Paragraph of the Week

From Nick Paumgarten's "Master of Play," a profile of Nintendo genius and Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, in the December 20, 2010 issue of The New Yorker:

Miyamoto recognizes that there is pleasure in difficulty but also in ease, in mastery, in performing a familiar act with aplomb, whether that be catching a baseball, dancing a tango, doing Sudoku, or steering Mario through the Mushroom Kingdom, jumping on Goombas and Koopa Troopas. His games strike this magical balance between the excitement that comes from facing new problems and the swagger from facing down old ones. The consequent sensation of confidence is useful, in dealing with a game’s more challenging stages, but also a worthy aim in itself. “A lot of the so-called ‘action games’ are not made that way,” Miyamoto told me. “All the time, players are forced to do their utmost. If they are challenged to the limit, is it really fun for them?” In his own games, Miyamoto said, “You are constantly providing the players with a new challenge, but at the same time providing them with some stages or some occasions where they can simply, repeatedly, do something again and again. And that itself can be a joy.”

Paragraph of the Week

David Owen's article "Taking Humor Seriously," a profile of longtime The Simpsons' writer George Meyer, from the March 13, 2000 issue of The New Yorker:

"I just watched everything," he [Meyer] told me, "and always with the same slack expression on my face. I watched so much and from such an early age, in fact, that I didn't understand what TV was for. I say this to people and they think I'm kidding, but I didn't realize that 'The Dick Van Dyke Show' was supposed to be funny I thought you just watched it. The people said things, and they moved around, and you just waited till you saw the kid-you know, you liked to see Richie. My brothers and sisters and I rarely laughed at anything we watched. We watched more to learn what the world was like and how adults interacted, and what a cocktail party was, what a night club was, what you did on a sea cruise -- although I did like shows where the joke would be that somebody got shot or fell out of a window. When you're a kid, you like to see adults getting away with stuff; because you hope to join them one day in anarchy and mayhem."

Facebook, Privacy, and the Bettering of Society

All everyone's been talking about is The Social Network, the so-called Facebook movie. And with good reason: it's a damn good film, even if it took some time on the way home from the theater to come up with even one likable character. (We eventually settled on Larry Summers, and, maybe, Erica and Rashida Jones' character.) I'll have some more thoughts on the film, I hope, later this week, but I found it interesting that so many publications used the occasion of the film's release to talk about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. As opposed to the usual formula of the movie following a book--even as The Social Network is based on Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires--here we have an outpouring of the written word following a film.

The best of these, at least of the ones I've read, is Jose Antonio Vargas' profile of Zuckerberg in the September 20th edition of The New Yorker. There's the usual history and background, but where Vargas really excels is in discussing issues familiar to any of Facebook's users, a number somewhere around half a billion worldwide.

Here's Vargas on Facebook and privacy, one of the recurring issues of our new digital lives:

Danah Boyd, a social-media researcher at Microsoft Research New England, added, “This is a philosophical battle. Zuckerberg thinks the world would be a better place—and more honest, you’ll hear that word over and over again—if people were more open and transparent. My feeling is, it’s not worth the cost for a lot of individuals.”

Zuckerberg and I talked about this the first time I signed up for Facebook, in September, 2006. Users are asked to check a box to indicate whether they’re interested in men or in women. I told Zuckerberg that it took me a few hours to decide which box to check. If I said on Facebook that I’m a man interested in men, all my Facebook friends, including relatives, co-workers, sources—some of whom might not approve of homosexuality—would see it.

“So what did you end up doing?” Zuckerberg asked.

“I put men.”

“That’s interesting. No one has done a study on this, as far as I can tell, but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out,” he said. “We didn’t create that—society was generally ready for that.” He went on, “I think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about, about society being more open, and I think that’s good.”

I've never understood Zuckerberg's claim that openness is good. I always pictured this as the posturing of someone whose billion-dollar company requires the redefinition of online privacy in such a way that maximizes profits. But, now, I'm not so sure. I still don't necessarily want my grandmother to see all the pictures I'm tagged in, but it might actually be a good thing--both for individuals and our society at large--if, for example, people felt more comfortable being honest about their sexuality. Who knows, maybe Facebook is doing some good after all.

