If you’ve got twenty-five minutes to listen to two smart + funny people talk about Marcel Duchamp, Ezra Pound, comparative literature, American poetry, and French philosophy, give this podcast a whirl. It’s by two of my teachers (and friends, and readers), the poet Charles Bernstein and literary critic Jean-Michel Rabat

Marcel Duchamp, 1926:

I even like the John Fahey-esque score, added by whomever.

Wyatt Mason looks at artists’ books, and sighs:

Not that long ago, all books were handmade; now, most of the work is performed by armies of cleverly machined presses and binderies. Lost, in that consumptive progression, is not the beautiful book — for many special books made by machine do manage to be beautiful objects that function well. Lost is the ordinary book being routinely beautiful.

Flint, MI is contemplating shrinkage:

Instead of waiting for houses to become abandoned and then pulling them down, local leaders are talking about demolishing entire blocks and even whole neighborhoods.

The population would be condensed into a few viable areas. So would stores and services. A city built to manufacture cars would be returned in large measure to the forest primeval.

I’m always awed that when it comes to cities like Flint, EVERYTHING is thought of in near-cosmic terms. Instead of “let’s replace abandoned neighborhoods with new parks” — which is already a pretty dramatic undertaking — it’s “let’s let that bitch goddess nature take back what’s hers, for we can no longer maintain even the pretense of civilization.”

I mean, look:

These days, crime is brazen: two men recently stripped the siding off Mr. Kildee

PBS is now bringing their game for online video. Not a ton of stuff up yet, but worth watching. Via. 

How did we get here?

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans…

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said.

Hilzoy writes:

In general, I wouldn’t think it was a problem not to know the origins of a technique, except for political reasons. But not knowing that the SERE program was designed to help soldiers withstand interrogations that had produced false confessions is inexcusable, especially since this was our program. Not knowing that the psychologist who persuaded the CIA to go for this had never conducted an actual interrogation is similarly mind-boggling. The fact that no one knew what the actual interrogators thought of all this is standard for the Bush administration, but it should not have been.

There are all sorts of experts in our government, including experts on interrogation. There’s also more than enough institutional memory to inform the administration about the origins of the SERE program. But the Bush administration, typically, did not bother with them. They preferred to make things up as they went along, because, after all, they always knew better.

This is what happens when we stop demanding minimal competence in our Presidents; when we start caring more about who we would rather have a beer with than, oh, who would be most likely to seek out the best advice and listen to all sides of an argument before making an important decision, or whose judgment we can trust. We end up with people who toss aside our most fundamental values because someone who has never conducted an interrogation before thinks it might be a good idea, and no one bothers to do the basic background research on what he proposes.

I gave a presentation to my students today on writing and research tools, doing what I always do — apologizing for the limitation of every single thing that I showed them. Zotero is pretty good at building a research database — but you can’t use it to write. MS Word 2008 is a champ for layout and even does a good job at formatting bibliographies — but it sucks for organizing research or pulling data from an application. Scrivener is a good place to organize research or notes and build drafts — but it turns PDFs into pictures and doesn’t really handle citations. Yep and Papers are great PDF organizers, but not much else. (I didn’t even want to get into DevonThink.) But Papers builds in a WebKit browser, so you can do research and navigate into online databases and plug anything you find right into your library.

This feels like the big conceptual leap. We’re finding our information on the web. We’re writing our documents on the web. We’re storing our data on the web. We’re using the web to collaborate on docs. But while online storage and collaboration are winners, AJAX writing apps kind of suck. They’re low-powered exactly where we need the full power of a rich client. We don’t just need more formatting and layout options; we need to be able to manage databases, for research and reading material, and lots of interconnected projects that bridge online and offline work.

What I want is just what my title says: a specialized browser-based client devoted to writing.

Read more…

Jonah Lehrer tickles my brain-bone:

This reminds me of that great William James quote: “We ought,” he wrote, “to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue, or a feeling of cold.” What is James talking about? He’s pointing out that language creates the illusion of transparency. We pretend that we’re just describing the “substantive parts” of the world – those nouns we match together with adjective and verbs in neat sentences – but this substance is inevitably shaded by “transitive” mental processes we aren’t aware of, such as gendered nouns and quirks of grammar. In other words, language is a constraint on thought, a concrete riverbed for the stream of consciousness.

Do you know what was great? The Hanseatic League. Do you think we could bring that back, twenty-first century style?:

This diffuse, fractured world will be run more by cities and city-states than countries. Once, Venice and Bruges formed an axis that spurred commercial expansion across Eurasia. Today, just 40 city-regions account for two thirds of the world economy and 90 percent of its innovation. The mighty Hanseatic League, a constellation of well-armed North and Baltic Sea trading hubs in the late Middle Ages, will be reborn as cities such as Hamburg and Dubai form commercial alliances and operate “free zones” across Africa like the ones Dubai Ports World is building. Add in sovereign wealth funds and private military contractors, and you have the agile geopolitical units of a neomedieval world. Even during this global financial crisis, multinational corporations heavily populate the list of the world’s largest economic entities; the commercial diplomacy of emerging-market firms such as China’s Haier and Mexico’s Cemex has already turned North-South relations inside out faster than the nonaligned movement ever did.

Wait — ninety percent of what, exactly? Innovation units?

I really love this elegant digression inserted in one of things magazine’s periodic collections of smartly-chosen links:

We used to notice slight spikes in traffic when we led with an image, but these seem to have tailed off (as has traffic in general). Things will always be about physical things but the role of text and analysis has and always will be central to the publication (although readers might have noticed that the physical publication itself has been in an extremely long stretch of self-imposed limbo). As talk of design, objects and collections shifts from the linguistic to the strictly visual, it seems ever more important to write about objects and the role they play in contemporary life — and, by definition, the role that collecting and collections play as well — rather than simply add to the ever-growing museum that is the internet. It seems increasingly clear to us that things’ role is not one of curator, but guide.

In one sense — and it’s a particularly narrow one — the change we are undergoing is one of “dematerialization” — but in another and (I think) more profound sense, what’s happening is that materiality and physicality are changing, becoming something else. I’m happy that things is around, in whatever format, to help document that.