Sometimes a single detail makes an entire story. I think that’s the case with Jodi Kantor’s profile of Richard Holbrooke:

(Many people have personal trainers; Mr. Holbrooke has a personal archivist.)

Awesome.

I was actually thinking about archives this morning, after reading this bit from Tim’s Whitman post:

But Whitman’s notebooks at this time are filled with images, just jottings, of these people, what they’re doing, what they look like, what their names are.

Cross-reference with Michael Bierut’s wonderful stack of notebooks. I love the idea of keeping a durable, written record like this… but I am congenitally incapable of using and keeping notebooks. I’m way more comfortable with digital notes — emails to myself, short little Google Docs, etc.

What’s a good compromise? Is there some easy way to physical-ize those notes? Maybe I need an app that literally scans my stuff for certain kinds of documents, saves them, and prints ’em out en masse.

I mean, until I get a personal archivist, anyway.

After gobbling up last week’s stellar NYT Mag cover story from David Leonhardt, I Kindled Paul Tough’s book about the birth of Harlem’s Promise Academy, Whatever It Takes. The book is stellar. Tough’s NYT Mag piece from 2006 gives a nice intro, but it ends by recounting the successes of KIPP charter schools. Whatever It Takes is in many ways a chronicle of the academic underworld, the students beyond KIPP’s reach. And it’s a fascinating primer on how education in America is transforming.

So, this morning, during the Snarkmasters’ sequifortnightly transcontinental gathering over email, coffee, cold pad thai, and cinnamon swirls, the conversation turned to Walt Whitman, and I was reminded of the really quite lovely American Experience documentary on Whitman that was broadcast around a year ago.

Well, as it happens, the whole thing is available to watch online, including this marvelous segment about Whitman’s experience as a young newspaperman in antebellum New York City.

I love Ed Folsom’s account of Whitman’s experience of “urban affection”:

Whitman feels the power of the city of strangers. He’s looking at a city of strangers and how something we might now call urban affection begins to develop. How do you come to care for people that you have never seen before and that you may never see again?

Every day we encounter people, eyes make contact, we brush by people, physically come into contact with them, and may never see them again.

But Whitman’s notebooks at this time are filled with images, just jottings, of these people, what they’re doing, what they look like, what their names are. ‘What is this person doing? What’s the activity that defines this person?

“If I were doing that activity that person would be me. If I were wandering the other way, rather than this way, that person could be me. That could be me. That could be me. What is it that separates any of us?’

Folsom co-edits The Walt Whitman Archive, a fantastic resource with complete e-texts, photographic images of all of the alternate editions, biographies, scholarly essays, you name it.

The only real downside to the online presentation of the Whitman Documentary (and it’s a real downer) is 1) there’s no way to watch the whole documentary straight through and 2) the videos can only be displayed as teeny-tiny Quicktime/WMA pop-ups. Come on, PBS! Broadcast TV has finally figured out how to rock the computer screen in fullscreen HD — so has YouTube, Comedy Central, and, um, everybody. The people demand that their public digital television be done up right.

Many of you have probably read John Siracusa’s insightful, entertaining, and long anecdotal history of e-books at Ars Technica. Still, with Amazon set to make a big Kindle-related announcement early next week, it seems like a good time to highlight this sample:

In 2003, Apple started selling music for the iPod through its iTunes music store. Apple sold audio books as well, through a partnership with Audible. Perhaps unknowingly, Apple had just positioned itself perfectly for e-book domination.

It was all happening right before our eyes. First the device, already far past the minimum threshold for screen size and legibility, and rapidly gaining market penetration. Then the digital distribution channel, accessed via a desktop application used by every iPod owner. Then the deals with content owners

Wow! We’re off to a great start towards a book on the new liberal arts. How do I know? My scrollbar gets teeeeny-tiny when I click that link.

We’re talking about potential NLAs like archiving, attention economics, branding, collaboration, home economics, mapping, micropolitics, photography, play, urbanism, writing for computers — the list goes on and on. And I’m realizing that we’re going to have to get good at a bunch of these new skills, fast, just to make this thing.

