Life and Letters: The Unfinished: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max?currentPage=all

glass palisades at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal al

Amazing bio piece on David Foster Wallace; actually chokes me up while reading; totally essential - must blog about this

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass “Infinite Jest.”

Article on the writer David Foster Wallace who committed suicide on Sep 12th 2008. He battled with depression.

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant

"Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being"-dfw, dfw's writing after infinite jest, struggle with depression, portrait of older dfw, some biography

Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.

who could wait only thirty sec

The marshmallow test -- longitudinal studies show that it may predict future success better than intelligence

The ability to delay gratification is a far better predictor of academic performance than I.Q. "Intelligence is really important, but it's still not as important as self-control."

In the late nineteen-sixties, Carolyn Weisz, a four-year-old with long brown hair, was invited into a “game room” at the Bing Nursery School, on the campus of Stanford University. The room was little more than a large closet, containing a desk and a chair. Carolyn was asked to sit down in the chair and pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows, cookies, and pretzel sticks. Carolyn chose the marshmallow. Although she’s now forty-four, Carolyn still has a weakness for those air-puffed balls of corn syrup and gelatine. “I know I shouldn’t like them,” she says. “But they’re just so delicious!” A researcher then made Carolyn an offer: she could either eat one marshmallow right away or, if she was willing to wait while he stepped out for a few minutes, she could have two marshmallows when he returned. He said that if she rang a bell on the desk while he was away he would come running back, and she could eat one marshmallow but would forfeit the second. Then he left the room.

Don’t! The secret of self-control.

Jorge Colombo drew this week’s [New Yorker] cover using Brushes, an application for the iPhone, while standing for an hour outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square.

at The New Yorker Blog — seen referenced/linked in multiple places already... Just plain "wow". Watch the video.

Created on an iPhone... cool!

more media coverage for jorge colombo, originally featured on 20x200 for iphone paintings!

What a Texas town can teach us about health care.

by Nicholson Baker

ANNALS OF READING about the Kindle 2. The writer ordered the Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could he not? Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important. Writing and publishing, wrote Steven Johnson in the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, would never be the same. In <i>Newsweek…

ANNALS OF READING about the Kindle 2. The writer ordered the Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could he not? Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important. Writing and publishing, wrote Steven Johnson in the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, would never be the same. In <i>Newsweek…

Can the Kindle really improve on the book?

The Kindle vs. the book by Nicholson Baker

Via ...? Nicholson Baker gives the Kindle 2 a test drive, compares it to printed books and the iPhone, and gives us a history of how the Kindle came to be.

Gladwell articles

Offensive Play How different are dogfighting and football? by Malcolm Gladwell

The effect of football on the human brain is stomach-turning.

“I remember, every season, multiple occasions where I’d hit someone so hard that my eyes went cross-eyed, and they wouldn’t come uncrossed for a full series of plays. You are just out there, trying to hit the guy in the middle, because there are three of them. You don’t remember much. There are the cases where you hit a guy and you’d get into a collision where everything goes off. You’re dazed. And there are the others where you are involved in a big, long drive. You start on your own five-yard line, and drive all the way down the field—fifteen, eighteen plays in a row sometimes. Every play: collision, collision, collision. By the time you get to the other end of the field, you’re seeing spots. You feel like you are going to black out. Literally, these white explosions—boom, boom, boom—lights getting dimmer and brighter, dimmer and brighter.

I grew up like Athena—covered with playing cards instead of armor—and, at the age of seven, materialized on a TV show, doing magic.

Ricky Jay profile in the New Yorker recommended by Whet Moser

Terrific profile of magician and historian Ricky Jay, and "the virtues of skeleton men, fasting impostors, and cannonball catchers".

A 1993 profile on sleight-of-hand artist and erudite Ricky Jay.

A profile of Ricky Jay from the New Yorker. April 1993.

funny cos it's true

The New Yorker

Fotografias dos políticos mundiais

instead of sweetened beverages, the average American drank water, Finkelstein calculates, he or she would weigh fifteen pounds less.

Good article on the rising rate of obesity in the US and around the world.

"The human body is “mismatched” to the human situation. “We evolved on the savannahs of Africa,” Power and Schulkin write. “We now live in Candyland.” "

A food scientist for Frito-Lay relates how the company is seeking to create “a lot of fun in your mouth” with products like Nacho Cheese Doritos, which meld “three different cheese notes” with lots of salt and oil. Another product-development expert talks about how she is trying to “unlock the code of craveability,” and a third about the effort to “cram as much hedonics as you can in one dish.” Kessler invents his own term—“conditioned hypereating”—to describe how people respond to these laboratory-designed concoctions. Foods like Cinnabons and Starbucks’ Strawberries & Crème Frappuccinos are, he maintains, like drugs:

"Early humans compensated for the energy used in their heads by cutting back on the energy used in their guts; as man’s cranium grew, his digestive tract shrank. This forced him to obtain more energy-dense foods than his fellow-primates were subsisting on, which put a premium on adding further brain power. The result of this self-reinforcing process was a strong taste for foods that are high in calories and easy to digest; just as it is natural for gorillas to love leaves, it is natural for people to love funnel cakes. In America today, obtaining calories is very nearly effortless; as Power and Schulkin observe, with a few dollars it’s possible to go to the grocery store and purchase enough sugar or vegetable oil to fulfill the average person’s energy requirements for a week. The result is what’s known as the 'mismatch paradigm.' The human body is 'mismatched' to the human situation. 'We evolved on the savannahs of Africa,' Power and Schulkin write. 'We now live in Candyland.'"

