I think about this graph a lot. At the moment, it’s because I’m rereading Clay Shirkey’s magnum opus from last spring, on the future of the industry. Click-through for a readably-large version. # A Graphic History of Newspaper Circulation Over the Last Two Decades

I think about this graph a lot. At the moment, it’s because I’m rereading Clay Shirkey’s magnum opus from last spring, on the future of the industry. Click-through for a readably-large version.

# A Graphic History of Newspaper Circulation Over the Last Two Decades

“A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.
The Economist (via mudd up, peterwknox, solipsism)

Times to Remember, Places to Forget

A wonderfully pithy Times Op-Ed from the New Year, on the homogenization of place. It grazes vapidity, but I think ultimately makes makes a smart point smartly. Give it a quick read.

When the industrial smoothing of our nation’s once-variegated edges has been fully accomplished, Americans may no longer need to gather at midnight on the last day of the year to yearn for their yesterdays, because wherever they are they will see the landscapes of their youths.
“‘Yes, yes, Hemingway,’ she said. ‘But you were living in a milieu of criminals and perverts.’ I did not want to argue that, although I thought that I had lived in a world as it was and there were all kinds of people in it and I tried to understand them, although some of them I could not like and some I still hated.
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast [p.12].
“In the annals of American slavery, this painful story would be utterly unremarkable, save for one reason: This union, consummated some two years before the Civil War, represents the origins of a family line that would extend from rural Georgia, to Birmingham, Ala., to Chicago and, finally, to the White House.

Sends shivers up my spine to read that line. Coincidentally, I re-listened to Zadie Smith’s extraordinary lecture at the NYPL from the last winter – both pieces call me to reassess, somehow, my understanding of how race is constructed in America. Can the times really be changing, even if only a bit?

# In First Lady’s Roots, a Complex Path From Slavery - NYTimes.com
# Speaking in Tongues – Zadie Smith live from the NYPL

On Language, 'Channeling'

Without getting into my qualms with having William Safire, inexplicably, writing the Sunday Times Magazine’s language column, the latter half of his piece last week piqued my inside baseball sort of linguistic interest: poetic allusions in print. To wit,

Paul Krugman of The Times is doing his best to preserve the grand tradition of oblique poetic quotation. He recently wrote: “Right now Mr. Obama’s backers seem to lack all conviction, perhaps because the prosaic reality of his administration isn’t living up to their dreams of transformation. Meanwhile, the angry right is filled with a passionate intensity.” No Bethlehem slouch, he; that’s based on William Butler Yeats’s familiar “The Second Coming,” in which “things fall apart; the center cannot hold” and “the best lack all conviction, while the worst/are full of passionate intensity.”

Getting at something

I wonder what it is that I feel so connected to David Foster Wallace’s own search for ontological clarity and meaning and yet guard my life with much more jealousy than it seems he ever did. By which I mean simply: he always understood something about the idea of suicide as a “solution” to deep metaphysical unrest that I doubt I’ll ever be able to fathom. I am so enamored of incarnation that I can’t stand to lose it; in D.T. Max’s telling, he was always destined to sink beneath the weight of life’s intransigencies.

His IQ was probably 60 points higher than mine, for one. He perceived (and created) with an insight and poignancy I’ll never know. Does identifying with him allow me to believe I see genius in myself? Is it an effort to exorcise the fear that with middling, unfocussed giftedness I am entirely unremarkable; that my discernment is completely of this age and nothing more?

This past year has been brewing a search for the marrow of things, or at least meaning in my life. Now I’m off to seminary, and it is explicitly a crucible of ontological engagement: I go to put aside my earthly machinations for a time, to make sense of a grander muddle. I need to commit to writing my racing thoughts these days, as middling and potentially redundant as they may be. I like the idea of serializing my reasons for enrolling at Union Theological Seminary for concerned friends and family, but also because the project will help me to sort and begin to make sense of the understandings and longings I bring to this undertaking.

I’m getting at something, is the point, and though it won’t be pretty for a while, I’ll give it a go anyhow. If you want to follow along you are welcome to watch this space.

From the Week in Review (which Lauren and I are realizing is rather fluffy, if enjoyable), A Modest Proposal - Bikers, Take the High Road: Next comes another species of biker, which I call the Really Cool Biker, because they are really cool — usually younger than the Lance Armstrong types, wearing skinny jeans and a windbreaker imprinted with, say, the name of a bar or a bowling alley, and riding a sleek, fixed-gear frame bike that I myself am too uncool to even adequately describe. Now, as the Tour de France vs. the tourist melee is exploding, the Really Cool Bikers attempt to skirt the scrum of tourists, using the moment of chaos as an obstacle course, causing tourists to break like pheasants after a bad shot. The Really Cool Bikers speed silently around terrified bystanders, leaving a trail of bike-induced horror. But it’s kind of fun to skirt the melee!

From the Week in Review (which Lauren and I are realizing is rather fluffy, if enjoyable), A Modest Proposal - Bikers, Take the High Road:

Next comes another species of biker, which I call the Really Cool Biker, because they are really cool — usually younger than the Lance Armstrong types, wearing skinny jeans and a windbreaker imprinted with, say, the name of a bar or a bowling alley, and riding a sleek, fixed-gear frame bike that I myself am too uncool to even adequately describe.

Now, as the Tour de France vs. the tourist melee is exploding, the Really Cool Bikers attempt to skirt the scrum of tourists, using the moment of chaos as an obstacle course, causing tourists to break like pheasants after a bad shot. The Really Cool Bikers speed silently around terrified bystanders, leaving a trail of bike-induced horror.

But it’s kind of fun to skirt the melee!

The Insolvency Dilemma

Add another notch to the board: Krugman makes the case for widespread insolvency in the troubled banks. He adds to a large number of voices – including my alma mater for my WikiPhD in Economics, Planet Money – who see things that way.

In opposition, of course, are Treasury and the White House, whose continued investment demonstrates their belief that the trouble lies in liquidity. And I find the logic there irresistible: look at the markets day to day - everyone is freaking out. Toxic assets aside (or even, to some extent, inclusive!), we have to be experience unprecedented illiquidity. Right?

Folks much smarter than me disagree, but I’ve yet to be swayed by a framing of the current climate in a way that supports their view. Treasury isn’t helping this much now, but if they can eventually inject confidence back into the system, it seems like assets good and bad are bound to recover a great deal of value. That’s liquidity.

“Fairey has said that the real message behind his work is “Question everything.” I question the I.C.A. director Jill Medvedow’s claim, in the show’s catalogue, that Fairey pursues a “quest to challenge the status quo and disrupt our sense of complacency through his art.” What isn’t status quo about political rage? And have you met anyone not heavily medicated who strikes you as complacent lately? The retrospective is dated on arrival.
Peter Schjedahl delivers a terse take-down of Shepherd Fairey’s work (the man, as if it needed to be said, behind the iconic Obama ‘HOPE’ poster). I appreciate the thesis that if it weren’t for the  faux-agitprop formlessness of Fairey’s style, that poster couldn’t have - like the candidate - meant so many things to so many people.