Paragraph of the Week

From Ian Frazier's "On the Prison Highway," from the August 30, 2010 edition of The New Yorker:

Beneath a surface layer of unbelief or Orthodox Christianity, Russia is an animist country. Ordinary physical objects are alive in Russia far more than they are in America, and, however Russia's religious or political currents flow, this native animism remains strong. Trees, streets, utensils, groves, machines--each has its own spirit and its own personality, like the cabin belonging to the witch Baba Yaga that could get up on its chicken legs and run around. A Russian telephone isn't just a phone, it's a being; once, at my friend Alex Melamid's mother's apartment when I was having trouble dialling her phone, she showed me how, explaining, "He likes to be dialled slowly." In Russia, alarm clocks don't ring; they burst into rooster-crowing.

[snip]

In Russia the windshield wiper on your car isn't called a mechanical name--it's a dvornik, a word whose more common meaning is "custodian." What we call a speed bump in America the Russians call lezhachii politseiskii, which means "lying-down policeman."

Paragraph of the Week

A selection of Roger Birnbaum's interview with The New Yorker's editor-in-chief, David Remnick, published in The Morning News:

RB: How much is the New Yorker a barometer, a thermometer, litmus test, measuring stick of cultural developments in the United States? Does the ongoing success of the New Yorker say anything about literacy, book-buying, things like that?

DR: Well, if that were the case than it would defy all [the] dark imaginings of all the prognosticators, because our circulation seems to go up. I have to tell you—one of the good parts about traveling or getting out of the house and the well-worn groove between my apartment and the office, and meeting people at this event or that event, is the number of people who come up and, in a non-routine sort of way, almost with an urgency, tell me how important the magazine is to them. Not me, not any single writer, even the enterprise by itself and its constancy. Not because it’s unfailing or because it’s perfect—that’s too ridiculous to hope for—but because of its ambition. I don’t think we are all alone, by the way. There are a number of magazines I really admire and respect that are quite different from ours. But I remember, one week after getting this job, in the almost absurd way I got it, I had to go to San Francisco, and I was at dinner and some guy came up to me. He had been in the Midwest and lived in San Francisco and he came up to the table where we were having dinner and grabbed my arm in a way that was slightly alarming and his message to me was, “Don’t fuck this up!”

RB: (laughs)

DR: “This magazine has meant something to me since I was 14 or 15 years old.” This guy had to be 50 if he was a day, and so his attachment to it was really important to him. And that happens all the time in one way or another.

Paragraph of the Week

From Julia Ioffe's article "Roulette Russian," in the the May 17, 2010 edition of The New Yorker, about Chatroulette founder Andrey Ternovskiy:

The best way to talk to Ternovskiy is through some kind of digital intermediary. Shy and evasive in person, he fills with a wry swagger when he is just a stream of text. "They have no business no money blablablabla," he typed to me one afternoon, feigning phlegmatic unconcern with the financial woes of an advertiser he'd been negotiating with--his only one. Like much of his generation, Ternovskiy has an online persona far more developed than his real one.

Paragraph of the Week

From "Class Warrior," Carlo Rotella's profile of United States Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, in the Feb. 1, 2010 issue of The New Yorker:

Duncan likes talking about how pickup basketball reveals character, an article of cultic faith in Obama's inner circle. (When I asked Axelrod about that, though, he said, "I hope that's not entirely true of me on the court.") He also believes that basketball teaches lessons in practical politics. Thinking back to his teens, Duncan said, "A bunch of places where I played were extraordinarily dangerous. I couldn't fight. There were times when I was really scared, but that's where the best basketball was." And so "I learned to read people's character. I learned to trust certain people completely."

This is the whole of our ideology.

Also, if you've been hesitant to check out PhoneMarketingInsider.com because you aren't necessarily interested in the marketing of phones, here's a good place to start: my take on how the ad campaign leading up to last night's Grammys has redefined what it means to be a fan. It's a piece that would fit in nicely on this here blog.

Paragraph of the Week

From Ariel Levy's "Either/Or" in the November 30, 2009 issue of The New Yorker:

Unfortunately for I.A.A.F. [International Association of Athletics Federations] officials, they are faced with a question that no one has ever been able to answer: what is the ultimate difference between a man and a woman? "This is not a solvable problem," Alice Dreger said. "People always press me: 'Isn't there one marker we can use?' No. We couldn't then and we can't now, and science is making it more difficult and not less, because it ends up showing us how much blending there is and how many nuances, and it becomes impossible to point to one thing, or even a set of things, and say that's what it means to be male."

Paragraph of the Week

The New Yorker, Nov. 23, 2009. Adam Gopnik, "What's the Recipe?"