So what comes next? Starting this weekend, we’ll reach out to some contributors from the comment thread on that original post; then, we’ll all spend the next week writing and editing. The deadline for copy will be Monday, February 16.

After that… we design the book!

Then, of course, there’s printing; we’re thinking hard about that step. If you have any tips, insights, or leads related to that part of the process, we’d love to hear them. You can leave a comment on this post or send an email: Is there a printing company you love? Some new print-on-demand scheme that we should know about? Elephant poop paper? Etc.

Look for another book update early next week. And, if you haven’t yet suggested a new liberal art of your own — now is precisely the time! Jump in.

Seriously, look at that scrollbar. It’s barely there.

So, if you’re anywhere near Facebook these days, chances are good that you’ve seen the “25 Things” meme. The descriptions and titles vary, but the basic idea is that you have to write twenty-five things about yourself (no restrictions on what they are or how you use them) and then tag twenty-five of your friends. Once tagged, you’re expected to write your own list and tag your friend back.

My little corner of Facebook has generally been resistant to these kind of digital chain letters. But this one took off. Why?

Working hypothesis: Facebook and its ilk are all about self-disclosure and keeping tabs on your friends. But they all generally proceed according to fixed categories — favorite music, movies, books, usw. — or through the structures of particular applications, groups, or wall-to-wall communication. The fact that the twenty-five things prompt doesn‘t define what you write about, that it asks you to be creative within a very broad (but finite) constraint, is an irresistable invitation. And invariably, nobody uses their twenty-five things post to say, “I love Animal Collective.” It’s all about filling in the gaps in the schema.

Likewise, the meme actually forces you to identify twenty-five friends whom you’d like to tag in the post. You’re restrained by having to tag the person who tagged you, but otherwise, you have to do what Facebook and its ilk virtually never ask you to do — to CHOOSE among your friends the subset whom you’d most like to know more about. Effectively, it asks you to designate superfriends.

So, in the context of a social network where you’re able to know a lot of small things about a lot of people, we have an emergent structure that allows you to know a little bit more about a little bit fewer people. Because what your friends write about is still minutiae — little stories from childhood, their favorite meal, a secret phobia — but it’s slightly more unexpected, slightly more meaningful minutiae. And through that, it gets at just a little slice of what has made social networking surprisingly fun in the first place.

It reminds me a little bit of the early days of Friendster — when you needed to be invited by a friend, where “wall entries” were “testimonials” where you could unabashedly praise your friends or make up bizarre, impossible stories — personal and public, sincere and self-ironized all at once.

Howard Weaver brings it:

People who wish some billionaire would endow newsrooms so they don’t have to change — you know who you are — have the musty smell of the mausoleum all about them. They move through twilight, walking stiffly toward a setting sun. They will find no pot of gold there.

Yet the digitalistas who suggest those newsrooms can be readily duplicated or replaced act like willful children, unmindful that substance, craft and capacity matter in the real world, that no group of 10,000 monkeys has ever written Shakespeare, that 98 of the 100 most important pieces of public service journalism last year flowed from professionals in the newsrooms they recklessly disregard.

This is a fool’s game. It’s time for grown-ups to intervene, to end the debate and move beyond the empty calories of nostalgia and the masturbatory fantasies of a theory-based future. A long-deceased, much missed colleague often referred to people with mature judgment and a steady hand by saying, “She knows where babies come from.” Those are the folks we need on the case now.

Really, what else is there to say? Howard’s style here reminds me of Ezra Pound at his caustic, humanistic best. And yes, that’s a compliment.

