This is Alexis Madrigal talking to the Columbia Journalism Review about staying up all night editing the first issue of Longshot:

I slept on Friday night, but didn’t sleep at all Saturday. It’s really easy to stay up because there’s so much to do, the adrenaline is going. But definitely the hours between, say, five and seven late Saturday night were really miserable. Those are the worst hours. That’s also usually when the big hairy pieces are getting edited down, that’s when the heavy lifting is happening, like crunching 2,000 words into a 750 word piece.

Um, yeah (raises hand); that was me.

I turned in a crazy, chimerical, multi-constellational draft that I wrote in a feverish hour-and-a-half after finishing my work day for Wired, just went ahead and sent it in early Friday night because I knew I was going to need a day off on Saturday.

Alexis wrote me on Sunday morning and said that they liked it but they couldn’t give me more than a page. “OK, it’s your piece and me in the Velodrome! She’s gonna get a lot shorter.” I didn’t know what velodrome meant. “Ah, yes, I meant thunderdome.” Alexis was clearly very sleepy.

I offered to help with cutting it down, so I needed a target. Alexis: “About 650. it’s got its own page, and with the layout that’s about all we can squeeze.” Exhale. My original draft had been about 2100 words. The rough cut Madrigal had sent me back knocking out whole sections was 1300-1400. I had to cut it in half again at the sentence level. “It’s all about focusing on the throughline. You’re a brilliant aside writer(see graf on non-odysseus nostos making), but we need tight…lemme know if this kills it 4 you.”

Anyways, as Milhouse says in the Simpsons Radioactive Man/Fallout Boy episode, “we did it. It took seven hours, but we did it. It’s done.”

It even got a new title, “Hero’s Welcome.” And I really liked how it turned out. Not just that I was able to get it squeezed in — it has a completely different quality. It was Homeric and rambling when I wrote it, but it’s enigmatic and Abrahamic now. (If this makes no sense, it will once you read it.)

Anyways, for the sake of posterity and those of you who may be interested, I’ve decided to post my original draft of the story here. Longshot readers will have the chance to compare and contrast to the thing as finished. All typos and malepropisms are original, authentic artifacts of the Carmody writing process.

I want to read the whole shaggy thing

Another Storify experiment, this time about my so-far 71%-successful effort to lobby for followers on Twitter.

A reminder: Wonder Woman is fucking awesome.

Earlier: Warriors of Themyscira, or why Miss USA is not-so-secretly an Amazon warrior.

My favorite post that I wrote for Kottke.org might be “Digging in the crates (or Why my generation is into history),” which used a Ta-Nehisi Coates riff on hip-hop’s omnivorous hunger for obscure/great old music as a kind of vernacular historical barometer.

But of course, crate-digging isn’t just a hip-hop thing; it’s also always been a huge part of indie rock culture. This is why every time I hear M.I.A. growl The Modern Lovers’ “Road runner, road runner” over hip-hop & Bollywood beats at the start of “Bamboo Banga,” or James Murphy shout “Gil! Scott! Heron!” at the climax of “Losing My Edge,” I feel like Sasha Frere-Jones had his head up his ass.

Then I think about Bob Dylan stealing old Woody Guthrie records from his friend’s houses in Minneapolis, and I think maybe my generation just isn’t so different:

Read more…

It’s nice today, on the anniversary of the March on Washington, while our friends at Longshot are in LA putting together issue #1, to find something small but inspiring that connects those dots:

Bayard Rustin’s first rule of management was to make lists of every conceivable task. If somebody thinks that something can possibly go wrong, come up with a specific solution, and put it on the list. Organizing anything — a massive march, a union picket, a training program, a newspaper — succeeds or fails because of details.

