February 2012
8 posts
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“Do you know the philosopher Slavoj Žižek? He has this thing about love, the evil...”
– John Jeremiah Sullivan talking with Michael Goetzman, L.A. Review of Books
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“Lady: a child’s categorical noun for non-mother adults.”
– Molly Fischer, So many feelings
Fischer gets at some of the things that irk me about that “endemic verbal tic” lady — that it’s coy and childlike and signals a kind of mainstream-disguised-as-alt conformity, not to mention that it seems to want to deny the commonalities...
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Notes: Hark! A vagrant, Kate Beaton
Dear Kate Beaton, you and your book have shamed me into making an embarrassing public admission: I know nothing about Canadian history.
Right now my Canadian followers are smirking and eye-rolling and muttering something about !$&#!$ Americans. (My other non-U.S. followers are dusting off their geography jokes.) Dudes, I know! Which is why I’ll welcome any suggestion you might make...
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New York Times Magazine Hires Thought Catalog... →
Forgive a question from a non-New Yorker, but is the Observer sort of a NY-specific Onion?
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“In 2004, Wasserstein & Company bought the thriving mail-order fruit retailer...”
– James Surowiecki, Private inequity
I deal with some of these issues in my job, but I had no idea private equity had gotten this predatory. A must read, but be prepared to be pissed.
January 2012
23 posts
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“Sometimes, when you find yourself the lone grump before a buzz juggernaut, you...”
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Our own Lydia Kiesling really knows how to start off a book review. (via millionsmillions)
This is a good piece. Kiesling’s jabs are tres amusant. But what makes the review work is the fact that she admits her biases and explains what she does like fiction to do. This is a really helpful...
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“Why do I object so viscerally to Two Lights and their ilk’s expenditure? Is it...”
– Nick Southall, On selling out and privilege in music
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“Bayley loaded the map into a computerized laser-cutting program. An hour later,...”
– Architecture Student Turns Ward Map Into Jigsaw Puzzle | NBC Chicago (via ourmaninchicago)
This is awesome! Me want.
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Watchmaura:
Donating to the Best Music Writing series is the functional equivalent of pre-ordering the 2012 edition of the book—which will collect 2011’s best pieces of criticism, reportage, and other media on music from publications of all types and from all corners of the globe. Why not do so today?
I donated yesterday. What are y’all waiting for? Only five days left!
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“it should be called h+1+n+1 because this shit is worse than bird flu amirite”
– One of ILM’s pseudonymous posters on that n+1 piece about Pitchfork.
I read ILM threads for the comedy and am rarely disappointed. But this seems like the most astute response to the article as well.
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“The deadness of Hirst’s product lines—flipping the bird to anyone...”
– Peter Schjeldahl smacks Damien Hirst (and his devotees and detractors) upside the head
As always, Schjeldahl states in elegant prose my scattered, inarticulate feelings about a visual artist. In this case Damien Hirst who, as the critic points out, isn’t interesting enough to get offended or...
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Notes: Eleanor of Aquitaine, Alison Weir
It’s probably not a good idea to approach a book of medieval history with high entertainment expectations. Life in twelfth-century Europe? A grim, relentless grind of war, disease, famine (or food so bad famine’s almost preferable) and unquestioning obedience to God, king, overlord, husband—even for the Queen of England and duchess of what constitutes most of modern-day France.
...
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Gosh this new Cloud Nothings album is crazy...
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“Mothers fretting over the sexual precocity of their sons can just sit back and...”
– Heather Havrilesky reviewing Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl land
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desnoise:
“The thing that [Jennifer] Egan does that no other American writer I can think of pulls off, is to be formally daring without being even a little bit pretentious. She takes her stories in crazy twists down wild alleys, without ever let the book turn into a writing workshop experiment. Whenever I read something that is labeled “formally daring”, on each page I can feel the criticisms...
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Here comes the rooster →
Yippee!
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“Many photos on Tumblr are not even credited, because to digital image collectors...”
– Meagan Day, On tumblr
Or many tumblr users are simply too lazy or intellectually incurious to credit images to their creators. This is theoretical excusifying for what is essentially dick behavior.
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“The idea of the “liberal elite” could not survive the depredations of the 1% in...”
– Barbara and John Ehrenreich, The making of the American 99% and the collapse of the middle class
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Notes: A visit from the goon squad, Jennifer Egan
I loved A Visit from the Goon Squad!
