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Published October 31, 2015

James Gleick on What Libraries Can (Still) Do

James Gleick (The Information, Faster) on libraries, and James Palfrey’s book BiblioTech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google, at the NYRB Blog:

In the midst of an information explosion, librarians are still the most versatile information specialists we have. And the purest. In his new book, BiblioTech, a wise and passionate manifesto, John Palfrey reminds us that the library is the last free space for the gathering and sharing of knowledge: “Our attention cannot be bought and sold in a library.” As a tradition barely a century and a half old in the United States, it gives physical form to the principle that public access to knowledge is the foundation of democracy.

The problem of libraries now—and it is a problem—involves some paradoxes, which need to be sorted out. For one thing, as Palfrey says, librarians will need to cherish their special talent as “stewards” while letting go of the instinct to be “collectors.” Knowledge in physical form needs to be handled carefully, preserved, and curated. But with digital information pouring into iPhones and Kindles in petabytes—via Twitter and Instagram and YouTube, not to mention Amazon’s self-publishing factories—libraries need to rethink old habits. They cannot collect everything, or even a small fraction of everything. “That model is already too hard to keep up,” Palfrey says. “A network of stewards can accomplish vastly more than a disconnected (even sometimes competitive) group of collectors ever can.”

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Published January 18, 2013

Something for the Weekend

Rubbish — Rachel Cooke on the artist Kurt Schwitters at The Guardian:

Merz doesn’t mean anything: it is a nonsense word (it comes from Commerzbank, an ad for which appears in one of his earliest collages). But after 1918 everything Schwitters made was Merz, whether it was periodical, painting or poem. He was a one-man movement. “The word denotes essentially the combination of all conceivable materials for artistic purposes,” he said. “And technically the principle of equal evaluation of the individual materials… A perambulator wheel, wire-netting, string and cotton wool are factors having equal rights with paint.” In other words, art could be made from the things most people regarded as rubbish. Almost overnight, he became a collagist.

There is a slide-show of Schwitters’ collages here.

Also: Merzman: The Art of Kurt Schwitters, is a fascinating 30-minute BBC Radio 4 documentary about the artist and his work in Britain.

The exhibition Kurt Schwitters in Britain opens at the Tate January 30, 2013.

Going Underground — The iconic London Underground typeface, designed by Edward Johnston in 1913, turns 100:

“Underground” — later known as “Johnston” — was circulated as a lettering guide for sign-painters and also made into wood and metal type for posters, signs, and other publicity materials used throughout London’s transport network.

Johnston himself only drew one weight of the typeface. He based its weight and proportions on seven diamond-shaped strokes of a pen stacked in a row. This gesture even shows up in the typeface itself, with the characteristic diamond used as the tittle of the “i” and “j”. He felt so strongly about the weight of the design that when another student of his agreed to create an accompanying set of bold capitals, Johnston wouldn’t speak to him for decades afterward.

And finally…

Fire Hose — James Gleick on the Library of Congress collecting and storage of Twitter messages, for the New York Review of Books:

This is an ocean of ephemera. A library of Babel. No one is under any illusions about the likely quality—seriousness, veracity, originality, wisdom—of any one tweet. The library will take the bad with the good: the rumors and lies, the prattle, puns, hoots, jeers, bluster, invective, bawdy probes, vile gossip, epigrams, anagrams, quips and jibes, hearsay and tittle-tattle, pleading, chicanery, jabbering, quibbling, block writing and ASCII art, self-promotion and humblebragging, grandiloquence and stultiloquence. New news every millisecond. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances. Now comical then tragical matters.

Call it what you will, the Twitter corpus now forms a piece of “the creative record of America” and therefore falls squarely within the library’s mission…

 

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Published August 8, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

A few remembrances of art critic Robert Hughes, author of The Shock of the New, Nothing If Not Critical and Things I Didn’t Know among others, who died earlier this week aged 74…

Maria Bustillos for The Awl:

“The Shock of the New”… brought him fame, and no wonder. It’s a marvel: a solid education in post-Impressionist modern art of the 20th century in the form of a luscious entertainment stretching over hours and hours; awareness, scholarship, wit, and a visual sensitivity matched for once by an equally sensitive sense of language, all delivered in a brisk, whip-smart, slightly clipped Anglo-Australian voice of enormous power and beauty.

