Personal Media Summary- September 2016

Random reads from September:

• As a sign of the times, some Democrats are now nostalgic¹ for Romney.

• In the speculative archaeology section, links² between China and ancient Egypt (specifically, that the former might have come from the latter?!)

• This one³ is hard to summarize, except to say that if you liked ”Snow Crash”, or slightly older cyberpunk, you’ll like it.

• NPR presents an evolutionary explanation⁴ for our (lack of!) grasp on reality

• This one is in the “plus ca change” section: literary egos⁵ were just as easily bruised a couple of millennia ago.

• Something relevant in the media-saturated yet misinformed current age: a fable⁶ about how the visual dominates the literal.

• This one⁷ is a bit long and maybe too self-congratulatory, but it’s about ‘cool’ and ‘uncool’ things, and I would have loved it when I was younger (I think).

• I love encyclopedias, so I have to share this⁸ nostalgic look back at the (perfect!) 11th edition of Britannica in 1911.

• File this in the “cool cultural artifacts from the recent past”: there are apparently giant concrete arrows across America that were once guideposts for the first airmail routes (!)

• If you liked “Jodorowsky’s Dune”, you might like this⁹

• This one belongs in the “news that didn’t make the news” section: the largest ever General Strike¹⁰ in history (150 to 180 million workers) took place in India on September 2nd, but … you probably never heard about it.

• Note to authors: don’t let the criticism of critics bother you, even if it comes from famous authors themselves. Here¹¹ is one such note, from H. G. Wells to James Joyce from 1928 !

Now with regard to this literary experiment of yours. It’s a considerable thing because you are a very considerable man and you have in your crowded composition a mighty genius for expression which has escaped discipline. But I don’t think it gets anywhere. You have turned your back on common men—on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence, and you have elaborated. What is the result? Vast riddles. Your last two works have been more amusing and exciting to write than they will ever be to read. Take me as a typical common reader. Do I get much pleasure from this work? No. Do I feel I am getting something new and illuminating as I do when I read Anrep’s dreadful translation of Pavlov’s badly written book on Conditioned Reflexes? No. So I ask: Who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousand I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering?

• This one may be boring, or it may be interesting: charting the course of corporate logos¹² through the decades, in particular how they all seemed to have lost the text within them!

• Finally, if you have to read one long-form article this month, let it be this one: Andrew Sullivan laments¹³ how “… An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts. It broke me.”

Has our enslavement to dopamine — to the instant hits of validation that come with a well-crafted tweet or Snapchat streak — made us happier? I suspect it has simply made us less unhappy, or rather less aware of our unhappiness, and that our phones are merely new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety. In an essay on contemplation, the Christian writer Alan Jacobs recently commended the comedian Louis C.K. for withholding smartphones from his children. On the Conan O’Brien show, C.K. explained why: “You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away,” he said. “Underneath in your life there’s that thing … that forever empty … that knowledge that it’s all for nothing and you’re alone … That’s why we text and drive … because we don’t want to be alone for a second.”

Yep, read it.