Fire and Knowledge

Stuart McMillen has created an interesting cartoon based on the foreword of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.

I agree that Huxley was closer to our future than Orwell — though it was a hard thing to predict, because it depended on whether communism or capitalism would win. Thankfully, capitalism did, and our “fate” is to revel in our own pleasure instead of being controlled by a despotic empire.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll take our pseudo-Huxlian future over an Orwellian one any day. It gives freedom to those who want it, and allows slavery to those who need it.

Now there’s a new way to publish your autobiography: The Tweetbook.

This is an interesting story about how Google never forgets by Seth Godin:

A friend advertised on Craigslist for a housekeeper.

Three interesting resumes came to the top. She googled each person’s name.

The first search turned up a MySpace page. There was a picture of the applicant, drinking beer from a funnel. Under hobbies, the first entry was, “binge drinking.”

The second search turned up a personal blog (a good one, actually). The most recent entry said something like, “I am applying for some menial jobs that are below me, and I’m annoyed by it. I’ll certainly quit the minute I sell a few paintings.”

And the third? There were only six matches, and the sixth was from the local police department, indicating that the applicant had been arrested for shoplifting two years earlier.

Three for three.

Google never forgets.

Two lessons there: (1) make sure you lock down your social networking profile so that only friends can see it and (2) never put anything on the internet that you don’t want your future employer to see.

Much of my early intellectual life was trying to like things others said I should like. And I would often get frustrated at myself, because I usually wouldn’t like what they said I should.

Some of the classics are outstanding — but most of them I’ve found dull, drawn-out, and unsatisfying. And unfortunately, I’ve read hundreds of them.

It’s been that way with art, too. I’ve been to art museums and tried to like the classics of art. I tried to reform my unruly tastes. But I found most of them unmoving and unimpressive.

So it’s a relief to hear that someone else that I respect felt similarly. Here’s Mark Twain:

Wherever you find a Raphael, a Rubens, a Michael Angelo, a Caracci, or a da Vinici (and we see them every day), you find artists copying them, and the copies are always the handsomest. Maybe the originals were handsome when they were new, but they are not now….

[People] stand entranced before [a da Vinci] with bated breath and parted lips, and when they speak, it is only in the catchy ejaculations of rapture:

“O, wonderful!”
“Such expression!”
“Such grace of attitude!”
“Such dignity!”
“Such faultless drawing!”
“Such matchless coloring!”

I envy them their honest admiration, if it be honest… But at the same time the thought will intrude… How can they see what is not visible?

I’ve stopped caring that my tastes are not what some people considered “cultured.” I’m not going to delude myself into liking something just because others do.

Tastes are subjective. Life is too short for reading books I don’t enjoy. It’s too short for old movies with bad acting and bad editing. It’s too short for art that was once moving, but now is mediocre at best.

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested,” said Francis Bacon. And some, I’d add, are to be shut and put back on the shelf for someone else who enjoys them.

Check out some pictures from “extreme power cabling” in Vietnam:

(via)

Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting article on “late bloomers” in The New Yorker. He argues that some artists have their best works young, and others when they are old — two kinds of geniuses.

I guess that means some of us have a second chance!

I just found out that there are more people in slavery now than at any other time in human history:

In its 400 years, the transatlantic slave trade is estimated to have shipped up to 12 million Africans to various colonies in the West. Free the Slaves estimates that the number of people in slavery today is at least 27 million…. Three out of four slavery victims are women and that half of all modern-day slaves are children.

And if you think it’s just “out there” and not in the US, think again:

Estimates by the US State Department suggest up to 17,500 slaves are brought into the US every year, with 50,000 of those working as prostitutes, farm workers or domestic servants.

According to the CIA, more than 1,000,000 people are enslaved in the US today. Thousands of cases go undetected each year and many are difficult to take to court as it can be difficult to prove force or legal coercion.

At least some of the decline in [political] civility arises from the fact that, from the press’s perspective, civility is boring. Your quote doesn’t run if you say, “I see the other guy’s point of view” or “The issue’s really complicated.” Go on the attack, though, and you can barely fight off the cameras.

—Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope (2006), p. 126