Thursday, January 30, 2020

R.I.P. Kobe Bryant



ESPN – "Kobe Bryant's greatness was both beautiful and maddening"
By Zach Lowe

Wall Street Journal – "What Kobe Bryant Meant"
By Jason Gay

The Ringer – "Kobe and Gianna"
By Shea Serrano

Business Insider – "Kobe Bryant was known for his intense work ethic, here are 24 examples"

American Dinner






















The Atlantic – "How America Lost Dinner"

"Forgetting you mail-ordered a bespoke set of ingredients for a selection of restaurant-style recipes is a luxurious predicament to be in, but the frequency with which those meal kits seem to be abandoned points to the very same problem they were invented to fix: Consumer surveys have found that most people who buy meal kits do so in hopes of saving time. As it turns out, it takes time to unpack, cook, and clean up after a meal-kit dinner, too.

While Blue Apron reported more than 1 million subscribers back in 2017, the meal-kit market today is struggling to retain subscribers. People seem no closer to consistently finding time or energy to cook. Instead, many turn to popular chains such as Chipotle and Sweetgreen; the fast-casual takeout market is only expanding. People who want to save time in the kitchen “meal prep,” the lifestyle-influencer world’s preferred term to describe cramming enough cooking into one day to spread the results out over an entire week of meals.

It isn’t just buying groceries and figuring out meals that apparently have become more untenable in the past several decades. The very act of feeding yourself in America has changed in fundamental ways. Dinner is the meal in which the social ramifications of those changes are perhaps most acutely felt. People in the United States eat alone more frequently than they ever have before. After decades as the idealized daily performance of the country’s communal life, dinner as it’s commonly imagined has begun to vanish.

...

Eating dinner alone is still eating, of course. But food can have far more value than just calories. As public-health campaigns are keen to remind people, there are good reasons to cook dinner and eat with your family. Cooking gives people better control and understanding of what they consume, which usually leads to more healthful choices than whatever a restaurant serves up. Preparing food and eating with friends or loved ones is also the kind of intimate bonding that strengthens social ties. Researchers have compared isolation’s impact on health to that of smoking cigarettes, and Americans are deeply lonely. Those who worry about the deterioration of dinnertime aren’t simply scolds.

They might be scolding the wrong people, however. By all indications, Americans want to cook and eat together. They’ll subscribe to delivery ingredient boxes by the millions, buy a staggering number of Instant Pots and air fryers, and make the internet sometimes feel like one giant recipe swap. It isn’t that they’ve gotten lazy or gluttonous. The very structure of American life has changed to make the basics of stability difficult to attain, down to something as simple as eating with your partner or child, or having a partner or child at all. The problem of dinner is far larger than what you’re going to eat."

Friday, January 24, 2020

The Last Thing He Wanted - Trailer



February 21, 2020
Directed by Dee Rees (Mudbound)
Based on The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion
Starring Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck, Rosie Perez, Willem Dafoe

2020 NFL Draft Stage in Las Vegas




















Via @arashmarkazi:

"The stage for the 2020 NFL Draft in Las Vegas will be on the water at the Fountains of Bellagio. The players will be transported to the stage by boat."

Hieroglyphs to Emojis






































New York Times – "Emojis Meet Hieroglyphs: If King Tut Could Text"

"Hieroglyphics was a complete written language, and while even an illiterate person could recognize and understand some basic symbols, the scribes worked according to strict rules and had to be highly skilled. Ancient Egyptian inscriptions eventually morphed into the dry efficiency of the first alphabet of around 20 characters, which could be more easily taught and executed, leading to an explosion in communications.

“What’s happened now,” said Ms. Ben Dor Evian, who has a hieroglyph app on her cellphone, “is that it is easier to click on an emoji than to write a whole word.”

Emojis often serve as emotional shorthand — think smiley blowing a heart kiss to soften a message or send love, or a winking face to signal sarcasm — filling an expressive void that text messages may fail to convey.

In ancient Egyptian writing and art, the image of a scarab, or dung beetle, expressed a whole concept of the afterlife and rebirth and was used in inscriptions as the verb “to become.” Hieroglyphics also had ways of adding context in the form of a set of mute symbols known as “classifiers.” A Libyan throw stick could, for example, be used to denote foreignness."

Friday, January 17, 2020

The Writing of Ted Chiang





















New Yorker – "Ted Chiang’s Soulful Science Fiction"

"Chiang has been described as a writer of “humanist” sci-fi; many readers feel that his stories are unusually moving and wonder, given their matter-of-fact tone, where their emotional power comes from. "

...

"“I don’t get that many ideas for stories,” Chiang said, around a decade ago, in an interview with the sci-fi magazine Interzone. “If I had more ideas, I would write them, but unfortunately they only come at long intervals. I'm probably best described as an occasional writer.” That is still more or less true. Chiang continues to make ends meet through technical writing; it’s unclear whether the success of “Arrival” could change that, or even whether he would desire such a change. A script based on another of his stories, “Understand,” is also in development. “I don't want to try to force myself to write novels in order to make a living,” Chiang wrote, in an e-mail. “I'm perfectly happy writing short stories at my own pace.”"






































One of the New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2019:

"Many of the nine deeply beautiful stories in this collection explore the material consequences of time travel. Reading them feels like sitting at dinner with a friend who explains scientific theory to you without an ounce of condescension. Each thoughtful, elegantly crafted story poses a philosophical question; Chiang curates all nine into a conversation that comes full circle, after having traversed remarkable terrain."

The Plot Outline for Knives Out





















From Rian Johnson's Twitter: "Have mentioned it in a few writing-centric interviews, so I dug up my barely legible moleskin notebook outline for @KnivesOut . This is how I always diagram stuff out before I start writing. (Spoilers... I guess?)"

