A New Leaf

This is the kind of thing I sit around thinking about all day.

I finally decided to spend a bit of time putting something in the main http://www.aruguladesigns.com/ page — just a link to this blog and my Linkedin profile, but so much more tasteful than the placeholder page that the web-hosting company posts there by default.

I fly to New York next week for a few days, a day in Boston, then a day or so over the weekend tacked on to spend time with my old college friends in Brooklyn. I also plan to see a production of Richard II on trapeze. My friend Nathan Cohen is doing the music, so in the worst case scenario I get to hear him play for a while. I am optimistic, however.

Look carefully at the titles of the top 10 bestselling nonfiction books on Amazon. OK, don’t bother – I’ll list them for you. As of December 20, 2009 at 1:50 pm Eastern time, the top ten nonfiction sellers on the US Amazon store are:

1. Going Rogue: An American Life (Sarah Palin)
2. SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance (Steven Levitt)
3. Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government (Glenn Beck)
4. Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Greg Mortenson)
5. Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell)
6. Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves (Andrew Ross Sorkin)
7. Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… One School at a Time (Greg Mortenson)
8. Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto (Mark R. Levin)
9. Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (Nicholas Kristof)
10. A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity (Bill O’Reilly)

See any patterns here? I see several. First of all, it appears that conservatives are searching for a hero, and Palin looks better than the crusty talk-show hosts. Second of all, since gaining the White House, liberals apparently feel secure enough to engage in the leisurely fantasy that schools will end war and that we can simply “turn oppression into opportunity” for women. Third, the national conversation remains political.

But what I want to write about today is more insidious — it is the way these books are titled. Of the top 10, only O’Reilly’s #10 slot is not occupied by a title of the form “[Pithy title]: [Overly simplistic framing of the book's topic].” I guess that earns him the right to call himself a “bold fresh piece of humanity.” Come to think of it, it’s his publisher that deserves the accolade — titles are routinely chosen by the marketing machine, not by the author. (The Palin title is so utterly stupid, however, that I wonder whether it was the only original writing she did on it. Or maybe the publisher was just being ironical.)

What bothers me about these titles is not that they all contain subtitles. Subtitles have been around for centuries. But, these days, the smarmy way they trumpet and preen instead of simply explicate gets under my skin. Have readers been reduced to simpletons? Can society no longer tolerate depth and subtlety and nuance? Are the titles of books forever stripped of gravitas?

From “book titles, if they were written today”:

Then: [An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of] the Wealth of Nations
Now:  Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them

Then: Walden
Now:  Camping with Myself: Two Years in American Tuscany

Then: The Theory of the Leisure Class
Now:  Buying Out Loud: The Unbelievable Truth About What We Consume and What It Says About Us

Then: The Gospel of Matthew
Now:  40 Days and a Mule: How One Man Quit His Job and Became the Boss

It’s funny because it’s true – the titles of books today are a sad, often misleading, representation of the ideas in the text. Gone are the days when the seminal work of the age has a title like “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica” – another language, for Pete’s sake!

I’ll end with my appeal to publishers: if you spend as much energy deciding what cruft not to publish as you do crafting clever subtitles, we’d all be better off.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you are probably aware of the precipitous decline of print news circulation over the past decade, almost universally attributed to the ubiquitous and free news any joe with a mobile phone can access nowadays. Here’s a rather stunning visual.

Some unsurprising trends: the Los Angeles Times is an absolute horrorshow. Not shown: the Boston Globe disappearing off the bottom of this chart, in a two decade decline from 521,000 in 1990 to 264,105 this year.

Sad to see the LA Times doing such a dreadful business – I think they have the best online design of any major news outlet. Certainly better than my local paper, and a lot less blood-red-awful than that other media loser, the lowest-rated cable news provider, CNN.

I love McSweeney’s defiant response:

Issue 33 of McSweeney’s Quarterly will be a one-time-only, Sunday-edition sized newspaper—the San Francisco Panorama. It’ll have news (actual news, tied to the day it comes out) and sports and arts coverage, and comics (sixteen pages of glorious, full-color comics, from Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and Art Spiegelman and many others besides) and a magazine and a weekend guide, and will basically be an attempt to demonstrate all the great things print journalism can (still) do, with as much first-rate writing and reportage and design (and posters and games and on-location Antarctic travelogues) as we can get in there.

…just $55.

Billion Dollar Gram

Billions of dollars are hard to imagine. Expand your mind, then, with this remarkable illustration which manages to put these vast sums in perspective. Especially well done is the careful layout of fortunes, encouraging comparisons between unrelated items. For example, the internet porn industry is roughly the size of foreign aid given by large countries. And “Feed every child in the world for a year” is slightly less than the sum of “Beijing Olympics” and “Video Games Market.”

Some numbers seem startlingly small, in the grand scheme of things: “Save the Amazon” at $21 billion is only a bit bigger than “Yoga Industry” at $18 billion.

But the headline comparison, in my mind – even more important than the enormous looming yellow square representing the losses associated with the financial crisis – is this:

• $465 billion: Feed and educate every child on Earth for 5 years.
• $3,000 billion: Iraq war estimated total.

Of course, this seems like an absurd trade-off until you see the “Iraq War (predicted cost 2003)” is “only” $60 billion. The lesson, it seems, is that the predicted cost of a war could be off by a factor of 50. To say nothing of the trade-offs made with human lives, war is a risky bet for a government to take; perhaps riskier even than bank bailouts and stimulus plans.

