Common Sense
While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (Justice John Paul Stevens, dissenting)
My year in cities 2009
At least one night spent in each city in 2009. An asterisk indicates multiple non-contiguous visits.
- Boulder, CO
- Denver, CO
- Boise, ID
- Boston, MA (*)
- Epping, NH
- Indianapolis, IN
- Chiang Dao, Thailand
- Chiang Mai, Thailand (*)
- Bangkok, Thailand (*)
- London, UK (*)
- Chicago, IL (*)
- Brooklyn, New York, NY (*)
- Manhattan, New York, NY (*) — most visited (5 times)
- San Francisco, CA (*)
- Berkeley, CA (home)
- Lansing, NY (*)
- Portland, OR (Initially omitted because I used my past flight schedules to tally cities, but we drove to Ryan and Eliz’s house for Thanksgiving. Thanks, Eliz.)
Pith: Subtitles and the Condescension of Marketing Nonfiction
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:
- Going Rogue: An American Life (Sarah Palin)
- SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance (Steven Levitt)
- Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government (Glenn Beck)
- Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan (Greg Mortenson)
- Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell)
- Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves (Andrew Ross Sorkin)
- Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… One School at a Time (Greg Mortenson)
- Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto (Mark R. Levin)
- Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (Nicholas Kristof)
- 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 ThemThen: Walden
Now: Camping with Myself: Two Years in American TuscanyThen: The Theory of the Leisure Class
Now: Buying Out Loud: The Unbelievable Truth About What We Consume and What It Says About UsThen: 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.
Storyboard – Star Wars
Combining my love of info-graphics (especially hand-drawn) and Star Wars, xkcd has produced what it calls “movie narrative charts,” partially represented below. From the chart, “The horizontal axis is time. The vertical grouping of the lines indicates which characters are together at a given time.” Click for the full version, which also includes The Lord of the Rings, Primer, and Twelve Angry Men.
Star Wars narrative diagram from xkcd.com
Halloween Hijinks
Just the first video I could get my hands on of our roving Cantina Band in the Mission last night. I’m on glockenspiel, C is playing the gourd-adorned whistle. Other instruments included: clarinet, fiddle-phone (my own word for it), bass guitar, tuba, flute, and toy accordion.
We roamed the streets, playing street corners and random Halloween crowds, performing in all manner of bars and restaurants – fancy, dive, crystal stemware, pint glasses – to rousing ovations. Most people recognized us on sight – “Hey look! It’s the Star Wars cantina band!” – but it blew their minds when we actually played the music. A great effect.
See some pictures here, including the Cantina Band “Alderaan Road” photo shoot.
UPDATE: for facebook users, more pictures here and here.
UPDATE 2: I swapped out the youtube video above to a higher-quality version. We also have a flickr groups page set up – http://www.flickr.com/groups/1228151@N25/ – and there are other videos here, here, and here.
UPDATE 3: Found on Laughing Squid and Current.com (which seems to have scraped it wholesale from Laughing Squid… tut tut).
Halloween Hype
I was hoping to have pictures and video of the Halloween dress rehearsal from last night, but there seems to be some delay. In the meantime, here’s a hint:
Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes
Nothing News
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.
Best Berkeley Brunches
I’m a big fan of the brunch – really, breakfast food is what I’m after, about a 90/10 split between savory and sweet. Here are my favorite Berkeley brunch spots.
| Name | Food | Coffee | Atmosphere | Cost | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fellini | *** | *** | **** | $$ | *** |
| Just three blocks from our first Berkeley apartment, Fellini eventually became our go-to restaurant for dinner, brunch, and on-the-go coffee (via their out-door coffee bar). The brunch menu has plenty of favorites, but tends to be on the vegan/healthy side, viz. no pork bacon (turkey only), lots of tofu scrambles, no really fatty hollandaise-laden dishes. | |||||
| Bette’s Oceanview Diner | ***** | **** | **** | $$ | ****+ |
| It doesn’t technically have an ocean view, but it is in the neighborhood formerly known as “Oceanview,” now called “4th Street” because, well, there’s not much else around except the stuff on 4th Street. My theory is that Bette’s accounts for a significant amount of retail foot traffic that would otherwise not bother to stop. The food is simply awesome – beautiful breakfasts without being boring (or too creative). On-menu items are great, but more often than not I end up with one of the weekly specials. The homemade chorizo is excellent. The only drawback is the wait: two people on a weekend morning will likely wait 45 minutes. Four people can expect to wait an hour. | |||||
| Jimmy Bean’s | **** | *** | **** | $$ | **** |
| A great selection of egg-based dishes with a slight Mexican recipe bias. Partial service means you stand in line to order, but even a long queue usually clears up within 10-15 minutes. Good espresso drinks, passable communal-carafe drip coffee. French toast offered Real maple syrup, but otherwise unremarkable. No peanut butter. Good bacon. Besides being a great brunch spot, the secret of Jimmy Bean’s is their low-cost, great-atmosphere, full-service dinner. | |||||
| Crepevine | *** | *** | ** | $$ | ** |
| So new it’s not even on their website’s list of locations, the occupant of the corner space on Shattuck and Cedar serves a reasonable meal. Service is a bit lacking (rare coffee refills, slow to clean up abandoned tables), and the high ceilings make the place seem more like a “warehouse” than “spacious and bright.” Beware the namesake crepes, as well – ours was soggy, drowned in its own topping-juice. But if you’re making a stop at Andronico’s anyway… it works. | |||||
| Liaison Bistro | **** | **** | ***** | $$$ | **** |
