In last week's New Yorker, science writer Jonah Lehrer presents an interesting correlation between creativity and physical space. He sums it up with a quote from Isaac Kohane, a Harvard Medical School researcher: "Even in the era of big science, when researchers spend so much time on the internet, it's still so important to create intimate spaces."
Read MoreTrickeration. Blowback. Ginormous. Lest you think I'm coming up with Huffington Post headline ideas, these are just three of the dozen words added to this year's list of banished vocabulary. Diction has been a hot topic here of late: last week, James R. offered his thoughts on banishing, or at least curbing, our use of the word "literally."
Read More"[Y]ou hire a fiction writer to do nonfiction, there's going to be the occasional bit of embellishment.” David Foster Wallace
Last week, Katie Roiphe gushed in Slate about the "rigorous" and "honorable" syllabi from David Foster Wallace's teaching days, currently housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin. Of his 1994 course in Literary Analysis at Illinois State University (which Wallace taught when he was in his early 30s), Roiphe writes, "There is in his syllabus...nothing but rigorous honesty and tireless interrogation."
Read MoreIn a better world, a lot of things would be true: I'd have a fleet of Dodge Vipers (like my 7th grade history teacher said I'd have because of my test scores), my tweets would get turned into searing movies starring Forrest Whitaker as a dyspeptic writer, and we would be eight games into the NBA regular season.
What a sad, cruel world it is.
Read MoreSkwerl, an Australian short film in which gibberish mimics how English might sound to non-English speakers, recently wound up on Gawker and New York Magazine. The film is unremarkable subject-wise: a sort of mumblecore prose poem about an alt-attractive couple and a romantic dinner gone sour. So why did I find myself playing and...
Read MoreNowhere am I more besieged by verbal notification and billboard instruction than I am in the bowels of the New York City MTA. “Stand clear of the closing doors.” “A crowded subway is no excuse for unlawful sexual behavior.” “The next Rockaway Parkway bound L train will depart in approximately twenty-two minutes.” Back in August, Oliver Burkeman’s “This column will change your life” series summarized various studies on the impact signs have on human behavior. What I gather is that greater specificity leads to greater compassion (or obedience), and that over-signage is an enormous disturbance that perpetuates compulsive behavior.
Read MoreThe New York Times Magazine recently published a “riff” by frequent contributor Dwight Garner arguing that “important novelists” should be publishing more frequently than once every ten years in order to be “central to the cultural conversation.” Garner’s essay was titled “Dear Important Novelists: Be Less Like Moses and More Like Howard Cosell.”
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