Adam Gopnik for The New Yorker:

Hughes believed in modern art with something close to innocence. Although “The Shock of the New” is in many ways an account of the tragedy of modernism—the tragedy of Utopias unachieved, historical triumphs made hollow, evasions of market values that ended by serving them—that tragedy is more than set off by the triumph of modern artists.

Jonathan Jones for The Guardian:

Hughes believed in modern art, whose story he told more eloquently than anyone else ever has. He was not some stick-in-the-mud. But he compared art in the 1900s with the art of today and observed that even our best do not deserve comparison with the pioneers of modernism. This is a truth that is hard to refute. The words of Robert Hughes have cost me a lot of sleep.

I’m sure there are many more… What a loss…

See also: obituaries in The Guardian,  New York Times, and The Telegraph.

Fertilizer — The always fascinating Jeet Heer reviews Blown Covers: New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant to See by Françoise Mouly, for the LA Review of Books:

the deeper value of Blown Covers is the insight it gives us into Mouly’s editing process. Editing is a very difficult art to write about, being by its very nature invisible, and based on thousands of tacit, unstated backstage decisions. Blown Covers shows that every idea that makes the page requires an editorial environment where new concepts are constantly being generated. Since the rejection rate is high, this can be frustrating for artists, but Mouly gets around this problem in part by allowing her artists to go all out during the brainstorming sessions, so that even if the idea doesn’t make the cover there is still the pleasure of daring to think of something new and fresh. The failed ideas are the necessary fertilizers of successful covers.

And finally…

Collective Unintelligence — James Gleick, author of The Information, on Autocorrect, for the New York Times:

In the past, we were responsible for our own typographical errors. Now Autocorrect has taken charge. This is no small matter. It is a step in our evolution — the grafting of silicon into our formerly carbon-based species, in the name of collective intelligence. Or unintelligence as the case may be.

 

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Published August 3, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

FPO: For Print Only features the fun cover for John Durak’s collection of poetry Condiments and Entrails designed by Bunch. 

The Oracle of Redirection — James Gleick, author of The Information, reviews four books about Google for the NYRB:

Google defines its mission as “to organize the world’s information,” not to possess it or accumulate it. Then again, a substantial portion of the world’s printed books have now been copied onto the company’s servers, where they share space with millions of hours of video and detailed multilevel imagery of the entire globe, from satellites and from its squadrons of roving street-level cameras. Not to mention the great and growing trove of information Google possesses regarding the interests and behavior of, approximately, everyone.

Glittering Delights  — Simon Schama talks to The Guardian about his recent book of essays Scribble, Scribble, Scribble:

I have this magpie instinct for the next glittering object. There are one or two things I know I can’t write about though: DIY, cricket, automobile repair. I could study it for a lifetime and not produce a word on the carburettor.

And finally…

Power, Corruption and Lies — New Yorker critic Alex Ross, author of  The Rest is Noise and Listen To This, on Oscar Wilde, homosexuality, and a new “uncensored” edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray published by Harvard University Press:

[N]o work of mainstream English-language fiction had come so close to spelling out homosexual desire. The opening pages leave little doubt that Basil Hallward, the painter of Dorian’s portrait, is in love with his subject. Once Dorian discovers his godlike powers, he carries out various heinous acts, including murder; but to the Victorian sensibility his most unspeakable deed would have been his corruption of a series of young men… At the Wilde trials of 1895, the opposing attorneys read aloud from “Dorian Gray,” calling it a “sodomitical book.” Wilde went to prison not because he loved young men but because he flaunted that love, and “Dorian Gray” became the chief exhibit of his shamelessness.