It is my most heartfelt private crusade: never use Starbucks’ absurd size terminology. Ever. Even though you buy their (admittedly very good) coffee several times each week, it’s a medium, not a grande. My only slip-up was some weeks ago, before a 6:00 phone call. Never again!

Someone else's Kindle

One memory I have of freshman year in college is Jim’s first English assignment (everyone’s first assignments were momentous that year), for which the notoriously difficult-to-please professor asked everyone to write an essay on “What is Reading?”. No – I remember now – it was not his first assignment, but the paper he had to write in a single night in order to stay in the class he’d already registered for, due to an over-booked roster. I have no idea what he wrote, but it had something to do with interlocutors.

My Kindle arrived today (together with a handsome leather case, not shown), and I think it will change the answer to that question, but not very much.

First impressions: It’s an attractive device, and feels “solid” – the buttons aren’t flimsy, for example. It will disappoint you, however, if you expect it to behave like a computer – response times are long for things like scrolling through a menu of options. It seems clear that the designers were mostly concerned about two experiences: buying things to read, and reading those things. The rest of it (annotations, searching, etc.) takes a bit of patience.

Shopping on the Kindle is a snap – browse categories, type a search term, click buy, start reading. Quite impressive. Everything is delivered wirelessly over the Sprint cell network (which my Kindle says gets 5 bars here at my desk), without the need to sign up for or pay for any kind of wireless service. Entire books are downloaded very quickly (~20 seconds). You can delete the book from the device (not that you need to, seeing as it can store hundreds or thousands of volumes), and then re-download it later from your Kindle, computer, iPhone, or second Kindle.

Reading, the raison d’être of the Kindle, is equally smooth. Click the “Home” button, select a book, start reading. It appears that the Kindle book format allows for many different typefaces and typographical treatments. Re-size the text to suit your liking. At the most read-able text size, there is about a half-page of text on a screen, compared to an “actual” book. Turning pages takes about three-quarters of one second from button-press to new display. The table of contents is a button + click away. The screen itself is easy to read in both low-medium light and full-on sunlight, and does not induce eye-strain at all (there is no backlight). Integrated dictionary.

What is reading, indeed? Some things that reading on the Kindle is not: skimming, flipping through, jumping around, multi-chromatic. This is fine when you read a novel – a completely linear task. Start at page one, keep going until you finish. But with books like programming tutorials or references, I think the Kindle will not offer the best experience because using a book in a non-linear fashion is slow (page turn, page turn, page turn… or menu, scroll, scroll, click, scroll, scroll, click on “index”…).

But that’s okay! The Kindle doesn’t have to (and won’t) make books obsolete. The Gutenberg analogy only goes so far. In that case, illuminated manuscripts became relatively worthless – except for aesthetics, printed texts were superior in almost every setting and in almost every way. With e-books, though, only some settings and book types are improved. In my case, the Kindle will lighten my daily commuter bag about 2-3 pounds, and save me about $10 per book. But it won’t replace textbooks.

Those are my thoughts. So far very pleased.

I’m doing a little rising from the dead myself today, fighting intense fatigue at the strange hours of my travel east. There’s also something a bit supernatural and/or miraculous about arriving somewhere before you leave.

Yesterday was our last in Bangkok. I insisted on a trip to the Jim Thompson store (no time for the House). I had never heard of him – his story is interesting (it includes a mysterious demise, or I should say concludes) and his merchandise is really quite stunning.

I also insisted on a massage, anticipating this long day of flying. It was also quite stunning, emphasis on stun. Some of it I wouldn’t wish on an enemy.

Now, to pass along some general interest inter-net things for your amusement. First is an infographic from Good Magazine showing you how water consumption can vary widely depending on choices you make like whether to have the steak or chicken. According to my calculations, eating a pound of beef uses as much water as taking a 65-hour shower.

The second is something called Layer Tennis. On Friday afternoons, Coudal Partners (a design firm) gets two talented designers to “compete” using graphics passed back and forth, changing every 15 minutes, posted live as the “volleys” are completed, the whole “match” often using a guest commentator and a twitter feed. See the latest one here. To navigate through the volleys, use the [1] [2] [3]… links just below the image on the right side of the page (where it says “View Match”). It’s not for everyone – the players often make heavy use of internet memes past and present (e.g. the Fail Whale makes an appearance in the lastest match). I think it’s remarkable when you remember that each iteration represents only 15 minutes of work.

That’s all I got for now. To conserve water, I’ll opt for an airport shower instead of Bul Go Gi.

UPDATE: Looks like the domain is suddenly inactive. Too bad – this was pretty cool.

Image via: recycling bread board. So clever, but I worry about encouraging birds in my kitchen. It might be better for an out-door meal on the patio.

I also like the site design — it’s made to look like what apache spits out (if you ask it) when there is no “index.html” file to render. You can’t get any more minimalist in web design.

migas-pájaros

I ran across a blog recently that I must share because of its uniquely effective organizing principle: what might be a “tag” or “category” (are they different?) on any other blog is connected explicitly to a book.

The result is rightly titled A Working Library - on it’s face it is just a set of blog posts, but the All Books page shows you the posts categorized by book references. For example, open the Diary of a Bad Year (Coetzee) page and read along with the author as she pulls out quotes, adds her thoughts, and connects ideas to other books in the library.

The format manages to be more interesting than a set of book reviews, which tend to be so wrapped up delivering a verdict. AWL captures something of the reading itself.