Joe Stracci's blog. Topics covered include, but are not limited to: writing, art, technology, Apple, food, fatherhood, parenting, and music. And photography. And design. And sports. Oh, and probably some politics too.
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In celebration of my finally tying the bow on the third draft of my new book, I’m sharing this paragraph, which I was told was, “beautiful, one of the best paragraphs in the book so far."
Fourth draft, here I come.
I’ve been a chef in New York for more than ten years, and, for the decade before that, a dishwasher, a prep drone, a line cook, and a sous-chef. I came into the business when cooks still smoked on the line and wore headbands. A few years ago, I wasn’t surprised to hear rumors of a study of the nation’s prison population which reportedly found that the leading civilian occupation among inmates before they were put behind bars was “cook.” As most of us in the restaurant business know, there is a powerful strain of criminality in the industry, ranging from the dope-dealing busboy with beeper and cell phone to the restaurant owner who has two sets of accounting books. In fact, it was the unsavory side of professsional cooking that attracted me to it in the first place. In the early seventies, I dropped out of college and transferred to the Culinary Institute of America. I wanted it all: the cuts and burns on hands and wrists, the ghoulish kitchen humor, the free food, the pilfered booze, the camaraderie that flourished within rigid order and nerve-shattering chaos. I would climb the chain of command from mal carne (meaning “bad meat,” or “new guy”) to chefdom—doing whatever it took until I ran my own kitchen and had my own crew of cutthroats, the culinary equivalent of “The Wild Bunch.”
The 1999 New Yorker piece that was the beginning of it all.
It all began simply enough. I’d just read one of those ubiquitous Internet lists called “21 Things You Didn’t Know Your iPhone Could Do.” One of them was this: I could ask Siri, “What planes are above me right now?” and Siri would bark back, “Checking my sources.” Almost instantly there was a list of actual flights — numbers, altitudes, angles — above my head.
I happened to be doing this when Gus was nearby. “Why would anyone need to know what planes are flying above your head?” I muttered. Gus replied without looking up: “So you know who you’re waving at, Mommy.”
Just when you thought every morsel of meat, every ounce of marrow, had been snipped and sucked from the public discourse on technology, and all that was left to do was gnaw on the snarky bones.
This morning, "Track 3" from Taylor Swift's new album, "1989," rose to No. 1 on Canada's iTunes. This would not be notable—yet another Swift song, catapulting to the top of the charts—except for the song itself: "Track 3," it turned out, was simply eight seconds of ... white noise.
You could see the whole thing as a simple glitch (and, of course, as a commentary on the deep loyalty of Swift's fan base, in Canada and in the U.S.). But you could also see it as something more meaningful, something in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons and, of course John Cage: Taylor, an expert in the agonies of love and loss, extending her reach to explore technology and nihilism and the entire human condition. "White Noise" may be the song of our time. So we asked for a review of it from Don DeLillo, the author of one of the novels of our time.
I hope this starts a new trend in music reviews.
The Pew Research Center published a fascinating new report on political polarization and the media Tuesday morning. The report contains [a] chart, based on survey data of people who say they've read, watched, or listened to different media outlets.
Really interesting. You’ll be surprised by where some organizations/outlets land compared to others.
I heard the voice calling from just outside the well
She said "You fool! Now that you know your end is near
You always fall for what you desire or what you fear"
What exactly have we learned from the opening salvos of The Players' Tribune? What deep, dark secrets are these great athletes finally empowered to reveal now that the burden of dealing with reporters is removed? The first post, from " Derek Jeter," opens with the expected platitudes about how great New York fans are, how great baseball fans are, and how grateful he is. It then turns from the usual platitudes to the usual Jeter routine of speaking while saying nothing:
“I do think fans deserve more than "no comments" or "I don't knows." Those simple answers have always stemmed from a genuine concern that any statement, any opinion or detail, might be distorted. I have a unique perspective. Many of you saw me after that final home game, when the enormity of the moment hit me. I'm not a robot. Neither are the other athletes who at times might seem unapproachable. We all have emotions. We just need to be sure our thoughts will come across the way we intend.”
Great, except at no point in the piece does "Derek Jeter" say what's on his mind. There is no first-person story; there are no behind-the-scenes details. He is, instead, during the only truly Jeter thing there is to do—selling a product. (Himself, in this case.) The only thing missing from his sales pitch is a button advertising T-shirts for $39.99, plus shipping and handling.
Yeah, I was initially excited by this premise, but it’s turned out to be pretty vapid. There’s a reason politicians shouldn’t be allowed to investigate themselves.
Is political rhetoric becoming less sophisticated over time? One interesting way to answer the question is to study the complexity of presidential speeches, from George Washington's first inaugural to the recent addresses of Barack Obama.
To do that, the site Vocativ used the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, which was developed by the U.S. Navy in the 1970s to ensure the simplicity of military instruction manuals. The Flesch reading formula is not a measure of vocabulary or the technical construction of sentences. Instead, it measures two variables—syllables per word and words per sentence. So a cryptic sentence like this:
As mist slunk in, the oiler on the rig slewed the boom of the crane.
actually has a lower (simpler) Flesch score than this sentence of equal words:
The cat was so happy after eating the goldfish that it made a big smile.
because happy, after, eating, and goldfish have two syllables, even though they're far more common than one-syllable words like slunk, rig, slew, or boom.
With that caveat out of the way, here is a look at presidential-speech complexity over time.
I was curious to see what the internet’s reaction would be to this piece. I think the dumbing down of speeches is fine—the cleaner the language, the more obvious the lie.
“Forced to cancel my talk at USU after receiving death threats because police wouldn’t take steps to prevent concealed firearms at the event,” she tweeted. “Requested pat downs or metal detectors after mass shooting threat but because of Utah’s open carry laws police wouldn’t do firearm searches.”
Good thing we’ve got all of these guns and lack of gun restrictions around to protect our freedom.