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Published June 14, 2011

James Gleick on the Future of Books

The Book Show recently broadcast James Gleick’s closing address to the Sydney Writers’ Festival, in which the author of The Information discusses the future of the printed book:

THE BOOK SHOW: The Future of the Book with James Gleick

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Published April 27, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Designer Catherine Casalino discusses her cover design for Darren Shan’s Procession of the Dead at Faceout Books.

50 / 50 — An interesting Design Observer piece by Ernest Beck on the controversy around AIGA’s 50 Books/50 Covers and the changing roles of book designers:

“The design aspect hasn’t changed, but it will,” notes [Chris] Sergio, who like other book designers believes that books and covers will endure in both print and electronic versions. “Digital versus print is a zero-sum argument,” he says. “These roads are not mutually exclusive. If anything, we want to see more competition and more critical exploration [of book design]. That’s why it would have been a shame to blend it all down into one big thing.”

Paula Scher, a partner at Pentagram Design, agrees that book design — in whatever form — is important because people still relate to visual imagery. “It’s the emotional connection,” she says. “People still remember record covers although nobody has records anymore.” Book jackets matter, whether they are on a piece of paper or in an electronic version, she continues “because when none of it matters because it’s digital or nobody does it or it doesn’t save the planet, then we murder our own craft and give excuses to be mediocre and lower standards bit by bit.”

Indelible Replicas — Author Philip Ball (Unnatural: The Heretical Idea of Making People) reviews The Information by James Gleick for The Observer:

Robert Burton, the Oxford anatomist of melancholy, confessed in 1621 that he was drowning in books, pamphlets, news and opinions. All the twittering and tweeting today, the blogs and wikis and apparent determination to archive even the most ephemeral and trivial thought has, as James Gleick observes in this magisterial survey, something of the Borgesian about it. Nothing is forgotten; the world imprints itself on the informatosphere at a scale approaching 1:1, each moment of reality creating an indelible replica.

Also in The Observer…

P. J. Harvey on writing and her new album Let England Shake (via A Piece of Monologue):

“I certainly feel like I’m getting somewhere that I wanted to get to as a writer of words. I wanted to get better, I wanted to be more coherent, I wanted there to be a greater strength and depth emotionally, and all these things require work – to hone something, to get rid of any superfluous language. I’m inspired by the other great writers I go back to and read again and again, and think how did they do that?”

Such as? She indicates a volume of Harold Pinter’s poetry that she has brought with her. “Pinter leaves me speechless. Just unbelievable. A poem like ‘American Football’ or ‘The Disappeared’. TS Eliot of course. Ted Hughes. WB Yeats. James Joyce.” She leans forward, freshly excited. “Just that feeling of reading something profound and having your breath quite literally taken away by the end of a piece. I’m reading John Burnside’s poems at the moment. Do you know his work? I’m getting that feeling – just reaching the end of every poem, going ‘Oh my God!'” She clutches her chest and laughs. “And all of these writers offer me a greater understanding of what it is to be alive, and that is such an incredible thing art can do for other people. It made me want to try and get close to this strange, mysterious thing that people can do with words.”

And finally…

The Local Grammar Nazi — Robert Lane Greene, author of You Are What You Speak, on the fluidity of language:

It’s certainly easier to know one set of rigid rules than to develop a fingertip-feel for the nuances of syntax, word choice and mechanics. This is why the book “Elements of Style” is such a hit. William Strunk and E.B. White’s canonised system for language use is short and sharply worded. Read, memorise and you need never think again… Readers are taught any number of things, such as when to use “that” instead of “which” and how one should never begin a sentence with “However, …”. But such guidelines should be understood as the authors’ preferences, not grammatical commandments.

Writing in English offers far more room for manoeuvre than some may realise… A lot of people don’t like this fluidity. Life is tricky in a world without rules. Fortunately, language does have rules, but they are more like bedrock principles than a detailed set of by-laws covering every do and don’t. A good usage dictionary should explain the principles, not simply command.

