Hey kids, we're kind of on summer hiatus here.
Okay, we admit it. We've closed the offices down in favor of an epic bender. Fine. We said it. Are you happy now?
While we're gone, you should make time to read Jeff Weiss' history of the album that made Stones Throw: Madvillainy by Madvillain. Don't know what we're talking about? Read Weiss' blow-by-blow of how it came about and you'll be sold. It's hyperbolic, but that's standard for Pitchfork. And really, if it's not filled with purposely frilly sentences, it wouldn't be music writing, would it?
And now: "Searching for Tomorrow: The Story of Madlib and DOOM's Madvillainy"
We're going back to sleep for now. See you soon!
Showing posts with label tl;dr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tl;dr. Show all posts
Thursday, August 14, 2014
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Are You Ready to Ragnarok?
Remember back in Nov 2013, we alerted you to the Norse historical and mythology enthusiast in England who, per their calculations, predicted that Ragnarok was near, so they blew a ceremonial horn to mark the approaching end? No?
Oh well. It won't matter anyway because Feb 22 the fall of Asgard begins. That is, assuming the predicted date is correct. Hurry up and read about it. We haven't much time.
***
Bonus Bigfoot News!
Since we're all doomed, let's take a moment and embrace the snake-oil charm of self-proclaimed Bigfoot hunter Rick Dyer's touring show. To sum up: Dyer claims he killed a Sasquatch two years ago. He preserved the body and is now touring the United States, charging a fee to those who want to take a peek at the beast.
We could be offended at Dyer's claim. There's no chance of it passing the typical baloney detecting questions. But if Dyer wants to revive the medicine show to make a few buck off of believers and non-believers alike, why waste the energy? The Typing Monkey would put good money on the possibility that Dyer's story becomes a musical in a couple years.
 |
| Then the Awful Fight Began by George Wright, 1908 |
***
Bonus Bigfoot News!
Since we're all doomed, let's take a moment and embrace the snake-oil charm of self-proclaimed Bigfoot hunter Rick Dyer's touring show. To sum up: Dyer claims he killed a Sasquatch two years ago. He preserved the body and is now touring the United States, charging a fee to those who want to take a peek at the beast.
We could be offended at Dyer's claim. There's no chance of it passing the typical baloney detecting questions. But if Dyer wants to revive the medicine show to make a few buck off of believers and non-believers alike, why waste the energy? The Typing Monkey would put good money on the possibility that Dyer's story becomes a musical in a couple years.
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Six
Tuesday Jan 21, 2014 was The Typing Monkey's sixth anniversary ... or birthday? What do you call the day that marks another year of blogging into the wind? Right. "Pointless." Very good.
[At this point in the conversation, our intern Kim was asked to clock out for the day. "Clock out? I don't even get paid," he said. Kim. Kim, c'mon. -- ed.]
To celebrate, we punish you with links culled from Arts & Letters Daily, our ongoing source of quality journalism, editorials and critical thinking that helps us remember there's more to this technology than bewbs and horror movie trailers.
"We need to talk about TED" by Benjamin Bratton
... in which a man gives a TED talk that points out everything wrong with TED talks. It's like he's saying what we're thinking.
"No, Jane Austen Was Not a Game Theorist" by William Deresiewicz
[At this point in the conversation, our intern Kim was asked to clock out for the day. "Clock out? I don't even get paid," he said. Kim. Kim, c'mon. -- ed.]
To celebrate, we punish you with links culled from Arts & Letters Daily, our ongoing source of quality journalism, editorials and critical thinking that helps us remember there's more to this technology than bewbs and horror movie trailers.
"We need to talk about TED" by Benjamin Bratton
... in which a man gives a TED talk that points out everything wrong with TED talks. It's like he's saying what we're thinking.
"No, Jane Austen Was Not a Game Theorist" by William Deresiewicz
... a call to resist and reject the post-Freakonomics/Gladwell trend in literary and art criticism to assert that modern, often trendy, scientific theories and ideas are the real themes and subtexts of many great works of art, history be damned.
"The Paratext's the Thing" by Thomas Doherty
"The irritating distractions have morphed into the main attractions."
Perhaps the thematic thread that connects these editorials is just in our imagination. But we think they're complementary.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Peering Into the Dark: Lovecraft’s Great Depression
Once again, we gave TMI custodian Kris Kendall the assignment the rest of us were too lazy to tackle: Read a collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories. Lovecraft's reputation makes for a daunting task, but in a surprise only slightly bigger than our realization that Kendall can read and write, the smelly bastard actually had something to say.