The woman who reads the fashion magazines isn't passively imaging the act of having; she's actively imagining the act of shopping. (And distantly imagining the act of wearing.) She turns down pages not because she wants to look again but because, for that moment, she really intends to buy that--for a decisive moment she did buy it, even if she knows she never will. Reading recipe books is an active practice too, even if all the action takes place in your mind. We reanimate our passions by imagining the possibilities, and the act of wanting ends up mattering more than the fact of getting. It's not the false hope that it will turn out right that makes us go on with our reading but our being resigned to the knowledge that it won't ever, quite.

This Is Why We're Fat

One of the real pleasures of reading The New Yorker over the past two months has been a string of excellent articles written by Elizabeth Kolbert, including the story of James Hansen (abstract only, except for subscribers), a NASA scientist so concerned with climate change that he attends protests and rallies, and an appraisal of the fact that we're living through--and possibly causing--a mass extinction (also, abstract only, except for subscribers) the likes of which the Earth has not seen in the past 65 million years.

Her latest effort, "XXXL," is a focused review of seven books published in the past six years that all attempt to explain why humans, including but not limited to Americans, are gaining weight. You should read the article to learn what these books and Kolbert theorize, but here are some scary highlights:

• American "[m]en are now on average seventeen pounds heavier that they were in the late seventies, and for women that figure is even higher: nineteen pounds."
• "Today, soft drinks account for about seven per cent of all the calories ingested in the United States (!), making them 'the number one food consumed in the American diet.' If, instead of sweetened beverages, the average American drank water, [health economist Eric] Finkelstein calculates, he or she would weigh fifteen pounds less."
• We eat just about whatever food is in front of us, without, it would seem, taking into account how hungry we are: "In another experiment, [director of Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab, Brian] Wansink invited participants to cook dinner for themselves with ingredients that he provided. One group got big boxes of pasta and big boxes of sauces, a second smaller boxes and smaller bottles. The first group prepared twenty-three per cent more, and downed it all."
• "According to the federally supported National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the bagels that Americans eat have in the past twenty years swelled from a hundred and forty to three hundred and fifty calories each. If, as Wansink argues, people are relying on external cues to determine their consumption, then the new, bigger bagel is sneaking in an additional two hundred and ten calories. For someone who is in the habit of eating a bagel a day, these extra calories translate into a weight gain of more than a pound a month."

Yikes.

[Update: Though Kolbert addresses a similar movement in her article, I found it interesting that The New York Times yesterday published a piece titled "Tossing Out the Diet and Embracing the Fat."]

The Daring Young Woman on the Flying Trapeze

I just want to point out that last week's The New Yorker included a short piece about Evan Rachel Wood's recent session at Trapeze School New York, the very same Trapeze School I once attended. The article even explains what "hep" means.

Huzzah for Trapeze School.

How The New York Times Does Business

This, it seems to me, is a brilliant way to conduct business. From the June 1, 2009 The New Yorker, in an article titled "Slim's Time," about Carlos Slim and his effort to purchase The New York Times:

"In my early days as an editor, I had someone explain to me the marketing strategy of the Times," [executive editor Bill] Keller recalled. "What most newspapers do when they want to expand is to conduct a survey of people who don't read their paper and ask, 'What would make you like our paper better? What could we change to appeal to you?' Then they go out and add the advice column or the comic strip--whatever it was that the nonreader said he wanted. The Times' approach was to go find our most loyal readers--who say they couldn't live without it, they read it every day--and to profile those people. Who are they? The strategy was to find more people like that, to define ourselves demographically, not geographically. The whole marketing apparatus was out there looking for people who want what we're doing. The commitment to solid journalism wasn't just a slogan. It was a sound business proposition."

The confidence the Times has in its product is amazing. They know they have the best product in the field, and they just try to find more people who would appreciate what they have to offer.

Figure out what you do well, and focus on that. Don't water down yourself or your product. Sound advice.

iPhone Art

This week's The New Yorker features a really cool cover titled "Finger Painting," made by an artist on his iPhone. The best part: the video, showing how this thing was done, conveniently embedded right here:

Elephants Approach

Early word on the street (or, you know, on the internet) is that the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus' annual Elephant Walk will take place early Tuesday morning, March 24, though most people would probably prefer to think of it as late Monday night, March 23. I've tried confirming this date, but every mention of Elephant Walk cites the same meetup.com link I've cited above. I'm still waiting for another independent source, even as I pencil this event directly on to my google calender tab. I'll keep you updated on any updates or time/place confirmations as I learn of them.