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Published April 22, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Visual Vocabulary — An interesting interview with book designer Peter Mendelsund at Czech Position:

I definitely take into account the author’s native culture, though whether I choose to adopt something stylistic from this culture depends on the vagaries of the particular project. There are times when one wants to accentuate the universal aspects of a writer’s work; and there are times when one wants to situate an author in a specific time and place… With Kafka, I would argue that his greatness lies in the universality of his ideas, that his writing transcends time and place… Conversely, with many other writers, nationality is at the core of their work — their great subject is place and contextual identity. They may write about Czech-ness, or English-ness, etc. These are the books where it makes the most sense to bring the local artistic tropes and visual cues to bear. For what it’s worth, I love delving into the visual vocabulary of different cultures.

The Casual Optimist interview with Peter is here, and you can read my 2-cents on his Kafka redesigns here.

The Polish Club — 50 Watts asks you to design the Polish edition of your favourite book. $400 is up for grabs.

Living by Dying — Ben Ehrenreich, author of The Suitors and Ether (forthcoming), on the death of the book in the new Los Angeles Review of Books:

For the record, my own loyalties are uncomplicated.  I adore few humans more than I love books.  I make no promises, but I do not expect to purchase a Kindle or a Nook or any of their offspring.  I hope to keep bringing home bound paper books until my shelves snap from their weight, until there is no room in my apartment for a bed or a couch or another human being, until the floorboards collapse and my eyes blur to dim.  But the book, bless it, is not a simple thing… [W]hat could it mean for the book to die?  Which sort of book?  And what variety of death?  What if the book had only ever lived by dying?

A World Made of Stories — James Gleick, author of The Information, on memes:

In the competition for space in our brains and in the culture, the effective combatants are the messages. The new, oblique, looping views of genes and memes have enriched us. They give us paradoxes to write on Möbius strips. “The human world is made of stories, not people,” writes the novelist David Mitchell. “The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed.” Margaret Atwood writes: “As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn’t imagine how it was that you hadn’t known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.” Nearing death, John Updike reflected on

A life poured into words—apparent waste intended to preserve the thing consumed.

Fred Dretske, a philosopher of mind and knowledge, wrote in 1981: “In the beginning there was information. The word came later.” He added this explanation: “The transition was achieved by the development of organisms with the capacity for selectively exploiting this information in order to survive and perpetuate their kind.” Now we might add, thanks to Dawkins, that the transition was achieved by the information itself, surviving and perpetuating its kind and selectively exploiting organisms.

Cull or be Culled — NPR’s Linda Holmes on how we are missing everything:

You used to have a limited number of reasonably practical choices presented to you, based on what bookstores carried, what your local newspaper reviewed, or what you heard on the radio, or what was taught in college by a particular English department. There was a huge amount of selection that took place above the consumer level. (And here, I don’t mean “consumer” in the crass sense of consumerism, but in the sense of one who devours, as you do a book or a film you love.)

Now, everything gets dropped into our laps, and there are really only two responses if you want to feel like you’re well-read, or well-versed in music, or whatever the case may be: culling and surrender.

And on a related note…

Lester Bangs’ Basement — Bill Wyman on collecting and scarcity at Slate:

Lester Bangs, the late, great early-rock critic, once said he dreamed of having a basement with every album ever released in it… [T]he Internet today is very much like [that]. In its vastness, cacophony, and inaccuracy, it’s also very reminiscent of Borges’ Library of Babel. Just as that library contained books made up of every possible combination of letters, in the corners of the Internet I’m concerned with here you can find similar chaos: The song “Let It Be” by the Beatles, sure, but also mislabeled as by the Stones, by the Kinks, by the Hollies, by the “Battles” … and also with, of course, those same labels attached to entirely different songs (like “Let It Bleed”).

Anyway, is it enough?

For some, the enjoyment of art or culture has fetishistic aspects. To them, being a fan is about something more than just experiencing the art. There will always be collectors, fixating on the physical objects, like the great LP jackets from the 1960s and 1970s… And there will always be people who can’t be happy unless they have something regular fans don’t. Indeed, a friend of Bangs’, long after he died, said to me that the unspoken corollary in Bangs’ mind to his fantasy was that no one else would have access to it.

