Last month, I put out a call for readers to ask me anything — “questions about the sabbatical, media diets, 25 years of blogging, membership stuff, editorial policies, my fiddle leaf fig, Mastodon, parenting, Fortnite, etc.” I meant to start answering these sooner, but I ended up getting so any questions (over 330 of them!) that I decided to go a little overboard and build a little site to host the questions and answers.
I’ll be spending the entire day today answering questions over there, so check it out now and then come back later for more. You can favorite posts to help others discover what the collective readership thinks are the best ones. Here’s one of the questions I’ve answered so far:
Q: What’s the reader profile you have in your mind when you write? Are you thinking about someone or some kind of person specifically? I’m a 37 year old lawyer who can’t even remember how I first came across your blog. I’ve read for 10+ years and have always sort of wondered if you had a sense of the breadth of people who read your blog. I don’t necessarily fit neatly within any of the topics you focus on but always learn something when I dip in. - Garo
A: The site is best when I try to write posts as if each one is an email to a curious friend who I think would be interested in the thing I’m writing about, irrespective of topic/subject/field/whatever. I know not everyone is interested in every topic (or even most topics!) but I tend to look for things that people might find intriguing even if they don’t normally collect stamps, skateboard, watch ballet, appreciate mathematics, or listen to rap. Anything is interesting if you dig deep enough, observe it from the correct angle, or talk to the right enthusiast.
From Max Miller’s informative & entertaining YouTube channel Tasting History comes this lesson on pemmican, a mixture of meat and fat/tallow that was invented by the indigenous peoples of North America. Pemmican’s main attributes are its shelf-life (years), portability, and nutritional value, making it an ideal “power bar” to be taken on expeditions or long ship voyages.
In 1975, famed French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson traveled, at the behest of a public television station, to the US to take photographs of New Jersey.
The photographer felt that New Jersey’s anywhere-ness, its density and diversity, was “a kind of shortcut through America.” With that prompt, Evans assembled an itinerary. Cunningham picked up Cartier-Bresson in Manhattan around sunrise each day for three weeks and headed for the bridges and tunnels. They embedded with ambulance drivers in Newark and chicken farmers in West Orange. They visited suburban sprawl, horse country, pine barrens, swamps, seashore, beauty parlors, labs, nuclear facilities, jails, mansions. They once stayed overnight in a South Jersey motel, and Cartier-Bresson insisted that they flip a coin to determine who got the bed.
It was one of his final photo projects and because his photos were cropped for use on television (“a practice Cartier-Bresson viewed as sacrilege”), the project was not included in most catalogues of his work and was almost forgotten.
Memes are remixing. You take a photo, you repurpose it, then someone else tries it, then there’s a flood of everyone trying out combinations, including remixing other memes.
When you take something old and use it in something new, that’s remixing. It might just seem like just copying, but it’s actually something much more. Remixing can empower you be more creative.
Remixing allows us to make music without playing instruments, to create software without coding, to create bigger and more complex ideas out of smaller and simpler ideas.
You don’t need expensive tools to remix, you don’t need a distributor, you don’t even need skills or… good judgment. Everybody can remix and everybody does.
From our songs and games and movies and memes, to how we train computers to create, to the way we sense of reality, to the evolution of life itself, everything is definitely a remix.
I…. Hmm. I really don’t know how to describe this video. Bobby Fingers, who seems to be a professional model maker of some sort (who can also sing and dance?), made a diorama of when Michael Jackson’s hair caught on fire during the filming of a Pepsi commercial (which, weirdly, occurred almost exactly halfway through Jackson’s life). It’s quietly and surreally hilarious — I absolutely lost it when the horse poop made an abrupt-but-relevant appearance. I don’t know what else to say…just watch it. Thank god the internet can still be weird. (thx, tim & clarke)
With three major new rules this year ("the pitch clock, a ban on the infield shift and limits on pickoff throws"), MLB hopes to speed the game up and to showcase the players' athleticism more effectively.
This recently rediscovered and deciphered stone slab is the oldest map of Europe "for which we can identify the territory it depicts". It's around 4000 years old and depicts (in 3D!) an area in Brittany, France.
An old favorite link of mine: "This is my personal account of curing my asthma and hayfever by deliberately infesting myself with the intestinal parasite hookworm."
Wow. In 1978, George Lucus gathered together Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan to go over ideas for a film Lucas had wanted to make about a swashbuckling archeologist, i.e. Raiders of the Lost Ark. Their sessions were recorded and there’s a transcript available online.
Lucas - Now, several aspects that we’ve discussed before: The image of him which is the strongest image is the “Treasure Of Sierra Madre” outfit, which is the khaki pants, he’s got the leather jacket, that sort of felt hat, and the pistol and holster with a World War One sort of flap over it. He’s going into the jungle carrying his gun. The other thing we’ve added to him, which may be fun, is a bull whip. That’s really his trade mark. That’s really what he’s good at. He has a pistol, and he’s probably very good at that, but at the same time he happens to be very good with a bull whip. It’s really more of a hobby than anything else. Maybe he came from Montana, someplace, and he… There are freaks who love bull whips. They just do it all the time. It’s a device that hasn’t been used in a long time.
Spielberg - You can knock somebody’s belt off and the guys pants fall down.
Lucas - You can swing over things, you can…there are so many things you can do with it. I thought he carried it rolled up. It’s like a Samurai sword. He carries it back there and you don’t even notice it. That way it’s not in the way or anything. It’s just there whenever he wants it.
Spielberg - At some point in the movie he must use it to get a girl back who’s walking out of the room. Wrap her up and she twirls as he pulls her back. She spins into his arms. You have to use it for more things than just saving himself.
Lucas - We’ll have to work that part out. In a way it’s important that it be a dangerous weapon. It looks sort of like a snake that’s coiled up behind him, and any time it strikes it’s a real threat.
Kasdan - Except there has to be that moment when he’s alone with a can of beer and he just whips it to him.
Over the intervening decades of enormous wealth and success, both Lucas and Spielberg have carefully tended their public images, so there is a voyeuristic thrill to seeing them converse in so unguarded a manner. As the screenwriters Craig Mazin and John August pointed out recently on the Scriptnotes podcast, one delight of reading the transcript is watching Spielberg throw out bad ideas, and then noting how Lucas gently shuts him down. Spielberg, who had sought to direct a Bond movie-and, astonishingly, been rejected-thought that their hero should be an avid gambler. Lucas replied that perhaps they shouldn’t overload him with attributes. (Lucas himself had briefly entertained, then mercifully set aside, the notion that his archaeologist might also be a practitioner of kung fu.) There’s a good reason we seldom get to spy on these conversations: really good spitballing, like improv comedy, requires a high degree of social disinhibition. So the writers’ room, like a therapist’s office, must remain inviolable.
