In doing this site for the past six and a half years, I've grown quite fond of short form writing, especially nonfiction short form writing. Magazine articles, newspaper pieces, weblog posts, etc. As I've said before, I'd love to compile an end-of-the-year Best Online Writing book or do a monthly Reader's Digest-style magazine that compiles the best short-form writing from a variety of sources, but there's a lot of hassle to deal with (securing rights, working with publishers, killing trees).
Luckily, the magic of the Internet allows you to do things that aren't quite perfect but work well enough that it's worth the trade-off. In lieu of a book or magazine compilation of the best writing of 2004, here are some of the best things I linked to in the past year. The list consists mostly of magazine and newspaper articles with a few other types of media sprinkled in and is more objective than my favorite weblogs of 2004 list. If, unlike me, you've got a little bit of slack time at the end of the year at your place of employ, this should keep you busy for the rest of the day. Enjoy.
The Buddhabrot Set. An amazing universe of structure, spirituality, and mathematical intrigue.
Jared Tarbell, Gallery of Computation
Big and Bad. How the S.U.V. ran over automotive safety.
Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker
Victoria's Secret. A look at one of Prada's top saleswomen.
Mimi Swartz, The New Yorker
Street Smarts. Learning from JetBlue
Norm Brodsky, Inc. Magazine
Khaaan!!
khaaan.com
The Way We Eat Now. Ancient bodies collide with modern technology to produce a flabby, disease-ridden populace.
Craig Lambert, Harvard Magazine
Microsoft Research DRM talk
Cory Doctorow, craphound.com
What the Bagel Man Saw. Honesty and breakfast.
Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, The New York Times Magazine
The Decline of Fashion Photography. An argument in pictures.
Karen Lehrman, Slate
mashuga's Fotolog. Portraiture of the homeless.
Gary F. Clark, fotolog.net
Ikeaphobia and its discontents
Adam Greenfield, v-2 Organisation
Birnbaum v. Michael Lewis. Moneyball, Red Sox, journalism, and screenwriting.
Robert Birnbaum, The Morning News
A Corporation That Breaks the Greed Mold
Jim Hightower, AlterNet
New Details Surface. Dick Cheney and Pat Leahy throw down.
Paul Sims, The New Yorker
The Anarchist's Cookbook. John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods.
Charles Fishman, Fast Company
Week in Review. Hand drawn representations of the news.
Week in Review
Why don't we do it in the road? A new school of traffic design says we should get rid of stop signs and red lights and let cars, bikes and people mingle together.
Linda Baker, Salon
Discovery of Flores Man. It sounds too incredible to be true, but this is not a hoax.
Nature
The Searchers. Radiohead's unquiet revolution.
Alex Ross, The New Yorker
On the Record: David Neeleman, JetBlue Airways. Interview with the CEO of JetBlue
San Francisco Chronicle
How not to buy happiness. Can money make you happy?
Robert H. Frank, Daedalus
The Vice Guide to Everything. The DOs and DONTs of modern life.
Vice Magazine
Misinterpreted Movie Titles. Renaming movies with literal descriptions of their movie posters.
Something Awful
Blinded By Science. How 'Balanced' Coverage Lets the Scientific Fringe Hijack Reality.
Chris Mooney, Columbia Journalism Review
The True Story of Audion. How a piece of software got made.
Cabel Sasser, Panic
Something Borrowed. Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life?
Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker
The Bell Curve. What happens when patients find out how good their doctors really are?
Atul Gawande, The New Yorker
Skeletal Systems. A character study of 22 present and past cartoon characters.
Michael Paulus, michaelpaulus.com
The Ketchup Conundrum. Mustard now comes in dozens of varieties. Why has ketchup stayed the same?
Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker
Decentralized Intelligence What Toyota can teach the 9/11 commission about intelligence gathering.
Duncan Watts, Slate
The way I rolled. A report on the Usher concert.
Mr. Sun, Mr. Sun!
Memory and Manipulation. The trials of Elizabeth Loftus, defender of the wrongly accused.
Sasha Abramsky, LA Weekly
Designs For Working. Why your bosses want to turn your new office into Greenwich Village.
Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker
Born of the Fourth of July. The statistics are not good for a baby born in the 24th and 6th day of gestation.
Eric C. Snowdeal III, snowdeal.org
John Stewart on Crossfire. You're as big a dick on your show as you are on any show.
CNN Crossfire
Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor. An interview with the noted SF author.