Read the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft during the dreary month of January.
The stories by the “godfather of modern horror” echo the long, dark, cold and soggy stretch of the first month of the year, when the carnival of the holiday season has left town. Bleakness rules all in January, and it’s the defining tone of Lovecraft’s work.
Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, selected and edited by Joyce Carol Oates, comes highly recommended and there’s good reason for that.
Her curation of the shorts and novellas builds logically, beginning with the “The Outsider” – a sort of character study that has been imitated so many times, it nearly suffers from its own influence.
Which isn’t to say it’s a bad story – on the contrary, Lovecraft builds to his big (obvious to modern readers) reveal skillfully, like a waltz for the doomed that ends in ugly, minor chords meant to shock and horrify.
Then the real recurring themes of what people think of as “Lovecraftian” begins with “The Music of Erich Zann” and “Rats in the Walls.”
The former introduces the idea that there are other worlds, other dimensions, near our own and that the barrier between them is thin, perhaps easily breached. While the latter introduces a theme that Lovecraft returns to in subsequent works: family lineage.
He writes of ancestry that reaches so far back in time that our brains can scarcely grasp the distance. And in that distance are ugly behaviors, ugly genetics, that ripple forward into the modern world.
“The Shunned House” – at least in the Oates collection – acts as a sort of rest stop before the big, well-known stories begin. And we’d argue that it’s a lesser tale, but it left too much of an impression. However, “Shunned” illuminates the major problem with Lovecraft: he rambles and repeats himself.
Like Charles Dickens and, to a lesser degree, Lovecraft's predecessor in horror, Edgar Allan Poe, Lovecraft writes as if he were paid by the word. He was. “Shunned” exposes the Lovecraft novice to the author’s tendency toward unnecessary length in pursuit of a bigger paycheck.
Lovecraft’s garrulous narrative is absent entirely from “The Call of Cthulhu.” The story was published in 1926, four years before Lovecraft would begin corresponding with fellow Weird Tales contributor Robert E. Howard. But it’s reasonable to aver that Lovecraft was reading Howard’s work by then. Perhaps Howard’s electric, two-fisted prose influenced the efficiency of “Cthulhu.”
Structured like the classic Victorian horror tales, “Cthulhu” begins with the declaration that it was “found among the papers of the late Frances Wayland Thurston, of Boston.” The opening paragraph stands as one of the best passages in this collection, a concise portent of what is to come, but also a clever assessment of why humankind seems incapable of advancing very far before collapsing.
Part murder mystery and part action yarn, “Cthulhu” introduces everything that would come be known as what Lovecraft associate and superfan, August Derleth, called “ the Cthulhu Mythos.” There are ancient cults worshiping a beast straight out of Revelations, global conspiracies in place to deny the existence of those cults, and geometry so otherworldly, that human senses can’t properly perceive it.
Ringing, siren-like, above it all is the nightmare realization that beings from across the galaxy, and often from worlds outside our own universe, have been to Earth – some of them are still here, waiting for the right conditions to rise up again and snuff us out like spent matches.
Lovecraft revisits that idea repeatedly with “The Dunwich Horror,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” and “The Shadow Out of Time.” In doing so, he expands his rogues gallery, subtly but methodically linking his beasts by showing how they fit together into a history pre-dating, and later concomitant to, our own journey out of the cave and into the false security of civilization.
But for all the monsters and mythology, an equal amount of the dread that permeates Lovecraft’s writing comes from his doomed heroes. In fact, his protagonists rarely qualify as heroes, as many of them end up dead, or mad, and always along the way, fall headlong into the deep isolation that comes with the knowledge they acquire.
Without having read a proper biography of Lovecraft, it’s pure speculation that the man was probably depressed through most of his life. At the very least he was deeply cynical about the world – for he outright states multiple times that humans are not nearly so advanced or evolved as we like to think. If we don’t destroy ourselves first, there are plenty of outside forces just waiting for an opportunity to do the job for us.
He illustrates that anxiety well in “The Colour Out of Space.” The story concerns a New England farmer, in the rural hills west of Arkham, a stand-in for Salem, Massachusetts. A meteorite lands in the fields of the farm and poisons everything it touches, including the minds of the farmer and his family.
In pure book report terms: The corrosive power of a cosmic force could easily stand in for events in our mundane lives that are sometimes unbearable, and like the dying, mad farmer of “The Colour ...” those things can destroy us. But for some reason, or lack of reason, we are drawn to the destructive agents.