| This is the kind of place you take out-of-town company or a date – I feel underdressed in my hoodie. Service is way beyond the other contenders on this list, and the food is very well-prepared. The menu has a predictably French bias, but is recognizable brunch fare. Items of note include the list of “Croques” in place of the “Benedicts” found on everyone else’s menu. Liaison also serves a steak-and-eggs, which used to be my signature breakfast dish in college; it was the only plate I could manage to clean. | |||||
| Bacheeso’s | **** | * | ***** | $$ | *** |
| Some great Mediterranean-styled dishes here, but I only ever order the German Farmer’s Omelette, so I can’t speak from experience. They also have a huge breakfast buffet, which I avoid because buffets are always money-losing propositions for me. The drip coffee tasted funky on at least two occasions, and is not very satisfying on its best days. Five-star atmosphere for the consistent appearance of the way-cool accordion player, who entertains you with strains of Hotel California, Ace of Base, and various other pop songs. | |||||
| Cafe Fanny | **** | **** | * | $$ | *** |
| An Alice Waters joint, Cafe Fanny has wonderfully simple and tasty food. For example, do this at home: toast a wide slice of levain or ciabatta; fry or poach an egg and place on top of the toast; sprinkle with salt, pepper, oregano, and a few drops of red wine vinegar. Delicious. One star for atmosphere due to the fact that seating is essentially confined to two parking spaces in the midst of other parked cars on a busy street. | |||||
| Chester’s Bayview Cafe | *** | *** | ** | $$+ | ** |
| Unremarkable interior… or maybe it just feels empty during brunch hours. Great location off Shattuck. Nothing special on the menu. They charge extra for organic eggs (wtf?). | |||||
On Readers
“Why?” is a natural question to ask of any blogger, or for that matter, any writer. The answer is “To be read.”
In the pre-interweb business of writing, there is this unfortunate hurdle between question and answer called “publishing.” For a novelist, the process is an onerous trudge through the world of editors and publishers, only rarely ending in an item even available to be read, let alone commercial success. (Congratulations, by the way, to my dear old friend Jael Maack on the sale of her debut novel, Simmer.) An academic writer fences with anonymous peer reviewers and journal editors. A screenwriter grovels for attention from producers and film agents.
A blogger faces no barrier to publishing, except having a working internet connection and perhaps a functioning mouse with which to click the “Publish” button. Anything can be broadcast across the Tubes, and everything is; the marginal cost is not much more than zero. One trade-off is quality – I, blogger, have no editor (other than the red dotted lines warning me of mis-spelled words), no exogenous critical authority.
As for the problem of how to be read, the key trade-off is marketing – who even knows that I have written something, and thus who will read it? Novelists are to a greater or lesser degree provided with marketing machinery by the publisher. Academics have a built-in readership in the journal subscriber list. Screenwriters’ success is rewarded with a film, distributed and marketed by a whole separate set of interested parties.
For a blogger, readership is established via two mutually reinforcing channels: the Subscriber and the Hyperlink. Subscribers are readers who visit the blog as a starting point – they include the stream of entries in their RSS feeds, or save the URL in their browser’s bookmarks. They visit often, at least as often as new posts appear. They post links to your blog on their blog, attracting Hyperlink readers.
A Hyperlink reader is someone who reads a blog because it is a destination – the end-point of a journey that began somewhere else, on some other site. Some of these Hyperlink readers become Subscribers (hence the bit about these being mutually reinforcing).
My Brush with the Vast Pool of Readers on the Interweb
Another difference between interweb and pre-interweb writers is the availability of statistics to prove the existence of readers, which somehow justifies the whole enterprise. It is only because of my “Blog Stats” that I was even made aware of my own brush with that vast pool of interweb readers.
- April 17, 2009: Published Conjecture – an observation made on the commuter train one evening.
- August 3, 2009: Popular local blogger Jason Kottke publishes The Hot Waitress Index, a Freakonomics-style post on various odd every-day correlations with the macroeconomy, including the prevalence of hot waitresses.
- August 3, 2009: I send an email to Jason (who does not enable comments on his blog) alerting him to my related piece.
- August 4, 2009: Jason updates his post with a link to Conjecture.
- September 3, 2009: Daniel Finkelstein, in his blog for the TimesOnline (UK), includes Conjecture as number 3 in his list of 10 strangest ways to measure a recession (he reused a lot of Kottke’s links, with attribution).
Weekly visitors to "A New Leaf"
I have to admit, I have some deep sense of satisfaction from this episode, as if I made some meaningful contribution to the interweb. And, of course, because I was read.
3 Decades, 54 Minutes
As some folks at work began sending emails around with music recommendations, I indulged in a bit of iPod introspection. It turns out that I’ve been stuck on The Cure lately – “Love Cats” just cracks me up. “So wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully… pretty.” [chuckle]
In that same thread, a friend pointed out 8tracks – a site for uploading and sharing playlists of music. In order to be street-legal, it has some bizarre restrictions (playlists must have at least 8 tracks with no more than 2 songs from any particular album or artist; the second time someone else listens to the playlist the songs play in random order, etc.) but is otherwise unencumbered. Don’t bother with old DRM-laden iTunes tracks, however – I had to re-buy a couple of tracks in order to get the more recent DRM-free versions.
Without further ado, please enjoy my first creation: 3 Decades, 54 Minutes. (Warning: some non-kid-friendly lyrics here and there, cf. “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails. I was going for musicality, and I frankly love every one of these songs, but they aren’t for everyone.)
