have tables that yielded at our aching elbows while remaining firm on top, walk on floors that tingled like active sand, and sleep on pillows that would never allow our ears to flatten against our heads.

My favorite song*, Smog’s “To Be of Use,” summarizes my attitude perfectly:

Most of my fantasies

Are of

To be of use

To be of some hard

Simple

Undeniable use

Like a spindle

Like a candle

Like a horseshow

Like a corkscrew

* See also Nick Drake, “Northern Sky.”

I already have a love/hate relationship with this analogy from Virginia Heffernan:

Does anyone still believe that the forms of movies, television, magazines and newspapers might exist independently of their rapidly changing modes of distribution? The thought has become unsustainable. Take magazine writing. In school or on the job, magazine writers never learn anything so broad as to