Why We Like Our Own Farts
One of the most common retorts in my household—“That’s because you like sitting in your own filth!”—seems so much more plausible now.
/via Devour
Hue and Cry Notice →
On average, the police in [New Delhi] register the discovery of more than 3,000 unidentifiable bodies a year — unidentifiable not because they are unrecognizable, but because they carry no documents and there is no one who knows them.
There’s an entire world of pain out there, in which people operate in a totally different sphere of existence. We, here in the United States, know almost nothing about it.
‘100’ →
The Leica commercial “Leica 100” looks back at 100 years of Leica photography through cleverly staged recreations of famous photographs. The commercial includes recreations of photos by Diane Arbus, Dorothea Lange, and Neil Armstrong, among many others. “Leica 100” was created by ad agency F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi for Leica Gallery Sao Paolo.
Sea of Crises →
In January I flew to Tokyo to spend two weeks watching sumo wrestling. Tokyo, the city where my parents were married — I remember gazing up at their Japanese wedding certificate on the wall and wondering what it meant. Tokyo, the biggest city in the world, the biggest city in the history of the world, a galaxy reflected in its own glass. It was a fishing village barely 400 years ago, and now: 35 million people, a human concourse so vast it can’t be said to end, only to fade indeterminately around the edges. Thirty-five million, almost the population of California. Smells mauling you from doorways: stale beer, steaming broth, charbroiled eel. Intersections where a thousand people cross each time the light changes, under J-pop videos 10 stories tall. Flocks of schoolgirls in blue blazers and plaid skirts. Boys with frosted tips and oversize headphones, camouflage jackets and cashmere scarves. Herds of black-suited businessmen. A city so dense the 24-hour manga cafés will rent you a pod to sleep in for the night, so post-human there are brothels where the prostitutes are dolls. An unnavigable labyrinth with 1,200 miles of railway, 1,000 train stations, homes with no addresses, restaurants with no names. Endless warrens of Blade Runner alleys where paper lanterns float among crisscrossing power lines. And yet: clean, safe, quiet, somehow weightless, a place whose order seems sustained by the logic of a dream.
It’s a dream city, Tokyo. I mean that literally, in that I often felt like I was experiencing it while asleep. You’ll ride an escalator underground into what your map says is a tunnel between subway stops, only to find yourself in a thumping subterranean mall packed with beautiful teenagers dancing to Katy Perry remixes. You will take a turn off a busy street and into a deserted Buddhist graveyard, soundless but for the wind and the clacking of sotoba sticks, wooden markers crowded with the names of the dead. You will stand in a high tower and look out on the reason-defying extent of the city, windows and David Beckham billboards and aerial expressways falling lightly downward, toward the Ferris wheel on the edge of the sea.
The subheading for this piece, Grantland’s initial, I think, foray into design-conscious, long-form, "Snow Fall"-style narrative journalism, is:
A sumo wrestling tournament.
A failed coup ending in seppuku.
A search for a forgotten man.
How one writer’s trip to Japan became a journey through oblivion.
The collision—pun intended, in a piece about sumo wrestling—here between the content and the style, and the author’s voice, is magical. “Sea of Crises” is so, so worth your time; you will be transported. Read it as soon as you can.
New Use For a Microsoft Surface: iPad Stand →
Microsoft must have thought it had pulled off a nice piece of product placement when it gave CNN election commentators a bunch of Surface Pro tablets to help with their coverage. CNN dutifully covered its desks with the devices, resulting in a series of proud tweets from Microsoft fans.
There was just one small problem, noted by GeekWire: a closer look revealed that hidden behind the Surface tablets were the iPads that commentators were actually using. In one case, the commentator was actually using her Surface tablet as a stand for her iPad.
The silver lining on an otherwise dark, dark political night.