Slashdot
Fear Itself. Learning to live in the age of terrorism
Gene Weingarten, The Washington Post
Consider the Lobster. For 56 years, the Maine Lobster Festival has been drawing crowds with the promise of sun, fun, and fine food.
David Foster Wallace, Gourmet
Aerial Photography. Earth from above.
Yann Bertrand
Child Portraiture. Muted works of vibrant mundanity.
Loretta Lux, lorettalux.de
Food Without Fear. When it comes to food, Americans have the tendency to lose all reason.
Dan Barber, The New York Times
French Week continues over at Idlewords, and Sunday's installment compares French & American school cafeteria menus, rightly blasting Americans for providing our children (widely marketed to us by our government and corporations as "our future") with substandard, unimaginative, unhealthy and corporate-controlled food. Here's a sample:
Finally, notice how hard it is to eat a healthy diet at the American school. You would be relegated to a ghetto of garden salads, 'soups of the day', and whatever nutritious innards you could pull out of the breaded main dish. The message American kids get is that healthy food is second-rate and tastes bad, that they should eat lots of meat, cheese and potatoes, and that eating fast food every day is a normal diet.
There is no suggestion (like in the French schools) that a palate is something that must be nurtured and formed over time. Instead, kids are taught to favor sweet, fatty, salty foods and treat eating as just another source of entertainment.
The process shows no signs of slowing, either. The current push for irradiating meat (under the euphemism of 'cold pasteurization') is an attempt by the beef industry to make meat safer not by improving hygiene at the slaughterhouse, but by rendering contaminated meat harmless. Presumably, it doesn't matter whether meat in school lunches has been in contact with cowshit, as long as it is no longer infectious.
Rarely does a passage of text resonate with how I am as a person as the opening paragraph of Jonathan Rauch's Caring for Your Introvert did:
Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice?
Well, except for the "dynamite" part of "dynamite presentation".
The Internet has helped me a great deal in this regard. Email, IM, and my weblog allow me to communicate with people when I want and how I want, without worrying about all the things introverts worry about when interacting with people: small talk, first impressions, awkward silences, etc. With the web, I can carry on a conversation with a whole group of people and stare down at my shoes at the same time. That's an amazing and special thing for me.
Those wacky cats are at it again. This time, Gilpin & Marigold Explore The Wonders Of Wakayama Prefecture:
In traveling you can be a tourist or you can be a guest. Do not look at travel books. We can read about this place at home. Instead let's walk to Negoroji Temple, which I think is not too far in that direction. Not lost, just far away from our old lives."
Kevin was kind enough to let me design the title card for this installment. Enjoy more of Gilpin and Marigold here.
As a follow-up to my post about the incomprehensibility of the game of cricket, several readers pointed me to Kevin Guilfoile's excellent How to Explain the Rules of Cricket. It begins:
"You know the big tent at the east end of the county fairgrounds? Next to the show barn? Imagine it's an oval filled with 90,000 Pakistanis who love to watch pie-eating -- who love pie-eating more than soccer -- even though it seems to the rest of us that eating pie would be a fairly unpleasant reminder of British Colonialism."
And it goes from there. If you're into reading, the above is also available as part of The Manual.
Dennis peers into the abyss and sees himself: "This morning, I was surprised to receive an email virus from my own account. I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but I was plenty mad about it. After deleting the virulent email from both my Inbox and the Trash, I fired off the following response..."
Many 21 year-olds think they have the world all figured out, but few make the mistake of writing it all down for public consumption (or perhaps many do these days). Debra Pickett interviews first time author and The Sopranos actress Jamie-Lynn Sigler about her book Wise Girl:
"Sigler just moved in with her boyfriend of one year, 31-year-old A.J. Discala. In addition to sharing her Trump Tower apartment, Discala is also Sigler's manager.
"'A manager controls so much of your life,' Sigler says, her brown eyes sparkling, 'that it's just wonderful to know the person has nothing but good intentions for you.'
"I ask if it makes her nervous, the old Hollywood stereotype of the manager dating the starlet and, well, you know, not exactly doing what's in her best interest.
"'Oh, no,' she says. 'We just look at it as a wonderful thing.'
"Besides, she says, they're not like other show business couples.
"An awkward pause descends on our table, hovering just over our half-eaten lunches. She is pitying my cynical singledom, and I am worrying about her future.
"Then I notice she's wearing really cute sandals, and we decide to talk about those instead."