Related,
Favorite Movies of 2019

Sunday, January 12, 2020

How to Listen Better



























New York Times – "Talk Less. Listen More. Here’s How."

"Of course, technology plays a role. Social media provides a virtual megaphone, along with the means to filter out opposing views. People find phone calls intrusive and ignore voice mail, preferring text or wordless emoji. If people are listening to anything, it’s likely through headphones or earbuds, where they feel safe inside their own curated sound bubbles. This is all fueling what public health officials describe as an epidemic of loneliness in the United States.

But tech is not the only culprit. High schools and colleges have debate teams and courses in rhetoric and persuasion, but rarely, if ever, offer classes or extracurricular activities that teach careful listening. You can get a doctorate in speech communication and join clubs such as Toastmasters to perfect your public speaking, but who strives for excellence in listening? The image of success and power today is someone miked up and prowling around a stage or orating from behind a lectern. Giving a TED talk or delivering a commencement speech is living the dream.

The cacophony of modern life also stops us from listening. The acoustics in restaurants can make it difficult, if not impossible, for diners to clearly hear one another. Offices with an open design ensure every keyboard click, telephone call and after-lunch belch make for constant racket. Traffic noise on city streets, music playing in shops and the bean grinder at your favorite coffeehouse exceed the volume of normal conversation by as much as 30 decibels, and can even cause hearing loss.

So how can we reclaim the lost art of listening? After a couple of years studying the neuroscience, psychology and sociology of listening, as well as consulting some of the best professional listeners out there (including a C.I.A. agent, focus group moderator, radio producer, priest, bartender and furniture salesmen), I discovered that listening goes beyond simply hearing what people say. It also involves paying attention to how they say it and what they do while they are saying it, in what context, and how what they say resonates within you.

...

Good listeners ask good questions. One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned as a journalist is that anyone can be interesting if you ask the right questions. That is, if you ask truly curious questions that don’t have the hidden agenda of fixing, saving, advising, convincing or correcting. Curious questions don’t begin with “Wouldn’t you agree…?” or “Don’t you think…?” and they definitely don’t end with “right?” The idea is to explore the other person’s point of view, not sway it.

For example, when trying to find out why people might go to the grocery store late at night, a focus group moderator told me, she didn’t ask leading questions like, “Do you shop late a night because you didn’t get around to it during the day?” or “Do you shop at night because that’s when they restock the shelves?” Instead, she turned her question into an invitation: “Tell me about the last time you went grocery shopping late at night.” This, she said, prompted a quiet, unassuming woman who had hardly spoken up to that point to raise her hand. “I had just smoked a joint and was looking for a ménage à trois — me, Ben and Jerry,” she said. Grocers, take note.

You also want to avoid asking people personal and appraising questions like “What do you do for a living?” or “What part of town do you live in?” or “What school did you go to?” or “Are you married?” This line of questioning is not an honest attempt to get to know who you’re talking to so much as rank them in the social hierarchy. It’s more like an interrogation and, as a former C.I.A. agent told me, interrogation will get you information, but it won’t be credible or reliable.

In social situations, peppering people with judgmental questions is likely to shift the conversation into a superficial, self-promoting elevator pitch. In other words, the kinds of conversations that make you want to leave the party early and rush home to your dog.

Instead, ask about people’s interests. Try to find out what excites or aggravates them — their daily pleasures or what keeps them up at night. Ask about the last movie they saw or for the story behind a piece of jewelry they’re wearing. Also good are expansive questions, such as, “If you could spend a month anywhere in the world, where would you go?”

Research indicates that when people who don’t know each other well ask each other these types of questions, they feel more connected than if they spent time together accomplishing a task. They are the same kinds of questions listed in the widely circulated article “36 Questions That Lead to Love” and are similar to the conversation starters suggested by the Family Dinner Project, which encourages device-free and listening-focused meals.

Because our brains can think a lot faster than people can talk, beware of the tendency to take mental side trips when you should be listening. Smart people are particularly apt to get distracted by their own galloping thoughts. They are also more likely to assume they already know what the other person is going to say."

U.S. Chinese Relations




































New Yorker – "The Future of America’s Contest with China"

"On the balcony, to Xi’s right, was the politburo’s reigning propagandist, Wang Huning, a former professor who once travelled the United States and honed a prickly theory about dealing with its people. “The Americans pay attention to strength,” he wrote, after attending a football game at the Naval Academy. “Football has some strategy, but it’s not elegant; mainly, it relies on strength.” He added, “The Americans apply that spirit to many fields, including the military, politics, and the economy.”"

The Origins of Layering






















The Atlantic – "The Military Origins of Layering:The popular way to keep warm outdoors owes a debt to World War II–era clothing science."

High School Basketball Superstars


























The Athletic – "A weekend with Sierra Canyon, as Bronny James, Zaire Wade and ‘The Show’ take over Minneapolis"

"They’ve all come here for a high school basketball doubleheader, featuring two local powerhouses and two nationally ranked teams from each coast. But truthfully, everyone is really here to eyeball Sierra Canyon. The private Los Angeles-area school features several five-star prospects in its starting lineup and two social media stars coming off the bench: LeBron “Bronny” James Jr., and Zaire Wade, the son of Dwyane Wade. Their presence, along with the occasional cameos from their famous fathers, has turned Sierra Canyon into a prep version of the mid-1990s Chicago Bulls, a nationwide barnstorming unit that attracts hordes of selfie-takers and autograph seekers wherever it goes.

The Trailblazers are in Minneapolis for games on back-to-back nights, the first of which airs on ESPN2 with the second one streaming on ESPN3. Fifteen of their games will be shown on one of the ESPN platforms this season, a record for a high school team."