Thought Catalog, the Slate.com of urban 25-year-old creative writing majors (and their spiritual kin) who are incapable of being boring, is redefining the art of blog post writing for a new and vibrant generation.
Do stop reading Thought Catalog. Right now. This instant. I mean it. This is self-indulgent fluff dressed up as cultural critique. You’re smarter than this.
Don’t mistake being insipid for being thoughtful. Recycling tired social situations like “displacement,” “anxiety,” and “uncertainty” with a smattering of colorful details doesn’t make for original thought; meeting life’s ambiguities with a plethora of specifics doesn’t create order, only the sense of it.
Do notice that every one of those moving morsels of soul-capturing self-reflection appears at least once a week. The advice seems to be the same, centered on distilling solutions for the existential anxiety wrought by any major transition (in most cases “growing up” or “falling in love” or, in the space between the two, “fucking”) into a sequence of obsessive-compulsive, material therapies (Do away with that IKEA furniture! Drink all the booze!) The goal, of course, is never to actually achieve some sort of growth, but rather to induce episodic outbreaks of angst with the passage of time. You’re grown up now, isn’t that weird? Except I don’t feel grown up, isn’t that weird? But I’m supposed to be grown up, how weird is that! And so on. But life is rarely orderly, or coherent, or linear, so why bother tying yourself to someone else’s business cycle of post-graduate angst? Embrace the chaos.
Don’t mistake the presence of nouns and adjectives for writing. Sure, this is an age where we no longer need the rubber stamp of some nameless feature editor at a New York-based general interest weekly to validate our creative impulses, but just because something exists does not make it good. Look past the smattering of banal idiosyncrasies (having sex while watching Gilmore Girls?) that may resonate with your personal quirks (wow, you’re weird? I’m weird! Let’s be weird together) and look for a message, some message, any message. If you can’t distill the point of an article into a few sentences and distinguish it from every other article about happiness, find yourself a new source of leisure reading. Poor ideas are often dressed up in a smorgasbord of shiny adverbs and fleeting anecdotes designed to distract you from the truth: that there’s nothing here worth learning, or gleaning, that will really challenge you to think critically about yourself.
Do learn to loathe (excessive use of) listicle. I would have titled this “Five Reasons to Hate Thought Catalog” but Gawker already beat me to it. A list isn’t inherently bad, but their repetitive use is the trademark of the intellectually lazy.
Don’t live, laugh, love. See what I did there? Humans can’t live by slogans and aphorisms alone.
Do be interesting, but if you’re going to, don’t write self-indulgent shit about what life would be like if you were boring, because nobody gives a fuck:
We were talking about relationships in my living room, over Aperol drinks with ice cubes and cigarettes off the fire escape. The ethereal echo of something lo-fi and chillwave set the mood. The heat lifted its oppressive finger, ever so slightly, in the early evening glow.
“If only we could be boring,” she said, wistfully, smiling in between sips.
Are you kidding me with this shit?
Don’t be fooled. Thought Catalog is, at its purest, the commodification and banalization of the human experience, of the anxiety and uncertainty and dread wrought by your passage from one stage of life to the next. Life is hard. They will always be hard, even as they get easier. But the benefit of their difficulty is that you get to work through them yourself, as an act of self-discovery. The purpose of narratives like these isn’t to find a silver bullet for your 20-something woes, but to challenge yourself and your perception of yourself. These stories don’t offer moments for self-reflection, but the continued argument for a narcissism of small differences, a world where, as Sigmund Freud described in Civilization, Society, and Religion:
“the phenomenon that it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other’ - ‘such sensitiveness…to just these details of differentiation’.”
The comfort offered by Thought Catalog of embracing those small differences in the form of material idiosyncrasies, the shiny baubles that signify difference and forcefulness to others and, in turn, to yourself. Don’t allow the narcissism of small differences to encircle your life; you’ll find yourself only circumscribing the problems within, the concerns, anxieties, and fears that push every last one of us to adulthood. To allow a platform designed to make money off of spoon-fed post-graduate advice to define the path and approach to making ourselves happy is more poisonous than existing transitional unhappiness. The temptation to fall into the sweet embrace of comfortable banality is strong, but we are only avoiding the inevitable confrontation with your own ennui that can be filled by no other 20-something, articulated by no other author of any age. Words, well-written or otherwise, will only take you so far when couched in the language of small differences and retail therapy.