Lovecraft himself had what is described as a “nervous breakdown” before he graduated high school. Both his father and mother had similar events and both died within a few years of those breakdowns, though neither died as a direct result of the breakdown.
Knowing that fact makes the reading of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” a more potent experience. The story of an isolated fishing village in Massachusetts probably best embodies Lovecraft’s pet idea of family history and biology working in tandem to cast our fates in stone. None of us has progressed far past our ancestors.
But let’s leave the analysis for greater minds because “Innsmouth” is a ripping good tale. It’s the kind of creepshow dread that The X-Files did so well. An educated city dweller ventures into the rural unknown, where his status as an outsider is immediately recognized and used against him.
The last third of the story has more of that “Call of Cthulhu” action – an escape scene that takes up an entire night, where the simple task of leaving becomes nearly impossible.
And that brings us back to the beginning. No matter what T.S. Eliot says, January is the cruelest month. The nights are long, the days are dark. Cold and wet rule the forecast. February is January’s petulant little sister, so don’t worry if your journey into H.P. Lovecraft’s writing spills over into the weeks of Valentines and alleged whispers of spring. The terror is there to keep you company.
Read the weird fiction of H. P. Lovecraft during the dreary month of January.
Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, selected and edited by Joyce Carol Oates, comes highly recommended and there’s good reason for that.
Which isn’t to say it’s a bad story – on the contrary, Lovecraft builds to his big (obvious to modern readers) reveal skillfully, like a waltz for the doomed that ends in ugly, minor chords meant to shock and horrify.
Then the real recurring themes of what people think of as “Lovecraftian” begins with “The Music of Erich Zann” and “Rats in the Walls.”
The former introduces the idea that there are other worlds, other dimensions, near our own and that the barrier between them is thin, perhaps easily breached. While the latter introduces a theme that Lovecraft returns to in subsequent works: family lineage.
He writes of ancestry that reaches so far back in time that our brains can scarcely grasp the distance. And in that distance are ugly behaviors, ugly genetics, that ripple forward into the modern world.
“The Shunned House” – at least in the Oates collection – acts as a sort of rest stop before the big, well-known stories begin. And we’d argue that it’s a lesser tale, but it left too much of an impression. However, “Shunned” illuminates the major problem with Lovecraft: he rambles and repeats himself.
Like Charles Dickens and, to a lesser degree, Lovecraft's predecessor in horror, Edgar Allan Poe, Lovecraft writes as if he were paid by the word. He was. “Shunned” exposes the Lovecraft novice to the author’s tendency toward unnecessary length in pursuit of a bigger paycheck.
Lovecraft’s garrulous narrative is absent entirely from “The Call of Cthulhu.” The story was published in 1926, four years before Lovecraft would begin corresponding with fellow Weird Tales contributor Robert E. Howard. But it’s reasonable to aver that Lovecraft was reading Howard’s work by then. Perhaps Howard’s electric, two-fisted prose influenced the efficiency of “Cthulhu.”
Structured like the classic Victorian horror tales, “Cthulhu” begins with the declaration that it was “found among the papers of the late Frances Wayland Thurston, of Boston.” The opening paragraph stands as one of the best passages in this collection, a concise portent of what is to come, but also a clever assessment of why humankind seems incapable of advancing very far before collapsing.
Part murder mystery and part action yarn, “Cthulhu” introduces everything that would come be known as what Lovecraft associate and superfan, August Derleth, called “ the Cthulhu Mythos.” There are ancient cults worshiping a beast straight out of Revelations, global conspiracies in place to deny the existence of those cults, and geometry so otherworldly, that human senses can’t properly perceive it.
Ringing, siren-like, above it all is the nightmare realization that beings from across the galaxy, and often from worlds outside our own universe, have been to Earth – some of them are still here, waiting for the right conditions to rise up again and snuff us out like spent matches.
Lovecraft revisits that idea repeatedly with “The Dunwich Horror,” “At the Mountains of Madness,” and “The Shadow Out of Time.” In doing so, he expands his rogues gallery, subtly but methodically linking his beasts by showing how they fit together into a history pre-dating, and later concomitant to, our own journey out of the cave and into the false security of civilization.
