Daily Office:
Thursday, 26 August 2010
¶ GOP panjandrum Kenneth Mehlman has come out as a gay man. (Atlantic) We share Joe’s exasperation.
¶ It’s a commonplace — at least among serious readers — that even the greatest novels change over time: the Emma that you read at sixteen is not the Emma that you’ll read at forty, even though not a single word in Jane Austen’s text has been changed. We do the changing. At The Online Photographer, Michael Johnston reports on an interesting variant of that phenomenon: you can never really go back to using equipment that you used to rely on every day.
¶ So, it has come to this, the current debate about unemployment: “Strucs vs Cycs.” Will “business cycles” restore jobs? Or is there a mismatch between jobs and workers that the market will not solve (in anyone’s lifetime, that is)? We agree (as usual) with Felix Salmon’s refinement on the structuralist position.
¶ Jonah Lehrer writes about the crash in housing prices in terms of the cognitive bias known as “loss aversion.” Clearly, what’s needed is a positive rhetoric for freeing homeowners from albatross properties.
¶ 4chan, a site that the Guardian calls “the id of the Internet,” is about to be transformed, via initial public offering, into Canvas. Julian Dibbell writes about Christopher Poole’s venture at MIT Technology Review. (via kottke.org)
¶ Tyler Cowen on Eliza Griswold’s The Tenth Parallel: “This is the book which everyone is reading…” Our copy is on order!
¶ Richard Greenwald writes perceptively about the quest for authenticity in today’s urban writing, which, although he doesn’t mention them, clearly betray “out-of-towner” anxieties. The work of Jonathan Lethem is a perfect foil for this discussion, because the writer grew up in a gentrifying household: Is he really Dean Street?
¶ One of the Editor’s most electric memories is the look on his adoptive mother’s face when he announced, at the age of ten or so, that he was going to change his name when he grew up — anything but the name that he’d been given would be better.
In those days, the routine, common among immigrants, of changing names, especially from foreign, difficult ones into tony English ones, was just beginning to fade. Now, Sam Roberts reminds us in the Times, it has become quite unusual.
¶ A project that perfectly captures the mentality of Ayn Rand’s fans. (Brainiac)