In the meantime, I recommend to you an excellent piece by Adam Gopnik, in the 22 Sept. 2008 The New Yorker, on the meaning of Babar the Elephant:

Yet those who would burn “Babar” miss the true subject of the books. The de Brunhoffs’ saga is not an unconscious expression of the French colonial imagination; it is a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination and its close relation to the French domestic imagination. The gist of the classic early books of the nineteen-thirties—“The Story of Babar” and “Babar the King,” particularly—is explicit and intelligent: the lure of the city, of civilization, of style and order and bourgeois living is real, for elephants as for humans. The costs of those things are real, too, in the perpetual care, the sobriety of effort, they demand. The happy effect that Babar has on us, and our imaginations, comes from this knowledge—from the child’s strong sense that, while it is a very good thing to be an elephant, still, the life of an elephant is dangerous, wild, and painful. It is therefore a safer thing to be an elephant in a house near a park.

Also worthwhile is the magazine's slideshow of original art by Jean de Brunhoff, author of the first books of the series.

DFW on Jobs

The New Yorker last week excerpted a short story length section of The Pale King, David Foster Wallace's unfinished third novel, which will be published sometime next year. The overarching theme of this book is boredom. Lane Dean, Jr., a character in the short story, works for the IRS.

Here is how Dean, Jr. works:

Then he did two more returns, checked the clock real quick, then two more, then bore down and and did three in a row, then flexed and visualized and bore way down and did four without looking up once, except to put the completed files and memos in the two Out trays side by side up in the top tier of trays, where the cart boys could get them when they came by.

And this is how he conceives of his job:

He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops. Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers that connect to nothing he'll ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never goes down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind's own devices.

If all this sounds familiar, it's probably because DFW has addressed these themes before. From his commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005:

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

It's interesting to gain a glimpse into how a writer develops tropes and writes about issues that matter to him. Cool.

Updike on Ted Williams

As I'm sure most everyone has heard by now, John Updike died today at the age of 76. It seems like we're losing our best writers.

Truthfully, I've had very little exposure to Updike. I've never read--let alone seen--any of his 60 or so published books, and I'm fairly certain that I've never read any of his short fiction. But he has published dozens of articles of criticism in The New Yorker in the thirty months I've been a subscriber, and I've been wise enough to occasionally read what he had to say. His literary criticism is what you would expect: beautifully composed and thoughtful in a way which always managed to further the conversation. I don't have particular memories of any one of these pieces, but I always felt an acute sense of excitement when I saw Updike's name in The NYer's table of contents. His presence in the magazine felt like an event. And in certain ways, Updike had as much to do with defining what The New Yorker has been about over the course of the last 50 years as anyone.

Here is one of Updike's most famous pieces, a profile of Ted Williams written during the ballplayer's last season in the majors. Just to offer a taste, here is one master of his craft describing another:

For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill. Baseball is a game of the long season, of relentless and gradual averaging-out. Irrelevance—since the reference point of most individual games is remote and statistical—always threatens its interest, which can be maintained not by the occasional heroics that sportswriters feed upon but by players who always care; who care, that is to say, about themselves and their art. Insofar as the clutch hitter is not a sportswriter’s myth, he is a vulgarity, like a writer who writes only for money. It may be that, compared to managers’ dreams such as Joe DiMaggio and the always helpful Stan Musial, Williams is an icy star. But of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game. No other player visible to my generation has concentrated within himself so much of the sport’s poignance, has so assiduously refined his natural skills, has so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.

Movies Meet Marketing

There's a great article in this week's edition of The New Yorker, dated January 19, 2009, by Tad Friend, titled "The Cobra: Inside a movie marketer's playbook." The piece follows Tim Palen, Lionsgate's co-president of theatrical marketing, and it does that quintessential The New Yorker thing of using Palen as a means of investigating the marketing of films as an industry. Here's the money quote:

One of the oldest jokes in the business is that when a studio head takes over he's given three envelopes, the first of which contains the advice "Fire the head of marketing." Nowadays, though, former marketers, such as Oren Aviv, at Disney, and Marc Shmuger, at Universal, often run the studios. "Studios now are pimples on the ass of giant conglomerates, " one studio's president of production says. "So at green-light meetings it's a bunch of marketing and sales guys giving you educated guesses about what a property might gross. No one is saying, 'This director was born to make this movie.' "

And, on the topic of trailers:

Another problem with free samples is: what if the product isn't particularly remarkable? "How many great movies are there each year?" the trailer cutter David Schneiderman says. "We're in the business of cheating, let's face it. We fix voice-overs, create dialogue to clear up a story, use stock footage. We give pushup bras to flat-chested girls, take people's eyes and put them where we want them. And sometimes it works.

