Results tagged “culture”

It's not a depression if "depression-themed" merchandise is salable.

First, it's not a depression if people actually have money to buy cutsie depression-themed junk, as opposed to, say, food, clothing, and shelter.

Second, it's not a depression if people are able to see anything remotely humorous about the state of the economy or the possibility of a depression.

I'll be kind and assume that those who see economic depression as a market opportunity simply don't know what they are talking about. And so I'll suggest that such people browse the Dorothea Lange archives rather than speculating on the sort of personality that might see bread lines and massive population displacement as a good thing.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a blogger for The Atlantic, has been running a Friday poetry feature. Intriguing, thought provoking, and worth a visit.

Another campaign season, another chance for charges of "elitism" to fly back and forth. Let's leave aside for the moment the fact that the word has no meaning if Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild can use it to describe anyone. And let's skip over the question of why mediocrity is more acceptable in a president than in, say, a surgeon or an airline pilot. Would you want a doctor who bragged about being last in his class at med school?

Instead, I'd like to look at the idea that attending a top school necessarily hangs that red 'E' around your neck. I can't say what the Ivies are like, but I did go to MIT, where any notion of one's personal specialness lasts about as long as it takes for the grades on the first exam to come back. Most MIT students were near the top of their high school class. Most will be merely average at MIT. Far from reinforcing arrogance, my time there was a four year lesson in humility.

Do some people come out of top-tier schools convinced that they are God's gift to the world? Of course. But would those people be any less arrogant if they'd floated through a less challenging program with fewer intellectual peers? Somehow I doubt it.

Semicon West is just one day old, and I've already accumulated five thumb drives. I like them a lot better than paper press kits or even CDs. The materials are right there in electronic form, and when I'm done the thumb drives themselves come in very handy.

I remember the first time I ever saw one of those things, holding it in my hand and thinking "ubiquitous data." The most valuable part of any computer, from low-end PCs to massive server farms, is the data it contains. Flash memory puts that data in the palm of your hand, and that's why demand for flash seems to be perfectly elastic. The more people have, the more they want. An address book is useful, but having your favorite music and pictures of your family with you when you travel, that's valuable.

While the Wall Street Journal's news coverage is excellent, its opinion pages tilt far to the right. I disagree with the Journal on almost everything. Still, this article on the New York Philharmonic's recent visit to Pyongyang hits the nail squarely on the head. The notion that one concert will have any impact whatsoever on the world's most closed society is beyond naive.

I've been reading Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's about where food on the American table comes from, from gigantic industrial farms to local hunters and gatherers. Pollan argues, quite convincingly, that industrial agriculture is an ecological and nutritional disaster. It creates unstable monocultures, sustains them with huge quantities of chemicals, undermines other kinds of farming, and yet fails to pay a living wage to the people who practice it.

So far so good. Unfortunately, the book -- at least so far, I'm about halfway through -- is long on problems and short on solutions. It's all well and good to suggest that we should all eat locally and sustainably grown food, but Pollan also estimates that two-fifths of the world's current population would starve without synthetic fertilizers. Some argue that industrial agriculture makes the problem worse by crowding out local agriculture in the developing world, but Pollan completely ignores the question.

At the other end of the income scale, the United States and Europe have come to expect tomatoes in January and citrus in places where it could never grow naturally. Suggesting that large numbers of people will turn their backs on these luxuries seems ludicrously naive. Here in Seattle, some "community-supported" "local" farms include California citrus in their offerings, while others are very vague about which products they actually grow themselves. Clearly, their subscribers would rather fudge their definitions of "sustainable" and "locally grown" than do without.

I don't have answers either, I'm afraid, but then I don't tell people what they should eat. It would be nice to see someone like Pollan go beyond "agribusiness is bad" and suggest a scalable alternative.

Wired Magazine presents the Lamest 'Value-Added' Products. It's not really surprising that seven of them are bottled water products. (Including two different ready-to-freeze ice cube blister packs.) Three more are vodkas. (One of them filtered through diamonds, for no apparent reason except to drive up the price.)

But I agree with the editors that the number one most lame value-added product is . . . air. Canned. With artificial fragrance added.

Amazon has launched a DRM-free music store. 2 million songs, MP3 format, 256 kbps encoding, no restrictions. With two major labels (EMI and Universal) having dropped restrictions, device-agnostic music is only a matter of time.

There's an interesting article in the New York Times Magazine about independent musicians in the Internet era. Many of them are only able to reach an audience at all because of the Internet, but at some point the fan intimacy that made them successful becomes a huge burden. I can understand that. Ten emails a day from readers would be fantastic, but a hundred? A thousand? How do you balance that kind of load against the solitude that creativity demands?

(Link by way of 43 Folders.)

Joshua Bell was recently named the best classical musician in America. A few days before that, he played at Washington's L'Enfant Plaza Metro stop, just to see what would happen. Mostly he was ignored, but the few people who noticed what was going on got a real treat.