Happy Easter.

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Published March 23, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Pharmaceutical Sincerity — Michael Bourne on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 40 years on for The Millions:

I can still remember sitting in the basement of my parents’ house in Northern California, practically whizzing myself with delight at that dizzying list of pharmaceuticals. I was fourteen and I’d read Catcher in the Rye and A Separate Peace and all the other books about and for nice, well-heeled boys whose lives have gone a little off the rails, but Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was different. It wasn’t just the mind-blowing drug use or the lusty middle finger Thompson seemed to be giving straight America; no, what was so startling, so riveting to my fourteen-year-old’s mind was how sincere the whole thing seemed.

Base Camp — Levi Stahl compares J.G. Ballard to Joseph Conrad (via The Second Pass):

Ballard’s scientists, marooned on far-flung outposts throughout the galaxy, are merely Conrad’s company agents and traders thrown into the future.

Like Conrad’s characters, Ballard’s have been nominally put in charge of places that are only barely understood back home–and whose history, culture, traditions, and dangers are almost entirely a secret. Their knowledge is limited where it isn’t totally useless; their true dominion extends no farther than the walls of their base camp; and the culture they represent is utterly unwanted, even insignificant when set against against the inescapable age of the universe around them.

Disrupting Molecules — Apple designer Jonathan Ive profiled in the Daily Mail (of all places):

Ive is not like other product designers, who too often trade in slick superficialities and press releases. Ive prefers to be engrossed in fundamentals and has very little interest in personal publicity. To him, the way a thing is made is fundamental to its character: his mind occupies a workshop, not an artist’s atelier.

With an Ive product, it is impossible to say where the engineering ends and the ‘design’ begins. It’s a continuum. He thinks and thinks about what a product should be and then worries it into existence. It’s what Ive calls ‘effort and care beyond the usual’. He has very few distractions…

…With the MacBook Air, he told me it’s, metallurgically speaking, about as far as you can actually go with aluminium before you start disrupting molecules. A calm and engaging personal manner becomes almost excitable when he describes the outer limits of transforming stainless steel. This Zen-like obsession with materials, with getting to what he calls the ‘local maximum’, is what gives Apple products their extreme appearance.

Semantic Slippage — The Information by James Gleick reviewed in The New York Times:

[In] its ordinary usage, “information” is a hard word to get a handle on (even after a recent revision, the Oxford English Dictionary still makes a hash of its history). It’s one of those words, like “objectivity” and “literacy,” that enable us to slip from one meaning to the next without letting on, even to ourselves, that we’ve changed the subject.

That elusiveness is epitomized in the phrase “information age,” which caught on in the 1970s, about the same time we started to refer to computers and the like as “information technology.” Computers clearly are that, if you think of information in terms of bits and bandwidth. But the phrases give us license to assume that the stuff sitting on our hard drives is the same as the stuff that we feel overwhelmed by, that everybody ought to have access to, and that wants to be free.

Kick Out the Jams — Wired Magazine profiles everyone’s favourite funding platform Kickstarter (via Waxy):

While plenty of people are willing to extol Kickstarter’s earth-shattering potential, its founders are not among them. “We never had change-the-world aspirations,” says cofounder Yancey Strickler, who insists he just wanted to help artists get stuff made. (Strickler’s team approves every project before it’s posted, and Strickler has personally funded 340 of them, making him the site’s greatest patron.) But the world may have other plans for the site. The Kickstarter guys may have kick-started something bigger than they ever intended…[J]ust as Twitter outgrew its beginnings as a humble messaging system, Kickstarter may not be able to maintain its low profile much longer. “The most interesting companies demonstrate emergent behavior,” says Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures, which invested in Kickstarter. “People’s use of the service is never what the creators intended.”