But for all the monsters and mythology, an equal amount of the dread that permeates Lovecraft’s writing comes from his doomed heroes. In fact, his protagonists rarely qualify as heroes, as many of them end up dead, or mad, and always along the way, fall headlong into the deep isolation that comes with the knowledge they acquire.
 |
| Inside joke! |
He illustrates that anxiety well in “The Colour Out of Space.” The story concerns a New England farmer, in the rural hills west of Arkham, a stand-in for Salem, Massachusetts. A meteorite lands in the fields of the farm and poisons everything it touches, including the minds of the farmer and his family.
In pure book report terms: The corrosive power of a cosmic force could easily stand in for events in our mundane lives that are sometimes unbearable, and like the dying, mad farmer of “The Colour ...” those things can destroy us. But for some reason, or lack of reason, we are drawn to the destructive agents.
Lovecraft himself had what is described as a “nervous breakdown” before he graduated high school. Both his father and mother had similar events and both died within a few years of those breakdowns, though neither died as a direct result of the breakdown.
Knowing that fact makes the reading of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” a more potent experience. The story of an isolated fishing village in Massachusetts probably best embodies Lovecraft’s pet idea of family history and biology working in tandem to cast our fates in stone. None of us has progressed far past our ancestors.
But let’s leave the analysis for greater minds because “Innsmouth” is a ripping good tale. It’s the kind of creepshow dread that The X-Files did so well. An educated city dweller ventures into the rural unknown, where his status as an outsider is immediately recognized and used against him.
The last third of the story has more of that “Call of Cthulhu” action – an escape scene that takes up an entire night, where the simple task of leaving becomes nearly impossible.
And that brings us back to the beginning. No matter what T.S. Eliot says, January is the cruelest month. The nights are long, the days are dark. Cold and wet rule the forecast. February is January’s petulant little sister, so don’t worry if your journey into H.P. Lovecraft’s writing spills over into the weeks of Valentines and alleged whispers of spring. The terror is there to keep you company.
Saturday, November 16, 2013
TL;DR -- More Typing, Less Monkey
In scouring the unpaved service roads, blind alleys and drainage ditches of the information superhighway to put together this year's Halloween Frenzy, we accumulated a few items that, while strange or even a little scary, didn't fit within the tasteful orange and black boundaries we try to maintain.
That doesn't mean we don't want to share them. So welcome to our clearance sale.
First up is an ultimately sad tale all the way back from January of this year, so if it's a rerun to you, we apologize. But this tale of vorarephilia is fascinating. Canada's National Post reports of a man who sought help at a Toronto psychiatric hospital in 2012.
The man expressed a desire to be consumed by a "large, dominant woman." He wanted to be eaten. Most cases of vorarephilia involve the diagnosed party as wanting to eat others. So this man's case proved unusual and worth further study. There's so much more to this story, including a puzzling end.
***
From strange consumption to mass consumption: On October 10, Truth Dig reported on a horrible prediction from this year's Chocolate Industry Network Conference in London. The forecast for chocolate does not look good friends. Evidence mounts.
One day, future generations will only know of the confection through a few perverted tales and perhaps a candy wrapper on display in a temple somewhere. We try to make light of this situation because as the adage goes, sometimes laughing is the only alternative to tears.
***
All mythologies have end-of-days stories. Norse mythology tells of Ragnarok, the ultimate battle of the gods against the giants that will result in the death of Odin, the all-father, and the plunging of Midgard [that's Earth, y'all -- ed.] into endless dark, cold winter.
As it turns out, some Norse scholars in England think Ragnarok is about to commence, and they blew a symbolic horn to mark the beginning of the end, which should arrive 100 days from Nov 15. Thanks, guys!
Read all about it on the Daily Mail site, which features a ton of video ads, so adjust your volume accordingly. [And a tip of the antlered helmet to the supremely wonderful Walt Simonson for the late-breaking news lead.]
***
We end this three-course feast of strange with a chewy dessert called The Bus. It's been making the rounds at comics, writing and art blogs for the past couple months, and with good reason. It's a series of short comic strips by Paul Kirchner. We know nothing more about it or him. We could look him up and find out, but frankly, the mystery just adds to the charm of The Bus.
That doesn't mean we don't want to share them. So welcome to our clearance sale.
First up is an ultimately sad tale all the way back from January of this year, so if it's a rerun to you, we apologize. But this tale of vorarephilia is fascinating. Canada's National Post reports of a man who sought help at a Toronto psychiatric hospital in 2012.
The man expressed a desire to be consumed by a "large, dominant woman." He wanted to be eaten. Most cases of vorarephilia involve the diagnosed party as wanting to eat others. So this man's case proved unusual and worth further study. There's so much more to this story, including a puzzling end.