OK. So we know now that the goal of films is to make money--and not, you know, be good--and that advertising lies to us.

But what do these marketing folks think about us, American citizumers? Is there room for nuance? For subtlety? For experimentation?

No:

An unexpected corallary of the modern marketing-and-distribution model is that films no longer hve time to find their audience; that audience has to be identified and solicited well in advance. Marketers segment the audience in a variety of ways, but the most common form of partition is the four quadrants: men under twenty-five; older men; women under twenty-five; older women. A studio rarely makes a film that it doesn't expect will succeed with at least two quadrants, and a film's budget is usually directly related to the number of quadrants it is anticipated to reach. The most expensive tent-pole movies, such as the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise, are aimed at all four quadrants.

Reading this article makes me question how I choose what movies to watch. I try to avoid movie reviews because I like going into the thing without previous knowledge. I want to decide for myself what worked and what didn't work. But are the trailers and commercials and newspaper ads commissioned and designed by the people trying to sell the movie any better? In a strange way, they may be. I may see the best joke in the trailer, but, after reading this article, I'm pretty convinced that the trailer won't actually have anything to do with the full-length movie.

And, just for fun, Gelf Magazine runs an occasional feature titled The Blurb Report, in which the magazine takes a look at the original context of excerpted movie blurbs. For example, here--from their Best Worst Blurbs of 2007-- is a quote attributed to Michael Wilmington of The Chicago Tribune regarding Norbit: "Eddie Murphy's comic skills are immense." And here is the complete quote: "Murphy's comic skills are immense, and 'Dreamgirls' shows he's a fine straight dramatic actor too. So why does he want to make these huge, belching spectaculars, movies as swollen, monstrous and full of hot air as Rasputia herself—here misdirected by Brian Robbins of 'Good Burger,' 'Varsity Blues' and that lousy 'Shaggy Dog' remake?"

That was just in case you still believed any form of marketing.

[Update: I didn't realize the Best Worst Blurbs of 2008 was out. But it is. Check it out, if you just can't get enough of out-of-context movie blurbs.]

Some Magazines, Not Surprisingly, Have Many Ads

This post is inspired by two discrete occurrences.

First, I found a great new blog (or, more likely, new to me), called Panopticist, which has a stated goal of taking a critical look at magazines, but which, fortunately, deviates from that goal often enough to examine the pronunciation of a word I'm not sure I'm ready to use on this blog. I'm also a big fan of anyone who's interested in Bentham.

Second, I went to the MoMA this evening, and my two favorite exhibits were the temporary exhibition called the "Modern Dwelling" and--I'm not sure what this says about me--the collection of Esquire covers designed by George Lois. Here's what the MoMA site has to say about him:

From 1962 to 1972, George Lois changed the face of magazine design with his ninety-two covers for Esquire magazine. He stripped the cover down to a graphically concise yet conceptually potent image that ventured beyond the mere illustration of a feature article. Lois exploited the communicative power of the mass-circulated front page to stimulate and provoke the public into debate, pressing Americans to confront controversial issues like racism, feminism, and the Vietnam War. Viewed as a collection, the covers serve as a visual timeline and a window onto the turbulent events of the 1960s. Initially received as jarring and prescient statements of their time, the covers have since become essential to the iconography of American culture.

All that was in the way of introduction, and all this is in the way of the body of my composition (there probably won't be much of a conclusion). The New Yorker this week is one of their special, thick issues, which has writing on the spine; it's the "Style Issue." These special issues are big for advertising purposes, I suppose, so there are four full-page spreads (F-PS's) of advertisements before the reader reaches the table of contents. This is very much out of the ordinary for the NYer, as a normal, non-special, issue has at maximum two F-PS's but more usually just one. This is phenomenal for a magazine, at least compared to the other ones which are scattered throughout my apartment.

Esquire is horrifically bad in this regard, with 21 (!) F-PS's in its September '08 edition, including one foldout, before the reader knows what's in the magazine. Though, to be fair, Esquire has this weird habit of scribbling its content on the cover, complete with page numbers.

Rolling Stone has, in the two issues I could find, on average, 3.5 F-PS's before the T.o.C.

And, lastly, Guitar Player, in the three issues I could find, has, on average, 2.83 F-SP's before the Contents which are listed in table form.

This alone probably shouldn't be the only way for you to measure the quality of a magazine, but it might be important to think about.