All day long, Rustin and his team crossed off completed tasks and added new tasks to the three- and four-page lists:

Briefing of Marshals
Sy does press release on cars to Negro press
Telephone for top command
Find out when office tent goes up
Wire Mahalia Jackson
Call Joe Rauh on insurance and inspection
Clarify with Washington police Rockwell’s intentions
Small national office at the Statler

I’m fascinated with Bayard Rustin, have been for years — about a year ago I finally picked up his Collected Writings, Time on Two Crosses. At the end of his life, Rustin became a forceful advocate for gay rights, and a lot of his writing from this period connects the two movements. But in everything I’ve read about Rustin, I’d never heard this story:

At the end of every workday, Rustin convened a staff meeting. Everyone was invited — and expected — to attend, from the heavies like Tom Kahn and Cleveland Robinson down to lowly interns like Peter Orris and Elliott Linzer.

Rustin let everyone else talk. Staffers reported on how many people had written requesting brochures and buttons. They reported on how many buses had been booked for Akron and Albany and New York. They raised questions about security arrangements or coordination with Walter Fauntroy’s operation in Washington.

As others talked, Rustin doodled. As he scribbled notes and crossed out completed tasks, he drew squares and triangles that looked like mazes. Peter Orris, a brainy high school student, was convinced that the doodles helped Rustin think through the relationships between the many-layered tasks. He got Rustin to autograph one of his doodles.

Sometimes, like a herald from the past, Rustin suddenly interrupted the chatter with an old spiritual, his voice sweet and high pitched:

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
A long ways from home,
A true believer
Sometimes I feel like I’m almos’ gone
Way up in the heab’nly lan’
True believer

Sometimes he sang alone. But he also called out songs everyone knew. Always the teacher, he told them where the song came from, what it meant. He talked to them, for example, about the syncopation in “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel” and the call-and-response patterns in “Swing Low.” He sang the old spirituals with new words targeting Bull Connor, George Wallace, Ross Barnett, and Jim Clark, the most notorious symbols of segregation in the South.

As Harlem slept, the music of slaves and sharecroppers, sit-inners and picketers, gospel choirs and a capella college ensembles, filled the muggy night air.

Listen to this speech.

Listen to it!

I heard King’s “I Have a Dream” on the radio this afternoon. Despite the grandeur of the visuals of the March on Washington, and the power of the text, I think that radio is the best way to experience it. I am amazed, as a writer, teacher, poet, and speaker, at the range of King’s elocutionary instrument.

He doesn’t just use every sonorous rhetorical tool in the book. He makes words rhyme which shouldn’t. He finds transitory consonants and bends them to fit his alliterative schemes. He has the most versatile spondaic foot I’ve ever heard, so much so it could pass for iambic. (Try to find a genuinely unstressed syllable — or unstressed thought — in the way King says “We Will Not Be Satisfied.”)

And he matches and varies his pitch to highlight his parallelisms of matter and mind, in his voice and in the air; a small, thickly built man, speaking from the roots of the trees, from the center of the earth, knowing that the extension of his own gravity stretches like a column from the molten core to the orbit of the moon. He is a single still point with the granted power to bend straight the crooked lines of history.

Originally published January 19, 2009

I embedded one of these videos and linked to the other in my Gadget Lab article on the near-future of wristwatches, but I thought it’d be worth juxtaposing ’em here too.

Two quick notes: in case it’s not obvious, “Anémic” is “Cinéma” backwards. And as you can see, Duchamp was never one to limit himself to just vertical OR horizontal reading. (Watch the whole thing.)