And finally… Just in case you’ve been in a dark room with the lights off for the last 24 hours (and who could blame you?),  a US federal judge has rejected Google’s legal settlement with authors and publishers reached in 2008. Read about at The Guardian, The New York Times, or the media outlet of your choice.  MobyLives stops just short of dancing on it’s grave, and Jacket Copy looks at what might come next.

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Published March 16, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

The Analytical Eye — Rick Poyner’s second essay for Design Observer on the visual interpretation of J.G. Ballard examines the work of French artist Peter Klasen:

What both Ballard and Klasen share… is a cold, appraising, analytical eye. It’s impossible to tell how they feel about what they show, or to know what they want us to feel, if anything at all. Their findings are disturbing and perhaps even repellent from a humanist perspective, yet the new aesthetic forms they use to embody them are, even today, exciting, provocative and tantalizingly difficult to resolve.

Any Colour — So Long As It Is Black — The WSJ profiles Massimo Vignelli:

“The greatest design has to provide a little pleasure,” he explained, producing the straightforward black bag he carries; Mr. Vignelli wears nothing but black. Proudly reporting that he’d bought the bag from a local street vendor, he pulled out a black Leica camera…, a pair of black Ray Bans and a tape measure—alas, bright yellow, not black.

“This is my dictionary,” Mr. Vignelli said of the tape measure. He explained that even as a child he had such fascination with the dimensions of things that he would challenge his friends to guess their size. He believes that subtleties of shape conjure emotion. “Is that three centimeters or four centimeters?”

All Forest, No Trees — David L. Ulin reviews The Information by James Gleick for The LA Times:

Over the course of human culture, there have been a number of significant transformations, beginning with the alphabet, which Gleick calls “a founding technology of information. The telephone, the fax machine, the calculator, and, ultimately, the computer are only the latest innovations devised for saving, manipulating, and communicating knowledge.” It is his idea that all these technologies exist as part of a continuum, with each developing from the last.

The key to such an argument is perspective, which is often in short supply when it comes to the information culture, with its tendency to inspire either paeans or jeremiads. Gleick, however, is too smart for that; he’s all about the forest, not the trees.

And finally…

Breaking Machines — Richard Conniff, author of The Species Seekers, on what the Luddites really fought against:

Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new. Moreover, the idea of smashing machines as a form of industrial protest did not begin or end with them. In truth, the secret of their enduring reputation depends less on what they did than on the name under which they did it. You could say they were good at branding.

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Published March 11, 2011

Something for the Weekend

The Book Bench interviews designer Kelly Blair about her work and her Heinrich Böll redesigns for Melville House:

There are so many amazing and striking book covers out there, yet I am most often drawn to the simplest thing on the shelf. Perhaps it’s because I am so immersed in book design day-to-day, but sometimes going into the bookstore can feel visually overwhelming, like the cereal aisle at the grocery store. To that end, David Knopka’s series design for the Melville House novellas still stands as one of my favorites. For the same reason, walking into the Persephone book shop in London feels like a breath of fresh air.

And on the subject of book covers, I’ve been loving designer Andrew Henderson‘s Lovely Book Covers Tumblr.

You can find The Casual Optimist Tumblr here.

Cabaret — Author Hanif Kureishi on the art of writing for The Independent:

There’s no connection between being able to write and being able to explain your work in a rain-swept tent to an audience staring at you like hungry animals contemplating a suspect steak. Listening and reading are different experiences. Reading, writing for a reader, and being read, are intimate acts, and there’s something about trying to articulate what you’ve done that can flatten and reduce it, horrifyingly so.

Some writers choose the written word because they find it difficult to speak directly; many writers are in love with solitude. Whichever it is, good writing should resist interpretation, summary and the need for applause.

The Information — Michael Dirda reviews Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age by Ann M. Blair for The Washington Post:

Just how to present information for easy use was a constant vexation. In late antiquity, one might simply find a list of authorities cited. Gradually, though, compilers began to employ categorical headings or to arrange entries alphabetically or according to elaborate branching diagrams of knowledge. “One historian has counted nineteen different systematic orders present in early modern encyclopedic works, including the order of creation, of the Decalogue, of the biblical narrative,” and various “chronological and geographical orders,” as well as others that follow “the chain of being.”

