BY ROSEY LAKOS: On embracing the fleeting photographic moments that emerge
In 2007 and 2008, we did a year-end roundup using the following format:
X event/news item/cultural artifact/personal experience was > Y event/news item/cultural artifact/personal experience
(short explanation)
Last year we lapsed, but not this one. Anyone with the inclination should submit an equation–it can be something serious or funny, whatever you want to do with it. Keep your explanatory blurb short—three sentences or less. Feel free to submit multiple equations, but if there’s a ton of submissions I may have to pick one per person.
FICTION BY LELAND CHEUK: “If Dave switches from an extra large coffee to a small one daily, he’ll save roughly $365 this year, as this year is not a leap year. With $365 dollars, he can almost buy the new Android OS touchscreen phone he wants.”
SIMPLICITIES BY JANINA LARENAS: The skillet or upside down cake is a perfect alternative to traditional Thanksgiving fare
For the short holiday week, an early Reading Room:
Patti Smith talks books with Jonathan Lethem. In other Lethem news, he’s got a new book about John Carpenter’s over-the-top political allegory They Live.
“What are we to make of the brain processing literal and metaphorical versions of a concept in the same brain region? Or that our neural circuitry doesn’t cleanly differentiate between the real and the symbolic? What are the consequences of the fact that evolution is a tinkerer and not an inventor, and has duct-taped metaphors and symbols to whichever pre-existing brain areas provided the closest fit?” Do metaphors stymie understanding?
The human race had a good run, before flying squid were discovered.
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BRIAN LAUVRAY braves an evening with history’s greatest monster, a case of Four Loko
BY JEANETTE WYCHE: A trio of designers who turned their college projects into a thriving fashion label.
Historical footnote still bears grudge against marginally more relevant legacy indie-rock outfit.
David Mitchell auctions off a character name in a future novel to benefit autism research.
Does the Internet enable casual racism and classism?
“The Trembling Giant, or Pando, is a enormous grove of quaking aspens that takes the “forest as a single organism” metaphor and literalizes it: the grove really is a single organism. Each of the approximately 47,000 or so trees in the grove are genetically identical and all the trees share a single root system.” Pando, the Trembling Giant.
Jonathan Safran Foer constructs a new novel by redacting items from an old book. Matt Wood argues that it’s not all rear-guard print book nostalgia.
BY LEVI FULLER: A look at musicians who make album covers that demand to be taken seriously. And fail.
FICTION BY CHLOE ZOLA: “He wakes up. Slowly. Like an elderly robot with a defective switchboard…”
PRETENTIOUS MACHO THEATER BY R.JOHN XERXES: On Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon’s action thriller set in Iraq
Welcome to a new weekly feature on Is Greater Than, a roundup of interesting items I’ve come across over the past few days:
“The Tea Party, in this sense, is not a new development so much as it is part of an ongoing migration of the perpetually petulant, a political phenomenon grounded in a demographic one: the creation of a class of baby-boom retirees who have been deprived of meaningful work but given personal computers as Christmas presents.” – Tom Junod on the Tea Party as Sore Winners
Grain Edit features typographically-minded poster artist Jon Contino
“Myself, I’m inclined to think that if they prove to be right, what will really be proven will be something very sad; and not about Singapore, but about our species. They will have proven it possible to flourish through the active repression of free expression. They will have proven that information does not necessarily want to be free.” – A fascinating William Gibson piece from ’94 about Singapore’s repressive IT state
MOONY HABITATIONS BY LEILANI CLARK: When you’re better friends online rather than off
THE SCHEME OF SPACES BY LYNETTE D’AMICO: Chicago’s meatpacking legacy, from red meat to dead meat in one minute
A FINE LINE BY CAT JOHNSON: The history of baseball uniforms is also a tale of typography
ART CAN’T HURT YOU BY LAURA M. BROWNING: British sculptor Rebecca Warren’s work straddles the line between abstract and figurative
Paul M Davis