Despite reports of increased xenophobia in China, it’s nice to know there’s still a part-time job available in Beijing for a tall, white, male, Jewish, Harvard-educated fluent Mandarin speaker.
Reminds me of Louis CK’s “Being White”.
(Source: felixsalmon)
The iRistocrats.
Happy Friday.
Maybe this will inspire a run on the HuffPo.
Blogger confronts newspaper editor who plagiarized his work.
I choose the Kardashian as a unit both because I like the mitteleuropean feel of the term – like the Ohm or the Roentgen – and because Kardashian is an exemplar of attention disconnected from merit, talent or reason. The Kardashian mentions how much attention is paid, not how much attention is deserved, so naming the unit after someone who is famous for being famous seems appropriate. Should the unit be adopted, I would hope that future scholars will calculate Kardashians using whatever public figure is appropriate at the time for being inappropriately famous.
— The Kardashian as a unit of measure for attention.
(Source: ethanzuckerman.com)
I love that Bobko’s photos here capture the sequential phases of a wave, if we can call them phases. Nearly every other representation of ocean waves, photograph or otherwise, captures only the cresting wave: the wave curling gently bidden by terns, cooly ridden by a surfer, or hovering before unleashing its onslaught on a listing boat. Like a fighter in the ring, we always see the moment right as the champ’s upper cut kisses his opponent’s chin. What a kiss it is, but there’s so much more. Here we see the wind up, we see the release; his feet planted, and the opponent cold on the canvas.
That first picture for me, that swell of the wave as it builds to its break, is what brings forth the kinesthetic memories.
Ready for the summer ocean.
As a former surfer, Paul Bobko had plenty of time to observe waves of all shapes and forms. It was during this time that he found his inspiration for his series Water Landscapes-Suspended Energy.
About the project:
In his magnum opus, Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon introduces us to the German concept of Brenschluss in the telemetry of the flight of the V2 rocket. The rocket is propelled by its engines and travels along its parabolic arc. At a certain point the engines turn off, this flameout is called brenschluss. At brenschluss the rocket’s ascendancy is checked by gravity, and before it begins to fall to its target on earth, it hesitates for just a moment. After this moment gravity and momentum alone, not a rocket engine, define the inexorable trajectory of descent to its inevitable, calamitous end.
So to do Paul Bobko’s Water Landscapes-Suspended Energy photographs allow us to see that very moment of hesitation when the force of nature that is the ocean wave, ceases to be propelled by the surging forces of the ocean floor. The ocean suddenly lets go and sets it free, it hesitates at this moment of release, then crashes on the shore, liberated, but spent. Bobko shows us this very moment of hesitation, before the explosion. The outline of the explosion is clear and coming, but it hasn’t happened yet, it is, as yet, prelude…the power is still coiled in the curl, frozen for this second. Light comes glowing through that watery tunnel, foam is leaping from its crest, escaping and ecstatic. The menace is limned in the terrifying flexing of its form. It is most exhilarating to see the noun become the verb.
8-bit Kid A.
HT courcelan
Although Facebook has recently started allowing people to see the kind of data the company collects on them, there is no way to opt-out of Facebook’s aggressive information collection, which can even track people who are not logged into Facebook.
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Twitter Implements Do Not Track Privacy Option
Facebook’s “aggressive information collection” is not all that exceptional though. Google and hundreds of other online services track us site by site, click by click.
That doesn’t make it any better, of course. A quick Ghostery install is a good way to reduce your trackability, and reveal just how many services out there are watching you browse online.
For what it’s worth, I actually use Facebook exclusively through a Fluid app with separate cookies from my system’s Safari. It’s probably a little bit crazy, but it does have the added benefit of making Facebook usage extremely intentional (and thus limited).
There’s nothing wrong with holding on to a few tchotchkes and family heirlooms. But you’re probably overestimating the future use or enjoyment you’re going to get from most of the things you cling to.
— Some thoughts on our attachment to stuff.