Dan Visel at if:book has a super entry/exhibition on postal art from Ray Johnson to Ben Greenman:

Johnson ran what he called the New York Correspondence School; he used the word correspondence not simply for its reference to communication but for the way he made associations with words and graphic elements in his collages… Membership was seemingly capricious and full of contradictions: members included institutions and the dead; the school committed suicide publicly at least once; and it was at best the most constant member of a baffling parade of clubs and organizations that Johnson ran, including, at random, Buddha University, the Deadpan Club, the Odilon Redon Fan Club, the Nancy Sinatra Fan Club…

“The whole idea of the Correspondence School,” Johnson told Richard Bernstein in an interview with Andy Warhol’s Interview in August, 1972 “is to receive and dispense with these bits of information, because they all refer to something else. It’s just a way of having a conversation or exchange, a kind of social intercourse.” Emblematic of Johnson’s work might be his Book about Death, begun in 1963, which consisted of thirteen printed pages of collaged images and text, which were mailed individually to Clive Phillpot, chief librarian at the Museum of Modern Art, and others. (A few pages are reproduced below.) The Book about Death was discorporate, as befits a book about death; more than being unbound, Johnson made sure that none of his readers received a complete set of the pages of the book. The book could only be assembled and read in toto by the correspondents working in concert: it was a book that demanded active participation in its reading. The content as well as the form of the Book about Death request active participation: the names of his correspondents feature prominently in it, but understanding of what Johnson was doing with those names requires some knowledge of the people who had those names.

One of my favorite recent literature/history/theory books is Bernhard Siegert’s Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System. Visel doesn’t quite say this, but it’s clear that despite Johnson’s humanist intents, he was using the technology of the mails in a way that was pretty resolutely anti-nostalgic. (In his fake-manifesto “Personism,” Frank O’Hara says that he once realized while he was writing a poem for someone that he could just as easily pick up the telephone and call them — you might say that Johnson realized he could just as easily send them a cheap postcard.)

Greenman, on the other hand, with his de luxe edition “book” collecting accordioned pamphlets and postcards, is working in a different register, where similar gestures connote a backwards-looking resistance to both electronic communication and industrial book design. But (and here Visel is spot on) both foreground the notion that literature doesn’t just have a reader but a recipient — a correspondent, so to speak — whose contact with the author begins with (but isn’t necessarily limited to) buying or reading or thinking about or talking about the book.

The Keynesian theory of government stimulus rests on the idea that economies in recessions don’t suffer from a real loss of wealth (like a famine that wipes out your crop) but an excess of economic capacity (when your crop rots in the silo because you can’t get it to the market). Keynes contrasted the two ideas by referring to “a crisis of poverty” versus “a crisis of abundance.” Money spent by the government, in addition to creating new real wealth in the form of infrastructure or whatever, works by utilizing this unused capacity — especially the human capital, by putting people to work.

But underutilized capacity isn’t just people who are out of work — it’s the goods rotting in our warehouses. The recent GDP dip was saved from staggering free-fall only by a quirk in the way these goods are measured:

The actual decline in the gross domestic product — at a 3.8 percent annual rate — fell short of the 5 to 6 percent that most economists had expected for the fourth quarter. But that was because consumption collapsed so quickly that goods piled up in inventory, unsold but counted as part of the nation

Virginia Heffernan at NYT would totally be way up high in my bloggers’ fantasy draft, with Scott Horton, John Gruber, Carmen van Kerckhove, Jim Fallows, Daniel Larison, Ron Silliman, Ben Vershbow (ret.), Eileen Joy… anyways, you see where this is going.

Anyways, her new magazine essay on digital reading with her three-year-old son is eminently blogworthy, not least for the universal reference:

I’d like for Ben to sit with One More Story and come away with the impression that he’d been read beautiful books all afternoon. But Ben tends to ask for One More Story when he wants privacy, the same state of mind in which he likes videos. Books, by contrast, are for when he feels snuggly.

Which brings up something significant about books for a 3-year-old: whatever else preschool reading is, it’s intimate. Before you can read, you get to see books mostly when you’re cuddled up with an adult or jostling with other kids in a circle.

Heffernan goes on to say: “I’m not sure he’s developing an appreciation for books. But he is learning how to enrich his solitude, and that is one of the most intensely pleasurable aspects of literacy.” Other intriguing thoughts include the relationship between interactive digi-books and video games, TV, and movies, the Freakonomics thesis that having books in your house is more important than reading them to your children, and a reluctant skepticism towards viewing digital reading as “reading-plus.” I don’t agree with everything VH throws out there, but it’s all worthwhile.