Until I read it.
Damn you hype-mongering critics, raving friends and false-hope-boosting Pulitzer Prize committee. I struggled, from the opening scene on a therapist’s couch (really?) to that pointer business in the final dystopian (really?) chapter, to understand just what warmed the hearts of my fellow readers and left mine a cold hard stone. I admit...
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Book notes: Faithful Place, Tana French
Notes on the first completed item on my 2012 book challenge list. One down, 29 to go.
Good news first. Faithful Place is a superb police procedural. Smart, suspenseful, well-plotted, humane, the novel does exactly what it’s supposed to. What’s that? Oh, delineate law and justice and map those junctures where it becomes necessary to sacrifice one for the other. (I’ve read a lot...
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“A merchandising industry geared up to cash in on the popularity of the novel....”
– Literary critic Matthew Sweet in his intro to the Penguin Classics edition of The Woman in White, first serialized in 1859.
In case you thought the practice of product tie-ins was invented in the 1970s.
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“If I didn’t have some sort of goal in mind, I might still be in the halfway...”
– Gabe Habash, Reading 55 books in 2011: What I learned
This is basically why I did a reading challenge in 2011 and why I’m working on my list for 2012. Even when it’s painful, it’s good to actually finish books!
December 2011
18 posts
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New York I love you, but get off my TV →
screwrocknroll:
Chicago is portrayed more frequently than I thought, but if this year’s lineup is any indication, it’s portrayed extremely badly.
Indeed. But this is the case every year. “Chicago” is coastal shorthand for “large American city that isn’t LA or NYC.” You can learn everything these shows know about Chicago without ever leaving O’Hare’s...
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Why women need fat →
Yes!
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I just made these cookies and they are fabulous
Extremely fast & easy & festive & delicious! I’m about to make a second batch so I can give them to more people. (Recipe from Epicurious; tweaked by me.)
Orange chocolate chip shortbread cookies
Makes about 24
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour 1/2 teaspoon baking powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature 1/2 cup sugar Grated peel from...
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“In many ways, Amazon is the perfect snow globe of late stage capitalism. You...”
– Vanessa Veselka, In the wake of protest: One woman’s attempt to unionize Amazon
Not just a “more reasons to be scared of Amazon” piece. Veselka’s thesis—that today’s workers can be conned into giving up basic rights and anything approaching fair pay in exchange...
imaginaryimageblog:
A newfound black and white photo of Tupac laying down tracks in a studio while wearing a Neutral Milk Hotel t-shirt
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“When you have three times more housing than homeless people, it’s not a housing...”
– Astra Taylor, Occupy Wall Street on your street
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“Taking the almond theme to excess is what makes this cake extraordinary: The...”
– You’re Doing It Wrong: Fruitcake
If your fruitcake doesn’t taste like Bon Iver, you’re doing it wrong.
But I’m making this recipe! How could you lose with the quadruple threat of marzipan, almonds, almond extract and amaretto.
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“Moore’s study and mastery in Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Kung Fu,...”
– Duff McKagan (yes! of GnR!) recommends Christopher Moore’s novel Lamb: The gospel according to Biff, Christ’s childhood pal for The Millions—and it sounds strangely awesome.
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“Make a list of miracles. That ice floats. That giraffes exist. That we are born...”
– Nick Jaina, How to write a song
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“There’s certainly an aesthetic dimension to the struggle – part of the reason...”
– Capitalist realism: Is art the alternative?
Mark Fisher talking with Mike Watson. Mixed emotions on this one. Love it in theory, but can’t help remembering all those historical misses of leftist art and design. Especially in the realm of architecture and urban planning, oy!
(I’ll...
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Sentences that make me want to kick things
Most of the time I stand in awe of New Yorker copy. And then I come across a couple “not uncomplicated” sentences like the following from Hilton Als’ blurb on Diane Keaton’s new memoir (“Critic’s Notebook,” 12/5/11 issue):
Writing in a collaboration of sorts with her late mother, Dorothy Hall, a great beauty—she was named Mrs. Los Angeles in...
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November 2011
11 posts
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“This runaway at the top is different from other periods of great inequality,...”
– Jeff Madrick, “America’s new robber barons”
This is a point that probably isn’t made often enough in discussions about America’s wealth-disparity crisis. The 19th century robber barons were greedy bastards whose treatment of workers was inexcusable. But they built...