***
From strange consumption to mass consumption: On October 10, Truth Dig reported on a horrible prediction from this year's Chocolate Industry Network Conference in London. The forecast for chocolate does not look good friends. Evidence mounts.
One day, future generations will only know of the confection through a few perverted tales and perhaps a candy wrapper on display in a temple somewhere. We try to make light of this situation because as the adage goes, sometimes laughing is the only alternative to tears.
***
As it turns out, some Norse scholars in England think Ragnarok is about to commence, and they blew a symbolic horn to mark the beginning of the end, which should arrive 100 days from Nov 15. Thanks, guys!
Read all about it on the Daily Mail site, which features a ton of video ads, so adjust your volume accordingly. [And a tip of the antlered helmet to the supremely wonderful Walt Simonson for the late-breaking news lead.]
***
We end this three-course feast of strange with a chewy dessert called The Bus. It's been making the rounds at comics, writing and art blogs for the past couple months, and with good reason. It's a series of short comic strips by Paul Kirchner. We know nothing more about it or him. We could look him up and find out, but frankly, the mystery just adds to the charm of The Bus.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Dirty Deeds & the Men Who Investigate Them
Two book reviews that make us want both books in our possession:
Matthew Walther enjoyed Wretched Writing: A Compendium of Crimes Against the English Language by Ross and Kathryn Petras. The volume collects examples of head-scratching sentences from famous, and sometimes even reputable, authors. See what Walther's on about here via The Spectator.
The other comes from Josephine Livingstone, who we've tagged before, so I guess that makes us fans of her work. In her review of Bran Nicol’s The Private Eye: Detectives in the Movies, Livingstone is genuinely pleased that Nicol touches on a pet theory of hers: That the Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo is a retelling of the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
And you know what? She's right. But it's Nicol's book she's discussing, and Livingstone gives it a scholarly scrubbing -- the kind of gimlet-eyed critical writing that doesn't happen often enough in the usual crap we read. Either way, The Private Eye sounds like catnip to us.
The other comes from Josephine Livingstone, who we've tagged before, so I guess that makes us fans of her work. In her review of Bran Nicol’s The Private Eye: Detectives in the Movies, Livingstone is genuinely pleased that Nicol touches on a pet theory of hers: That the Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo is a retelling of the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
And you know what? She's right. But it's Nicol's book she's discussing, and Livingstone gives it a scholarly scrubbing -- the kind of gimlet-eyed critical writing that doesn't happen often enough in the usual crap we read. Either way, The Private Eye sounds like catnip to us.
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Television for Women
The Typing Monkey doesn't understand most "reality" television programming -- the shows themselves, not just the popularity of the shows.
And by reality TV, we mean the kind those shows that would have us believe that people with no discernible talent, and often with little of value to offer to the world, are somehow worth paying attention to simply because they allow a camera crew to follow them around and document the minutiae of their daily lives.
That's on us, and we're okay with not watching them because we can change the channel.
With that in mind, we urge you to read Dennis Perkins' A.V. Club review of a new show on the Lifetime network called Pretty Wicked Moms.
Here's an excerpt from his review that lets the reader know what they're in for: "Once you’re comparing the relative merits of various reality shows, you’re simply sorting piles of crap by size and color—you can do it, but you’re going to end up covered in crap."
And that's just a parenthetical aside. It's good writing and worth your time.
And by reality TV, we mean the kind those shows that would have us believe that people with no discernible talent, and often with little of value to offer to the world, are somehow worth paying attention to simply because they allow a camera crew to follow them around and document the minutiae of their daily lives.
That's on us, and we're okay with not watching them because we can change the channel.
With that in mind, we urge you to read Dennis Perkins' A.V. Club review of a new show on the Lifetime network called Pretty Wicked Moms.
Here's an excerpt from his review that lets the reader know what they're in for: "Once you’re comparing the relative merits of various reality shows, you’re simply sorting piles of crap by size and color—you can do it, but you’re going to end up covered in crap."
And that's just a parenthetical aside. It's good writing and worth your time.
Friday, May 17, 2013
tl;dr
The Typing Monkey may re-use that headline (and tag) anytime we post links to articles on the web that actually qualify as articles.
What qualifies us to decide what qualifies as an "article"? Any piece we read that reaches a certain tipping point of the tl;dr factor. To save you a trip to Urban Dictionary, that weird abbreviation stands for "too long; didn't read" and is often used jokingly in comments under articles on the Web.