Hacking Las Vegas is "the inside story of the MIT Blackjack Team's conquest of the casinos". The article is excerpted from Ben Mezrich's Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, due out in October. Math, money, and discipline made them millions:
"The team worked at the mathematics -- the expected advantages, the proper Spotter payouts, the appropriate BP betting scheme -- in rigorous detail, with the aid of computers and countless hours of simulated play. Average profit percentages ranged from between 10 and 20 percent per gambling foray, but could go much higher depending on the number of open tables and the number of possible player hours. 'The first year I played, we returned 154 percent to our investors,' brags Lewis. 'That's after paying off expenses. You try and do that on Wall Street.' The real genius of the MIT scheme was how it turned the casinos' own profiling techniques against them, using stereotypes to camouflage the big money bets."
When I was in my teens, my dad was working on devising his own system for blackjack. He had a book outlining basic counting strategies and the odds for various hand combinations and played with various betting systems with the aid of Lotus 123 spreadsheets. We played blackjack for hours with both one-deck & two-deck shoes and his sizable spare change collection, just noodling around with different approaches. I had the odds for all the hand combinations memorized so that even without counting, I could play nearly break-even blackjack for as long as I wanted.
Malcolm Gladwell on The Naked Face we all wear:
"But there's nothing secondary about the face, and surely this realization is what set John Yarbrough apart on the night that the boy in the sports car came at him with a gun. It's not just that he saw a microexpression that the rest of us would have missed. It's that he took what he saw so seriously that he was able to overcome every self-protective instinct in his body, and hold his fire."
A must-read article about what people see when we look at each other and how some have taken that skill to a seemingly super-human level.
God bless The Morning News gang for finding a link to the Web site of Sedaris Hardwood Floors. The company is owned by David Sedaris' brother, the motherfucking Rooster. The highlight of the site is a link to another site where you can purchase official "You Can't Kill The Rooster" t-shirts. Also, there's pie...er, there's a new article by Sedaris about the Rooster: Rooster at the Hitchin' Post.
A would-be Palestinian suicide bomber has a near death experience:
"She wanted to be a shaheed [martyr], to blow herself up on an Israeli street and kill as many Jews as possible. The bomb was already strapped to her body. But on the way to the attack, she had a change of heart and returned home. Now the defense minister has come to ask her why: Why did she say yes at first - and why did she say no later? She looks into his eyes, searching for a hint of compassion."
Some powerful journalism in the NY Times today: Fighting to Live as the Towers Died. It's an account of the people who didn't survive the attack on the WTC, pieced together from frantic phone calls and emails to friends and family. The Web version includes some well-done interactive pieces (a chronology and detailed annotated maps of the interior of the buildings) as well as full transcripts of the interviews and email texts used in writing the story (North Tower transcripts, South Tower transcripts).
From the archives of the New Yorker comes an article by E.B. White on an early demonstration of television: "...and finally a telecast moving picture of television. This was where we began to crack up nervously. Try and appreciate our situation: we were in a dark room looking into a television set at a television set which was showing a picture of a moving picture."
I'm trying to appreciate the mind-bending experienced by that audience, but in the postmodern rip-mix-burn world I live in, the above sounds perfectly normal.
Don't Mention It: The hidden life and times of a Greenwich Village restaurant (via glfstrm):
"One evening, when the place was nearly full, I saw a party of four come in the door; a couple of them may have been wearing neckties, which wouldn't have been a plus in a restaurant whose waitress used to wear a T-shirt that said "Die Yuppie Scum." Kenny took a quick glance from the kitchen and said, "No, we're closed." After a brief try at appealing the decision, the party left, and the waitress pulled the security gate partway down to discourage other latecomers."
"'It's only eight o'clock,' I said to Kenny."
"'They were nothing but strangers,' he said."
"'I think those are usually called customers,' I said. 'They come here, you give them food, they give you money. It's known as the restaurant business.'"
"Kenny shrugged. 'Fuck 'em,' he said."
What the Net might look like in the overregulated next millennium: Snailmail from the 21st Century. As inaccurate as most gazing-into-the-future is (just read some old entries on kottke.org for proof), Mark did a pretty good job with this one from May 1997.
