Category: Culture
-
Don’t Miss Adam Grant’s new book “Originals”
Of the many compliments that I can give to Adam Grant’s remarkable new book Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, a rare one is that I will have to read it again soon. Grant is an unusual social scientist in that he’s also a terrific writer, a gem-cutting anecdote selector of real-life stories that illuminate…
-
The Girl in the Spider’s Web isn’t terrible, isn’t great
Over the weekend I zoomed through the new David Lagercrantz novel, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, which is the not-written-by-Stieg-Larsson sequel to the Millenium Trilogy that started with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I’ll start with some thoughts about the book itself — so you have your spoiler alert — but I’ll wind…
-
Stewart, Cosby, Williams: Tough Times for U.S. Comedy
Take heed, sirrah, the whip. —King Lear to his Fool Jon Stewart’s farewell episode of The Daily Show last night proved joyful rather than sad as dozens of people whose careers took root and bloomed under Stewart’s watch turned up to celebrate and — despite his resistance — to thank him. For the under-30 crowd,…
-
Against Disruption: Louis Menand, Douglas Adams, Books and Technology
Have you ever smacked into a glass door when you didn’t realize it was closed? I have. It hurts. The intersection of my face and a glass door happened at my great aunt’s tiny desert house in the 80s, where the mix of a trick of the sunlight and my distracted boyhood mind made the…
-
My 2014 in Books
I read a lot — magazines, two newspapers, email newsletters, and countless social-media-shared links I chase down digital rabbit holes. I’d never know anything, for example, without Jason Hirshhorn’s magnificent daily Media Redefined. But I’m lost without books. Actual books. Whether paper or digital, if I’m not reading at least two books then I get…
-
Paris as a way of seeing
Here is the view of the shop across the street from our flat in Paris’ Le Marais district early this morning, the day before Christmas, when I was the first one up and could watch the city come to life with a cup of coffee in one hand and my iPad-provided New York Times in…
-
Notes from Bergen
Our two most precious currencies are time and attention. Money, our more conventional currency, helps to focus attention and to make us chary of how we spend our time. I write this sitting in Chaos Coffee, perched at the edge of the University of Bergen campus and a block from Nygård Skole where W, my…
-
UP, UP and away… How a wearable computer changed my brain
Old dogs can learn new tricks. So can people young and old. Behavior is metamorphic, although we seldom recognize that plasticity in the moment. Instead, we think the world changes while we stay the same, that our children are less responsible than we were at their age but that we threw crazier parties. We think…