But it's just as often typed in earnest, because attention for reading web articles drops exponentially after certain word counts. The numbers vary depending on which study you read, but the advice is the same: the shorter the better. Which loosely means, anything that can't be read "above the fold" -- read without the user having to scroll further down the page -- is least likely to be read.
Why does this happen? Again, search around the Web and read up on studies, statistics and opinions, but the fact that it happens bugs us. It bugs us even more when we catch ourselves doing it. Never mind that this very blog posts two- and three-page scrollers all the time. We just can't shut up and that's another issue entirely.
So in defense of long-form journalism, criticism and other types of information delivery through the written word, we'll put "tl;dr" right there in the headline to let you know that what we're linking to, when we're recommending it, is more than one "page down" button's worth of reading but worth the time and attention.
To the links!
First up is "Wikipedia's Women Problem" from science writer James Gleick for The New York Review of Books. If you've been following the story at all, Wikipedia has slowly moved all of the women from the category "American novelists" into a sub-category specific to their gender. While this sort of OCD categorizing isn't weird on it's own, it's a problem because they didn't call the other category "male American novelists." Gleick goes deep. Hold on.
Take a break, drink some juice and then dig into Christopher Riley's love letter to Richard Feynman from The Telegraph. Riley's piece is secretly hyping the film version of his love letter to Feynman, but that doesn't reduce the appeal of his writing.
And perhaps most interesting to all of us at TMI, is a Wilson Quarterly article by Tom Vanderbilt called "Star Wars." Vanderbilt examines the value of "user review" critical opinions that dominate and influence our behavior on the Web and in the real world of commerce.
Yelp, Amazon and other giants of this format really do shape opinions, but Vanderbilt asks whether there's any real worth in these arbitrary and generally anonymous voices. Plus he asks what we bring to these opinions in contrast to what we might bring to the critical writing of that dying species: the paid, published critic.
For us, Vanderbilt's article is the most interesting, but all are worth a dive.
You'll be seeing mention of Arts & Letters Daily frequently for the tl;dr items, because that's where we go most often to grow our brains. Thank you A&L.
What qualifies us to decide what qualifies as an "article"? Any piece we read that reaches a certain tipping point of the tl;dr factor. To save you a trip to Urban Dictionary, that weird abbreviation stands for "too long; didn't read" and is often used jokingly in comments under articles on the Web.
But it's just as often typed in earnest, because attention for reading web articles drops exponentially after certain word counts. The numbers vary depending on which study you read, but the advice is the same: the shorter the better. Which loosely means, anything that can't be read "above the fold" -- read without the user having to scroll further down the page -- is least likely to be read.
Why does this happen? Again, search around the Web and read up on studies, statistics and opinions, but the fact that it happens bugs us. It bugs us even more when we catch ourselves doing it. Never mind that this very blog posts two- and three-page scrollers all the time. We just can't shut up and that's another issue entirely.
So in defense of long-form journalism, criticism and other types of information delivery through the written word, we'll put "tl;dr" right there in the headline to let you know that what we're linking to, when we're recommending it, is more than one "page down" button's worth of reading but worth the time and attention.To the links!
First up is "Wikipedia's Women Problem" from science writer James Gleick for The New York Review of Books. If you've been following the story at all, Wikipedia has slowly moved all of the women from the category "American novelists" into a sub-category specific to their gender. While this sort of OCD categorizing isn't weird on it's own, it's a problem because they didn't call the other category "male American novelists." Gleick goes deep. Hold on.
Take a break, drink some juice and then dig into Christopher Riley's love letter to Richard Feynman from The Telegraph. Riley's piece is secretly hyping the film version of his love letter to Feynman, but that doesn't reduce the appeal of his writing.
And perhaps most interesting to all of us at TMI, is a Wilson Quarterly article by Tom Vanderbilt called "Star Wars." Vanderbilt examines the value of "user review" critical opinions that dominate and influence our behavior on the Web and in the real world of commerce.
Yelp, Amazon and other giants of this format really do shape opinions, but Vanderbilt asks whether there's any real worth in these arbitrary and generally anonymous voices. Plus he asks what we bring to these opinions in contrast to what we might bring to the critical writing of that dying species: the paid, published critic.
For us, Vanderbilt's article is the most interesting, but all are worth a dive.
You'll be seeing mention of Arts & Letters Daily frequently for the tl;dr items, because that's where we go most often to grow our brains. Thank you A&L.
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