One of the most comprehensive data sets available about Americans—how tall they are, when they last visited a dentist, what sort of cereal they eat for breakfast, whether they have to pee during the night, and, if so, how often—comes from a series of studies conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Participants are chosen at random, interviewed at length, and subjected to a battery of tests in special trailers that the C.D.C. hauls around the country. The studies, known as the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, began during the Eisenhower Administration and have been carried out periodically ever since.

Hanushek recently did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about what even a rudimentary focus on teacher quality could mean for the United States. If you rank the countries of the world in terms of the academic performance of their schoolchildren, the U.S. is just below average, half a standard deviation below a clump of relatively high-performing countries like Canada and Belgium. According to Hanushek, the U.S. could close that gap simply by replacing the bottom six per cent to ten per cent of public-school teachers with teachers of average quality.

Teen pregnancy. October/November 2008.

Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant?

Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.

Short stories by J. D. Salinger published in The New Yorker

Salinger in the New Yorker.

links to all Salinger stories published in The New Yorker

The underground world of neuroenhancing drugs. Such is the zeitgeist.

Brain Gain ?

using mind enhancing drugs to improve performance

The underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs.

Until very recently, almost no literature was devoted to game design, and what there was tended to be quickly made obsolete by the speed of technological developments. After the day’s final meeting had ended, I realized that, for the two decades that I had been playing games, I had unwittingly been at the mercy of the constantly changing orthodoxies of game design. I knew that some games seemed more fun than others, but I would have struggled to explain why. Bleszinski and the other Epic designers came to this form as children. Growing up playing games, they absorbed the governing logic of the medium, but no institutions existed for them to transform what they learned into a methodology. Gradually, though, they turned a hobby into a creative profession that is now as complex as any other. They have established the principles of a grammar of fun.

CliffyB and the world of the video game.

The New Yorker has a typically in-depth, insightful, and light-hearted profile of the lead designer behind Epic's monster hit "Gears of War" video game series.

"Why did mushrooms make Mario grow larger? Why did flowers give Mario the ability to spit fire? Why did bashing Mario’s head against bricks sometimes produce coins? And why was Mario’s enemy, Bowser, a saurian, spiky-shelled turtle?"

There has been some really good journalism devoted to video games lately, including this New Yorker profile of Epic's lead designer.

Cool article about Gears of War and Epic Games

Bookstores, particularly independent bookstores, help resist this trend by championing authors the employees believe in. "In a bookstore, there’s a serendipitous element involved in browsing," Jonathan Burnham, the senior vice-president and publisher of HarperCollins, says. "Independent bookstores are like a community center. We walk in and know the people who work there and like to hear their reading recommendations." ... "If you want to make the right decision for the future, fear is not a very good consultant," ... Assked to describe her foremost concern, Carolyn Reidy, of Simon & Schuster, said, "In the digital world, it is possible for authors to publish without publishers. It is therefore incumbent on us to prove our worth to authors every day."

Ken Auletta.... good article on publishers, ebooks, Amazon and Apple. Good statistics.

Publish or Perish

Fulbright and Hogan & Hartson

"John Roberts: The Supreme Court’s stealth hard-liner." (by Jeffrey Toobin)

John Roberts and conservative activism

No More Mr. Nice Guy The Supreme Court’s stealth hard-liner. by Jeffrey Toobin

So much for candor at confirmation hearings.

When John G. Roberts, Jr., emerges from behind the red curtains and takes his place in the middle of the Supreme Court bench, he usually wears a pair of reading glasses, which he peers over to see the lawyers arguing before him. It’s an old-fashioned look for the Chief Justice of the United States, who is fifty-four, but, even with the glasses, there’s no mistaking that Roberts is the youngest person on the Court. (John Paul Stevens, the senior Associate Justice, who sits to Roberts’s right, is thirty-five years older.) Roberts’s face is unlined, his shoulders are broad and athletic, and only a few wisps of gray hair mark him as changed in any way from the judge who charmed the Senate Judiciary Committee at his confirmation hearing, in 2005.

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Freporting%2F2009%2F05%2F25%2F090525fa_fact_toobin

"In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party."

LETTER FROM MOSCOW about Chatroulette. Andrey Ternovskiy, an eighteen-year-old high-school dropout from Moscow, has a variety of explanations for why he created the Web site Chatroulette. The most reliable version, however, centers on a shop called Russian Souvenirs, where Ternovskiy started working in 2008, selling Soviet paraphernalia…

ndrey Ternovskiy, an eighteen-year-old high-school dropout from Moscow, has a variety of explanations for why he cr

perfil do criador do chat roulette