Do remember that you may not be a shoe-in for an extra on Girls or whatever cultural artifact is the exact personification of your life that week, but you have a mind and the ability to think. Don’t rely on outside sources, Thought Catalog or otherwise, to legitimize your malaise, to tell you who you are, or even to shape the course of your introspection. Nobody knows you better than you, you just don’t know it yet.
Don’t read Thought Catalog. Even if you went to NYU and double-majored in media anthropology and radical feminist ecosystems. Just stop.
8th May 2012
Notes: 16
Professionally, aggregation has become the new entry-level beat, and that’s a problem. [The Post fails a young blogger]
(via frontofbook)
Reblogged From frontofbook
![The Curator’s Guide to the Galaxy
That could be changing, though. This weekend, Maria Popova (whom you may know as an Atlantic contributor, or as the author of Brainpickings, and either way as one of the web’s foremost experts on the art of curation) is launching The Curator’s Code, a system (and, she hopes, a movement) to “honor and standardize the attribution of discovery across the web.” The new project offers both a code of ethics and a common standard for borrowing and sharing. It aims to provide a framework for celebrating curation by way of formalizing it — or, as Popova describes it, of “keeping the whimsical rabbit hole of the Internet open by honoring discovery.”
How to steal other people’s ideas (without being a jerk about it).
[by Megan Garber]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0qs51isBO1qbdh71o1_1280.png)
The Curator’s Guide to the Galaxy
That could be changing, though. This weekend, Maria Popova (whom you may know as an Atlantic contributor, or as the author of Brainpickings, and either way as one of the web’s foremost experts on the art of curation) is launching The Curator’s Code, a system (and, she hopes, a movement) to “honor and standardize the attribution of discovery across the web.” The new project offers both a code of ethics and a common standard for borrowing and sharing. It aims to provide a framework for celebrating curation by way of formalizing it — or, as Popova describes it, of “keeping the whimsical rabbit hole of the Internet open by honoring discovery.”
How to steal other people’s ideas (without being a jerk about it).
[by Megan Garber]
Mind-boggling debate around the legal right being used in some countries, dubbed ‘The Right to Be Forgotten’ that allows you to remove embarrassing information or pictures you put on the web — and do it permanently, totally. So the question is, should people be allowed to erase their mistakes from the internet?
(via)
Radiolab is excellent, as always.
In interviews, Amazon executives cast their new effort as an experiment in the booming world of e-books, not a plan to displace the Big Six—Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Penguin, Hachette, and Macmillan. “What we’re building is more like an in-house laboratory where authors and editors and marketers can test new ideas,” says Jeff Belle, vice-president of Amazon Publishing and Kirshbaum’s boss. “Success to us means working with authors who want to find new ways to connect with more readers.” Talk like that hasn’t mollified publishers, and it’s easy to see why. They’re trying to protect a century-old business model—and their role as nurturers of literary culture—from encroachment by a company that consistently reimagines how industries can be run more efficiently. Book publishing, an inefficient industry if there ever was one, seems ripe for reimagining.
As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For years inventions have extended man’s physical powers rather than the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists, microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if properly developed, will give man access to and command over the inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific instruments should be the first objective of our scientists as they emerge from their war work. Like Emerson’s famous address of 1837 on “The American Scholar,” this paper by Dr. Bush calls for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge.
This is probably one of my favorite technology essays of all time, let alone from The Atlantic’s archives. Writing in July 1945, Dr. Vannevar Bush expresses his concern for the direction of scientific efforts towards destruction, rather than understanding, and explicates a desire for a sort of collective memory machine with his concept of the memex that would make knowledge more accessible, believing that it would help fix these problems. Through this machine, Bush hoped to transform an information explosion into a knowledge explosion. This is essentially one of the first serious conceptualizations of what we now call the Internet
Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client’s interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.
The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.
Thus science may implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race. It might be striking to outline the instrumentalities of the future more spectacularly, rather than to stick closely to methods and elements now known and undergoing rapid development, as has been done here. Technical difficulties of all sorts have been ignored, certainly, but also ignored are means as yet unknown which may come any day to accelerate technical progress as violently as did the advent of the thermionic tube. In order that the picture may not be too commonplace, by reason of sticking to present-day patterns, it may be well to mention one such possibility, not to prophesy but merely to suggest, for prophecy based on extension of the known has substance, while prophecy founded on the unknown is only a doubly involved guess.
All our steps in creating or absorbing material of the record proceed through one of the senses—the tactile when we touch keys, the oral when we speak or listen, the visual when we read. Is it not possible that some day the path may be established more directly?