In the long list of books I’ll never write, there’s one that’s about a theory of risk. The theory is that there’s a threshold of risk aversion beyond which our attempts to extinguish risk actually exacerbate it. It would be filled with the case studies you might expect – things like the overuse of antibiotics and how a financial insurance product short-circuited the economy. But the opening anecdote would be about roads. And I’d basically copy and paste it from from this December ’04 Wired story:

Riding in [avant-garde traffic engineer Hans Monderman’s] green Saab, we glide into Drachten, a 17th-century village that has grown into a bustling town of more than 40,000. We pass by the performing arts center, and suddenly, there it is: the Intersection. [Monderman’s baby. – M] It’s the confluence of two busy two-lane roads that handle 20,000 cars a day, plus thousands of bicyclists and pedestrians. Several years ago, Monderman ripped out all the traditional instruments used by traffic engineers to influence driver behavior – traffic lights, road markings, and some pedestrian crossings – and in their place created a roundabout, or traffic circle. The circle is remarkable for what it doesn’t contain: signs or signals telling drivers how fast to go, who has the right-of-way, or how to behave. There are no lane markers or curbs separating street and sidewalk, so it’s unclear exactly where the car zone ends and the pedestrian zone begins. To an approaching driver, the intersection is utterly ambiguous – and that’s the point.

Monderman and I stand in silence by the side of the road a few minutes, watching the stream of motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians make their way through the circle, a giant concrete mixing bowl of transport. Somehow it all works. The drivers slow to gauge the intentions of crossing bicyclists and walkers. Negotiations over right-of-way are made through fleeting eye contact. Remarkably, traffic moves smoothly around the circle with hardly a brake screeching, horn honking, or obscene gesture. “I love it!” Monderman says at last. “Pedestrians and cyclists used to avoid this place, but now, as you see, the cars look out for the cyclists, the cyclists look out for the pedestrians, and everyone looks out for each other. You can’t expect traffic signs and street markings to encourage that sort of behavior. You have to build it into the design of the road.”

I wrote the text for “10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books,” but TheAtlantic.com’s science and technology editor/good friend of the Snark Alexis Madrigal edited it and added all the hyperlinks and images. The images are really wonderful, so I thought I would add some short annotations/captions/homework assignments for each one here.

1. Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory builds on the observation that what we call WW1 was the first major war fought where most of the soldiers did a lot of reading. The German empire sent the soldiers off with copies of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Soldier-poets like Wilfred Owen had inexpensive poetry anthologies like the first Oxford Book of English Verse. And the soldiers had lots of access to news, even printing their own newspapers (some official, some samizdat — those were the funny ones). Add the literacy revolution of the late-19th century, and lots of time spent sitting around and waiting for something to happen, and there was more reading in that war than any before it.
2. These industrial print machines just have a great aesthetic, don’t they? It looks like the machine Chaplin slides through in Modern Times. You could also say he’s becoming a ribbon of film flitting through the projector:
   

3. None of my “revolutions” are single moments. In fact, you could say that all of them are all still ongoing. But if you were talking about genuinely revolutionary moments in the history of reading, deciphering the Rosetta Stone would be a big one. And once you cut through the propaganda, even that wasn’t done by one guy on a single date.
4. If you wanted to, you could describe every revolution in the history of reading as a computing revolution. I love the “earliest true hardware” section of this Wikipedia article: “Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, mostly using one-to-one correspondence with our fingers.” As Matthew Battles would say, we’re all digital natives.
5. I don’t know how exactly Alexis dug up this picture of glasses designed for reading in bed, but I strongly suspect there isn’t yet an app for that.

Here is a link to Tim’s terrific new post over at The Atlantic, provided for your convenience. Like I said on Twitter:

@tcarmody I love that your magisterial media history post totally has a Demand Media headline. Nicely done.

I love the fact that Gutenberg’s press represents just one of ten revolutions here, and I love Tim’s characterization of it:

2. Outside of scholarly circles, the top candidate is usually the better-known Print Revolution, usually associated with Johannes Gutenberg, who helped introduce movable type to Europe. Now, as Andrew Pettegree’s new history The Book in the Renaissance shows, the early years of print were much messier than advertised: no one knew quite what to do with this technology, especially how to make money off of it.

“No one knew quite what to do with this technology.” I can’t tell you much I love that—how heartening I find it. It means we probably haven’t even figured out what the web is really good for yet.

But yo, Tim, I’ve got beef: where’s the paperback revolution in your list?