Rebecca Mead strikes again with Shopping Rebellion in this week's New Yorker. Her description & analysis of Japan's fashion culture reminds me generally of several other threads floating about in the popular ether: mp3 ripping/trading, the weblog circle jerk, Web-enabled hypercollection, DVRs, the idea of a creative commons, the death of scarcity. The mantra of the moment seems to be "rip, mix, burn, consume, repeat, faster!" It's always been like this, but technology and our cultural evolution has shortened the lifecycle of the process so that the time from "rip" to "repeat" is a few minutes or hours instead of a few weeks or months, meaning that sometimes we can't tell why we're laughing at something anymore.
Identity Theory looks like an interesting Web site with a lot of different sorts of information. Robert Birnbaum has conducted more than 20 interviews for the site, including a conversation with Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States. Also worth a look is their online version of Sun Tzu's The Art of War.
Excerpt from Stagette:
"As we approached Nob Hill, Fratboy One told the cab driver to pull over at an all-night grocery. He and Fratboy Three ran out of the cab to buy some beer. The cabbie turned around to talk to me.
'Those boys crazy. You seem like nice Asian boy, not like them. You are Filipino?'
'Yes.'
'I have many Filipino friends," said the cabbie, who was Chinese. "They all musicians, like you. But that not your real job?'
'No, I'm a computer programmer.'
'That nice job, even in hard time like now," he said, nodding. "You friend with these crazy gwei lo?'
'No, I met them tonight.' 'Duuuuuuude!' Fratboy One yelled, coming from the store holding a 24-pack of Sam Adams over his head. 'Let's roll!'
'And gwei lo say we can't hold liquor,' muttered the cabbie."
What a great story.
The quantum theory of laundry: "the disappearance of entire loads can be explained by the existence of the finite probability that all of the socks in the main compartment have taken on the wave function of the lint trap and subsequently turned to lint. This further implies that instead of accusing someone of stealing your socks, running the machine while empty for long periods of time will increase the chances of retrieval of most of the socks".
Some stuff gleaned from the February 2002 issue of Wired:
TinyApps.org has links to a bunch of useful Windows software that is smaller that 1.44 Mb. The system section seems particularly useful.
Winning photographs from the 2001 Visions of Science Photographic Awards. The close-up images are amazing.
RND#: "The RND# project, which will ultimately comprise 100 short films, explores our increasingly bizarre dependence on and relationship with technology."
I love the cover done by Patric King for The Ever-Expanding, Profit-Maximizing, Cultural-Imperialist, Wonderful World of Disney.
James Gleick, one of my favorite authors (his biography of Feynman is as fine a book as you'll find about science), is coming out with a book in May entitled What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Electronic Frontier, which sounds a bit similar to Michael Lewis's Next: The Future Just Happened. Gleick is a great author, very adept at making complex issues understandable to the reader. Too bad his personal site hasn't been updated with information about the new book.
From what is on Gleick's site, it looks like the book will be based on some articles he's been writing recently: Patently Absurd, Connected: Life in the Wireless Age, Stop Me Before I Shop Again, and Love, Microsoft, among others. I liked this passage I found in an article he wrote in 1994 for the NY Times:
"The hardest fact to grasp about the Internet and the I-way is this: It isn't a thing; it isn't an entity; it isn't an organization. No one owns it; no one runs it. It is simply Everyone's Computers, Connected. It is the network of all networks -- the combination of all the large and small university, government, and corporate networks. It extends to individual PC's at the end of the line, like shacks at the ends of dirt roads not far from the turnoff to U. S. Route 1."
Blast from the past: Bubble Goo and the Bubble Goo IPO. Classic Suck.
Some Evany updates. If you've never been to her site, go go go! I laugh more at this site than I do at The Onion.
While I'm on the topic of traffic flow, there's some yummy content on this site: Physics for Bored Commuters. Mr. Beaty confirms some of my suspicions about how to make traffic run more smoothly, most notably the idea of leaving a large space in front of your vehicle for merging traffic. Beaty also links to a slick Java applet that simulates a small area of in-town stoplight traffic that you can manipulate. (thanks Aaron and Peter)
One thing that he didn't mention is the proper speed of a merging car. In order to merge successfully into moderate-to-heavy traffic, you need to be moving at least as fast as said traffic. Failure to do so results in a traffic pileup both on the on-ramp and on the highway.
I read two nifty articles today.
The first is a piece written by Leslie Harpold at Smug concerning the increased proliferation of information and our attempt to keep up with it.
The second is a Salon article on bombs in online mailing lists.
And have you seen that Jetta commercial? Groovy music and a slick car. This advertising speaks to me. I want one.