David Foster Wallace’s Syllabus For 'English 170R: Selected Obscure/Eclectic Fictions' →
COURSE DESCRIPTION
It’s a 170-grade Advanced Seminar, meaning it’s “speaking-intensive” and presupposes the basic set of lit-crit tools taught in English 67. Structurally, the course is meant to be more a colloquium than a prof.-led seminar. We are going to read and converse about nine novels (some of which are kind of long) dating from the 1930s–1970s. They’re books that are arguably good and/or important but are not, in the main, read or talked about that much as of 2003. At the least, then, English 170R affords a chance to read some stuff you’re not apt to get in other Lit classes. It would also be good to talk this term about the dynamics of the Lit canon and about why some important books get taught a lot in English classes and others do not — which will, of course, entail our considering what modifiers like “important,” “good,” and “influential” mean w/r/t modern fiction. We can approach the books from a variety of different critical, theoretical, and ideological perspectives, too, depending on students’ backgrounds and interests. In essence, we can talk about whatever you wish to — provided that we do it cogently and well.
Another “Dave W.” syllabus, another masterpiece. Sidetone: can you imagine trying to bullshit your way through one of his classes? To his face? I get the shivers just thinking about it.
/via The Howling Fantods
Finally →
Life seems to happen in stages. As someone who has had a Facebook account since 2004, I’ve seen it. All of my friends got married (we were one of the first). All of my friends got pregnant. All of my friends had kids. We started on the marriage bandwagon before nearly anyone. Erin was a couple months shy of 24 and I was 25. Yet here it is we’re on a treadmill, and can’t progress forward. At this point we’ve been married 6 years.
I stop looking at Facebook daily, like I used to. I rarely look at it anymore. I just can’t stand it; every other post is about someone’s baby. I’m happy for them… I really am. But I can’t see the constant reminder of how we’re falling short. Of how we can’t seem to conceive.
I don’t listen regularly to the podcast Casey Liss is a part of, ATP, often, but when I saw that his son was born a week ago, I downloaded the episode. After hearing about and reading the linked-to piece above, I’m glad I did.
The Blair Witch Project, 15 Years Later
I’m linking here to two essays from The Dissolve about what I still think is one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen, The Blair Witch Project. First up, Mike D’Angelo:
Found-footage horror, which had previously barely existed as a genre, became so popular that it’s still going strong 15 years later; there are movies in multiplexes right now that only exist because of The Blair Witch Project. Shot for an initial budget that’s been reported as less than $50,000, it grossed just shy of $250 million (closer to $350 million, adjusted for inflation), making it one of the most profitable films of all time. Its two directors, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, were even on the cover of Time. Apart from Paranormal Activity—a direct descendant—there’s been no little-indie-that-could sensation like it since.
Oh, one more thing: America fucking hated it.
And then we’ve got a conversation between Nathan Rabin and Scott Tobias:
The one thing I like about found-footage horror films—and Blair Witch is certainly the gold standard of the form—is that they have to rely on the fundamentals. The film is scary as hell, but in the harsh light of day, we realize we’ve been freaked out by piles of rocks, stick configurations, and the flapping of a tent. Though I think the film actually includes some striking, even stylized, images—the angle on Heather’s face during that snot-filled confession, the discovery of the wooded area full of hanging stick figures, that utterly chilling final shot—the interplay between darkness and light, and onscreen and offscreen information. It doesn’t take a dime to achieve effects like that, either. Horror is the one genre that isn’t really helped by money being thrown at it, and Blair Witch affirms that as well as any movie I know.
The fact that some people were angered by the lie associated with The Blair Witch Project is ludicrous and has always been. All movies are based on a lie, especially in the horror genre. Once again, Happy Halloween.
Tim Cook is Proud to be Gay →
I’ll admit that this wasn’t an easy choice. Privacy remains important to me, and I’d like to hold on to a small amount of it. I’ve made Apple my life’s work, and I will continue to spend virtually all of my waking time focused on being the best CEO I can be. That’s what our employees deserve—and our customers, developers, shareholders, and supplier partners deserve it, too. Part of social progress is understanding that a person is not defined only by one’s sexuality, race, or gender. I’m an engineer, an uncle, a nature lover, a fitness nut, a son of the South, a sports fanatic, and many other things. I hope that people will respect my desire to focus on the things I’m best suited for and the work that brings me joy.
Beware of anyone who responds to this, not new news, but still important news with phrases like who cares? and stick to selling phones! and why is this important? That’s the shorthand that people use when they see the arc of history bending away from them, and they are terrified at the prospect of being left behind. If you can’t see/understand why having an openly gay CEO of one of the largest companies in the history of the world is an important revelation, then you’re just willfully ignorant.