This one’s for Robin.
The New York Times: Five Years on the Web. From January 20, 2001. Including a chat with Martin Nisenholtz and Bernard Gwertzmann (assorted NYT.com gurus), a super-fug Flash movie showing the history of the site, and a 1991 article announcing that “the development of a nationwide data network will allow personal computer users to tap sources as large as the Library of Congress or receive their own personalized electronic newspapers.”
I went on a big Malcolm Gladwell kick in the beginning of January — go back and check my posts, you’ll see — ending last week with the reading of Blink, so here’s my take on the book.
I’d read several reviews before Blink came out painting it as some sort of self-help manual … How rapid cognition can work for you! (To be fair, Gladwell sort of promises this himself, in his introduction, which I think was a bad move.) Many were skeptical, like David Brooks:
My first impression of ”Blink” — in blurb-speak — was ”Fascinating! Eye-Opening! Important!” Unfortunately, my brain, like yours, has more than just a thin-slicing side. It also has that thick-slicing side. The thick-slicing side wants more than a series of remarkable anecdotes. It wants a comprehensive theory of the whole. It wants to know how all the different bits of information fit together.
That thick-slicing part of my brain wasn’t as happy with ”Blink,” especially the second time through. Gladwell never tells us how the brain performs these amazing cognitive feats; we just get the scattered byproducts of the mysterious backstage process. (There have been books by people like Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner that go deeper into the brain chemistry of it.)
The thick-slicing side isn’t even sure what this book is about. Is it about first impressions, or intuition, or that amorphous blending of ”what is” with ”what could be” that we call imagination? In some of his stories, it’s regular people who are making snap judgments; in others, it’s experts who have been through decades of formal training. In some experiments, the environment matters a great deal; in others, the setting is a psychologist’s lab. In some, the snap judgments are based on methodical reasoning — as with a scientist who has broken facial expressions into discrete parts; in others, the snap-judgment process is formless and instinctive. In some, priming is all-important; in others, priming is disregarded.
Moreover, the thick-slicing part of my brain is telling me that while it would be pleasing if we all had these supercomputers in our heads, Gladwell is overselling his case. Most of his heartwarming stories involve the lone intuitive rebel who ends up besting the formal, bureaucratic decision-making procedure. Though Gladwell describes several ways intuition can lead people astray, he doesn’t really dwell on how often that happens. But I’ve learned from other books, notably David G. Myers’s more methodical but less entertaining ”Intuition,” that there is a great body of data suggesting that formal statistical analysis is a much, much better way of predicting everything from the outcome of a football game to the course of liver disease than the intuition even of experts.
(“Thin-slicing,” by the way, is what Malcolm Gladwell calls that first instant when our brain filters in only the relevant data.)
Don’t believe the hype. Or rather, don’t believe the backlash.
When I was in college, I used to love these two recordings by a University of Pennsylvania a cappella group — one was a cover of “Baby” by Nil Lara, the other a cover of Stevie Wonder’s version of the Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out.” The singer, John R. Stephens, had this throaty, incredible tenor and a break in his vocal range so gorgeous it sounded almost as though it had been painted into the digital recording after the fact. You can hear a hint of the break by listening to the clip of “Baby” here. Stephens was also a marvelous arranger.
Anyway, a few days ago, I purchased an album on iTunes by a singer named John Legend. I had loved one of its songs from the radio, and after listening to the clips, it appeared the whole thing was excellent. I couldn’t get over the thought that I’d heard that voice before, so I Googled my hunch that Mr. Legend was a renamed John R. Stephens, and I was, of course, correct.
This is just a roundabout way of recommending the album, while I’m in the business of making music recommendations. The man is incredible, even if I don’t much care for his stage name.
Ruben Fleischer has a new video out, and I think it may be my favorite of his many super-excellent music videos. It’s called “Galang” (look for the link at the bottom of the page), it’s by gorgeous Sri Lankan hip-hopper M.I.A., featuring her set against the backdrop of her animated artwork. Waaaaaaay too good not to share.
… why not go whole hog?
Jared Diamond has a new book. Malcolm Gladwell has a new article. Some correlation exists between these two joyous events.
Listening to authors read from their own works is a much better idea on paper than in reality.
But these are some damn fine authors, and those are some damn fine works. The quality of the audio’s pretty bad, sadly.
Paul Auster’s got an awesome gravelly Joe Frank-ish radio voice — he’s an NPR contributor and the author of some of my favorite books — so check out his excerpt from The Book of Illusions. Philip Roth also does a great job. The Mary Gaitskill story is incredible, her reading, not so much, so here’s an excerpt in text. Read the whole thing if you can find it.
Matt and I had planned to build a full-blown website around a souped-up version of our Googlezon presentation (you know, the one that masquerades as a transmission from the Museum of Media History circa 2014).
Buuut it didn’t look like that was going to happen anytime soon, so we decided to just go ahead and release our eight-minute Flash opus into the world.
Not ideal, as it’s basically without context and therefore somewhat weird, but hey! Let’s see how it fares in the howling chaos of the web.
Here it is: the Googly future of news. (Note: updated link… file has moved as EPIC madness washes over the Internet in a great flood of dread and wonder.)
Watch it spread on Technorati.
Jaysus, what has Nick Denton been up to? I mean, we all knew about Gawker and Wonkette and Fleshbot and Gizmodo (and we maintained a dim awareness of Defamer, although clearly not a bookmark), but apparently someone fed the Denton media empire after midnight and dropped it in the swimming pool (*), because his blogs have been spawning while no one was paying attention.
I predict that Denton’s reputation as the savvy, overmarketed blog-trepreneur soon turns a corner and his little Web empire collapses, ooooor possibly you’ll find me outside the Gawker Building in Times Square begging for a correspondent’s gig. Only time will tell.
Sorry, Jack Shafer. Your column today in Slate, calling for an end to White House background briefings, is not allowed. You gave up your right to complain about anonymous sources on Monday, Sept. 20, 2004, when you included this sentence in your column:
Sources inside the [New York] Times tell me that the paper’s leadership worried that excavating and analyzing the WMD stories would damage the institution.
Harsh? Tough. No, after your months of railing against anonymous sources, you do not get the luxury of throwing a few willy-nilly into article that wasn’t even about the New York Times, or WMD, or anything close. Sure, I agree with your main point, but when you totally undermine it, you live with the consequences.
You heard it here first, folks.
David Brooks? Crazy.