First Weeks in Review
More links dump than anything else...
It’s been a slow couple of weeks in terms of content generated by me, because nothing else has been slow around here. Being department chair means that the first week of class is always extra chaotic and stressful, which prevented me from doing much last week. And then this week we had the one-two of my trip down to NYC with The Pip to see an NBA game (more below) and then because I have reached A Certain Age a routine screening colonoscopy for me later in the week. The less said about the prep for that, the better.
But it’s been a little while since I rounded up what I’ve been writing and reading, and the open browser tabs are piling up, so here’s a links-heavy roundup post.
Me On Substack:
— Miscellany: Comment on the End of the Leap Second: A letter I sent to the New York Times that they didn’t use, so I decided to recycle it.
— Fluke Injuries and Living With Risk: Thoughts prompted by the Damar Hamlin injury in an NFL game, which says less about football than the general fragility of existence.
— Coach Pip Calls It: How my 11-year-old identified the correct strategy for the Milwaukee Bucks to beat the Knicks.
Links Dump:
— What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble's Surprising Turnaround? by Ted Gioia: A look at how the big-box bookstore mounted a comeback by selling books.
— Brandon Sanderson, fame, and the failure of the Long Tail by Matthew Claxton: Some thoughts on why the recommendations of big online retailers are so damn bad.
— Career Ceilings by Matt Reed: What can be done about the all-too-common situation in academia where people hit the top of the professional track they’re on and really can’t be promoted in-house.
— Resilience, Another Thing We Can't Talk About, by Freddie DeBoer: It’s sort of buried under grievances about social-media discourse, but the core point here about the inevitability of Bad Things and a need to deal with them is a good one.
— The Culture of Therapy: Or, Men will literally write a whole long blog post instead of going to therapy by Adam Kotsko: “The fact that some people abuse it does change the fact that many people need and benefit from therapy, etc., etc. But not everyone needs therapy, and every viewer of the Sopranos knows that there’s a danger that therapy just helps bad people rationalize their badness more effectively.”
— Maya calendar may be more than 3000 years old, laser mapping reveals, by Redrigo Perez Ortega: I am slightly skeptical of reading too much into some of these alignments, but this is generally relevant to my interests.
— There is No Such Entity as Productivity by Freddie deBoer: I find this tough-love advice fits with my standard unhelpful advice about writing productivity which is that you need to want to write the thing you’re supposed to be writing more than you want to do the other things you might do instead.
— You Don’t Know How Bad the Pizza Box Is by Saahil Desai: Coincidentally, I was eating takeout pizza as I was reading this.
— Roman vs. Modern Concrete, by Brian Potter: A deep dive into the science behind why some concrete structures last longer than others.
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
I snapped this while heading to breakfast with The Pip before getting our train home at Penn Station. As I said to him, this building always looks to me like one of those triangular UFO’s has crashed into a more ordinary skyscraper.
Pseudo-Random Songs of the Week:
Here’s my multi-million-dollar suggestion for the next cultural craze: A Broadway musical based on 69 Love Songs by the Magnetic Fields. I mean, they’ve hit big with Billy Joel and ABBA, and the best of these are as rich a source text as anything they have to offer. And there won’t be a dry eye in the house after the climactic performance of Busby Berkeley Dreams:
Call me, Broadway producers. Well, actually, call Stephin Merritt because he’s the one who actually has the rights to this stuff. But, you know, throw me a finder’s fee, or something.
And that’s what’s been going on hereabouts. I expect there to be more actual original content here in the near-ish future, as the term settles into more of a routine. If you want to see that as it happens, here’s a button:
And if you know Stephin Merritt (or are Stephin Merritt) and want to get in on the musical thing, the comments will be open:
I really wanted to comment on <i>Brandon Sanderson, fame, and the failure of the Long Tail</i> but alas comments on that blog are restricted to paid subscribers (=? uncritical fans) so any feedback the author gets will be just a tad biased.
What he's missing is that Amazon used to produce excellent book recommendations. They eventually "fixed" that - last I checked they don't even have an accurate search function, preferring sponsored results to accurate ones. The bad recommendations are a conscious choice, to extract the maximum possible money over the short term, rather than satisfying their potential customers.
LibraryThing still produces fairly decent recommendations, based on the aggregate of what a particular user owns. They may be a bit too heavy on bestsellers, but nothing like what Claxton describes.