While people during the Middle Ages and later drew much of their learning from dictionaries and digests, the more ambitious also took extensive notes from whatever classics came their way. By the Renaissance one could even purchase the equivalent of “Reading for Dummies”: Francesco Sacchini’s 1614 “De ratione libros cum profectu legendi libellus,” i.e.,”A Little Book on How to Read With Profit.”

The Science of Making Decisions — Sharon Begley on how too much information impairs our ability to make decisions:

The problem has been creeping up on us for a long time. In the 17th century Leibniz bemoaned the “horrible mass of books which keeps on growing,” and in 1729 Alexander Pope warned of “a deluge of authors cover[ing] the land,” as James Gleick describes in his new book, The Information. But the consequences were thought to be emotional and psychological, chiefly anxiety about being unable to absorb even a small fraction of what’s out there. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary added “information fatigue” in 2009. But as information finds more ways to reach us, more often, more insistently than ever before, another consequence is becoming alarmingly clear: trying to drink from a firehose of information has harmful cognitive effects. And nowhere are those effects clearer, and more worrying, than in our ability to make smart, creative, successful decisions.

And related… Jonah Lehrer, contributing editor at Wired and the author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist, on why easy decisions seem so hard:

The problem, of course, is that the modern marketplace is a conspiracy to confuse, to trick the mind into believing that our most banal choices are actually extremely significant. Companies spend a fortune trying to convince us that only their toothpaste will clean our teeth, or that only their detergent will remove the stains from our clothes, or that every other cereal tastes like cardboard. And then there is the surreal abundance of the store shelf… While all these products are designed to cater to particular consumer niches, they end up duping the brain into believing that picking a floss is a high-stakes game, since it’s so damn hard. And so we get mired in decision-making quicksand.

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Published March 4, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Beep Beep — Nicholas Carr (The Shallows) reviews The Information by James Gleick:

As a celebration of human ingenuity, The Information is a deeply hopeful book. But it ends on an ambivalent note. The mathematical analysis of information, Gleick points out, entails the “ruthless sacrifice” of meaning, the very thing that “gives information its value and its purpose.” To the number-crunchers and code-wranglers who design our world-engirdling information networks, a message’s meaning is beside the point. A bit is a bit is a bit. As Shannon himself dryly noted, meaning is “irrelevant to the engineering problem.”

And yes, that cover was designed by Peter Mendelsund.

Beginners Edited — The original draft of Beginners by Raymond Carver compared with the final version of the story, retitled and published as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, edited by Gordon Lish. It’s from a couple of years ago, but still fascinating if you’ve never seen it (via Biblioklept).

Collector’s Items — The Guardian on the renaissance of chapbooks:

The 16th century merriments that became the chapman’s stock in trade were historically cheap, crudely made and illustrated using recycled woodcuts.

Today’s chapbooks, which are enjoying a revival along with independent regional publishing, bear little resemblance to the roughly produced books of the past. They are objects of beauty in their own right, with emphasis on original design as well as being a showcase for original writing. Pamphlet-sized but glossy, and more book than leaflet, they are highly covetable, which partly explains their appeal.

And finally…

A Curious Journey— The story of Margret and H.A. Rey, the creators of Curious George, at More Intelligent Life:

On June 12th 1940, the couple left Paris. The Nazis arrived less than two days later.

The Reys made their way to the south of France, and spent several weeks in a makeshift refugee camp in a high-school gymnasium before proceeding to Lisbon. From there they arranged passage to Brazil, and months later to New York. They carried with them the first drawings for the Curious George books, and showed them to police as proof of their occupation. The first book, “Curious George”, was published in 1941. The little monkey arrives in New York and strolls off of the ship with a smile, holding his papers in one hand and a little red valise in the other. A policeman salutes in welcome.

An exhibition of art by the Reys is on display at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco until March 13th.

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