We know that when the eye sees, all the consequent information is transmitted to the brain by means of electrical vibrations in the channel of the optic nerve. This is an exact analogy with the electrical vibrations which occur in the cable of a television set: they convey the picture from the photocells which see it to the radio transmitter from which it is broadcast. We know further that if we can approach that cable with the proper instruments, we do not need to touch it; we can pick up those vibrations by electrical induction and thus discover and reproduce the scene which is being transmitted, just as a telephone wire may be tapped for its message.
The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand?
Read the rest of “As We May Think” at The Atlantic
In our new story, Joshuah Bearman tells the funny and poignant tale of the real-life Baghdad Country Club, a bar in the Green Zone during the conflict’s bloodiest years. Against all odds, its proprietors struggle to keep their raucous watering hole safe and well-stocked as the insurgency rages outside. Read an excerpt on The Atlantic. Get the full story here.
The Blind Man Who Taught Himself To See (Mens Journal, March 2011)
Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. Yet he can mountain bike. And navigate the wilderness alone. And recognize a building as far away as 1,000 feet. How? The same way bats can see in the dark.
Bats, of course, use echolocation. Beluga whales too. Dolphins. And Daniel Kish. He is so accomplished at echolocation that he’s able to pedal his mountain bike through streets heavy with traffic and on precipitous dirt trails. He climbs trees. He camps out, by himself, deep in the wilderness. He’s lived for weeks at a time in a tiny cabin a two-mile hike from the nearest road. He travels around the globe. He’s a skilled cook, an avid swimmer, a fluid dance partner. Essentially, though in a way that is unfamiliar to nearly any other human being, Kish can see.
The Behavioral Sink (Cabinet Magazine, Spring 2011)
How do you design a utopia?
In 1972, John B. Calhoun detailed the specifications of his Mortality-Inhibiting Environment for Mice: a practical utopia built in the laboratory. Every aspect of Universe 25—as this particular model was called—was pitched to cater for the well-being of its rodent residents and increase their lifespan. The Universe took the form of a tank, 101 inches square, enclosed by walls 54 inches high. The first 37 inches of wall was structured so the mice could climb up, but they were prevented from escaping by 17 inches of bare wall above. Each wall had sixteen vertical mesh tunnels—call them stairwells—soldered to it. Four horizontal corridors opened off each stairwell, each leading to four nesting boxes. That means 256 boxes in total, each capable of housing fifteen mice. There was abundant clean food, water, and nesting material. The Universe was cleaned every four to eight weeks. There were no predators, the temperature was kept at a steady 68°F, and the mice were a disease-free elite selected from the National Institutes of Health’s breeding colony. Heaven.
…
Vogt, Ehrlich, and the others were neo-Malthusians, arguing that population growth would cause our demise by exhausting our natural resources, leading to starvation and conflict. But there was no scarcity of food and water in Calhoun’s universe. The only thing that was in short supply was space. This was, after all, “heaven”—a title Calhoun deliberately used with pitch-black irony. The point was that crowding itself could destroy a society before famine even got a chance. In Calhoun’s heaven, hell was other mice.
The Beer Archaeologist (Smithsonian Magazine, August 2011)
By analyzing ancient pottery, Patrick McGovern is resurrecting the libations that fueled civilization
“Dr. Pat,” as he’s known at Dogfish Head, is the world’s foremost expert on ancient fermented beverages, and he cracks long-forgotten recipes with chemistry, scouring ancient kegs and bottles for residue samples to scrutinize in the lab. He has identified the world’s oldest known barley beer (from Iran’s Zagros Mountains, dating to 3400 B.C.), the oldest grape wine (also from the Zagros, circa 5400 B.C.) and the earliest known booze of any kind, a Neolithic grog from China’s Yellow River Valley brewed some 9,000 years ago.
The Brain on Trial (The Atlantic, July/August 2011)
Advances in brain science are calling into question the volition behind many criminal acts. A leading neuroscientist describes how the foundations of our criminal-justice system are beginning to crumble, and proposes a new way forward for law and order.
Changes in the balance of brain chemistry, even small ones, can also cause large and unexpected changes in behavior. Victims of Parkinson’s disease offer an example. In 2001, families and caretakers of Parkinson’s patients began to notice something strange. When patients were given a drug called pramipexole, some of them turned into gamblers. And not just casual gamblers, but pathological gamblers. These were people who had never gambled much before, and now they were flying off to Vegas. One 68-year-old man amassed losses of more than $200,000 in six months at a series of casinos. Some patients became consumed with Internet poker, racking up unpayable credit-card bills. For several, the new addiction reached beyond gambling, to compulsive eating, excessive alcohol consumption, and hypersexuality.
…
The lesson from all these stories is the same: human behavior cannot be separated from human biology. If we like to believe that people make free choices about their behavior (as in, “I don’t gamble, because I’m strong-willed”), cases like Alex the pedophile, the frontotemporal shoplifters, and the gambling Parkinson’s patients may encourage us to examine our views more carefully. Perhaps not everyone is equally “free” to make socially appropriate choices.
Lost Symbols (Lapham’s Quarterly, Spring 2011)
I also had personal reasons to be suspicious of tool collecting. Although I come from a family of insufferably handy men—men able to wire a house, rebuild a transmission, frame a wall without calling an expert or consulting a book—I am profoundly unhandy. By the traditional measures of American manhood, I am, essentially, a Frenchwoman.
One might, therefore, find it strange or worrisome that one summer not long ago I devoted every waking hour I could spare to the study of old tools, reading books with titles like Wrenches: Antique and Unusual and The Hammer: The King of Tools. I stayed up all night browsing the searchable archives of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, encountering there such exotic utensils as the Clamp Fur-Knife, which, when “Edward Flint, of the city, county, and State of New York,” registered his invention in 1837, was “a new and useful Instrument for Extracting Hairs from Fur-Skins.” Mostly, I rode a Midwestern circuit of flea markets and farm auctions in the passenger seat of an emerald-green Toyota pickup truck piloted by a fifty-five-year-old botanist with a ponytail, spectacles like windowpanes, and a beard bordering on the Whitmanesque.
BONUS:
The Luckiest Woman on Earth (Harpers, August 2011 (subscription required))
Three ways to win the lottery
No Death, No Taxes (New Yorker, November 28, 2011)
The libertarian futurism of a Silicon Valley billionaire.
How Luther Went Viral (The Economist, December 17, 2011)
Five centuries before Facebook and the Arab spring, social media helped bring about the Reformation
Five centuries before Facebook and the Arab spring, social media helped bring about the Reformation
This wonderful essay from The Economist is a nice reminder that “virality” as a concept (i.e. the rapid diffusion of ideas) isn’t really a that new, but just far more extensive in modern times thanks to the acceleration of communication (the phone, the telegraph, social media, etc.).
What’s more compelling about virality now than in past decades is that the spread of ideas is far more visible and, in turn, measurable than in the past. How would you measure the spread of an idea during the time of Luther? The number of printed editions of the 95 Theses and their sale is a good proxy; their translation into different languages gives us a sense for how Luther’s screed against indulgences permeated different cultural and linguistics ecosystems. But in general, there was no incredibly nuanced way to gauge when an idea went from the fringe of European society to the a central vein of the national (or international) conversation.
The advent of mass media gave us a better measure of that tipping point, I think, in terms of when ideas begin to make their way into central institutions of cultural production (movie studios, the Big Three of broadcasting, “mainstream media” outlets, etc.). The Columbia Journalism Review and Pew do a great job now of measuring the “news hole” of certain topics (health care, Occupy Wall Streets, etc), but even that’s a proxy for the actual spread of ideas, confined by particular geographic or political boundaries (or economic ones, in terms of circulation and distribution).
Since social media and the Internet have drastically reduced the transaction costs of spreading ideas and information (or organizing productive institutions that produce and distribute ideas and information), concepts move faster and go further than ever. But the real consequence, I think, is that we can measure the spread of ideas across communicative media more precisely than any other time during the history of media.
Take the death of Osama bin Laden as one anecdotal example. SocialFlow tracked how news of the al Qaeda leader’s death spread on Twitter after Keith Urbahn speculated on President Obama’s emergency announcement. Here’s what the spread of the news looked like within the first few minutes:
The fact that this is measurable, in real time, is just totally astounding, and it holds tons of implications for tracking social behavior and how it effects things like, I don’t know, the invisible hand of the markets. People don’t act the way economists and other social scientists predict they should: the introduction of exogenous shocks or other new elements to a social system always throws off even the most complex models. But examining how ideas and information affect the dynamics of a given social ecosystem in real time is something never before possible.
This reminds me of the old anecdote about the French Revolution. When China’s Premier, Chou En Lai was asked in 1972 whether he thought the French Revolution had been a good or a bad thing, he mused for a few moments and then replied “It’s too early to tell.” It makes me wonder how the spread of ideas in a networked world will affect how we think about intellectual history, among other things.
