Daily Media Diet

From The New Yorker : In 2007, the legislature in Des Moines created the Generation Iowa Commission, to study why college graduates were leaving; two years later, a fifth of the members of the commission had themselves left the state. From The Economist : "The most important thing is not meeting the demand but creating the demand,” says Alibaba’s Mr Zhang. From The New York Times (on Elizabeth Strout's Anything is Possible): This audacious novel is about small-town characters struggling to make sense of past family traumas. From Harper's : People who desire to undergo an elective limb amputation are likeliest to choose the left leg. From The TLS (Clare Carlisle on Books of the Year 2017): Each year yields a fresh crop of Guides, Handbooks and Reassuringly Short Introductions to philosophical thinkers and topics. The best of these cheerful paperbacks are the unsung heroes of academic life: they are read widely, and as profitably by professors as by under

From The Economist : Alipay is now used by about 520m people, not just to shop on Taobao or Tmall but to pay bills, buy lunch or send money to family. Amazon has nothing of this kind. Most American and European consumers have stuck with their tried-and-trusted credit cards. Last year Alipay had 2.5 times as many users as PayPal and more than 11 times as many as Apple Pay. From The New Yorker : In many towns, the most enterprising kids leave for college and stay away rather than starting businesses at home, which means that there are fewer jobs at home, which means that even more people leave; and, over time, the town’s population gets smaller and older, shops and schools begin to close, and the town begins to die. From The New York Times (on Omar El Akkad's American War): This haunting debut novel imagines the events that lead up to and follow the Second American Civil War at the turn of the 22nd century. From The Economist : “We will know you as well as you know you

From Harper's : Parents who encountered their children watching pornography reported, variously, telling the child that it was yoga, telling the child that the naked lady’s shower was broken, or hitting the child. From The Economist : [A] time may soon come when old folk sigh with impatience as youngsters tell them how much easier life was “when you were my age”. From The Economist : On an average morning a young urban professional anywhere in the world might wake up, check her social-media feed and order a cab on her mobile. While sitting in traffic, she might use her phone to purchase groceries and watch a video, and later to pay the driver and buy a coffee. Once at work, she might make an online payment to reimburse a friend for a concert ticket. So far, so normal. But if that young urbanite were living in China, every one of these activities could have been powered either by Alibaba or a company in which it has a stake. From The New Yorker : A survey, conducted in

From The New York Times (Anthony Bourdain on "What’s the last great book you read?"): Truly great? Charles Portis’s “True Grit” is a masterpiece. Don’t settle for seeing the film versions. One of the great heroines of all time and a magnificent book filled with great dialogue. From  The New York Times  (Anthony Bourdain on "Whose writing today most inspires you?"): Donald Ray Pollock was a revelation when I first read “The Devil All the Time.” Daniel Woodrell’s work. Marlon James’s “A Brief History of Seven Killings” was incredible. Lydia Lunch takes no prisoners … ever. I’m inspired by her utter fearlessness. William T. Vollmann is intimidating in his sheer volume and courage and ambition. But when I find myself in a hole writing? I always go back to Elmore Leonard, he was a professional. And Edward St. Aubyn. His writing thrills me. From The New Yorker : [Of] white people who still lived in their childhood home town, nearly sixty per cent supported Trump

From The TLS (Paul Binding on Books of the Year 2017): David Harsent’s remarkable Salt (Faber) is a “series, not a sequence” of short poems united by a “ricochet of echoes”, a magic-lantern show for the psyche: “Wind-driven salt in the crevice of a rock is how / memory works: image, invention, regret”. Gisli Palsson’s The Man Who Stole Himself (Chicago; translated from the Icelandic by Anna Yates) inspiringly recreates the life journey of Hans Jonathan, born in 1784 to an enslaved black woman in the Danish Virgin Isles, and the victim of legal ambivalence in Denmark itself, who escapes by ship to Iceland where he now has 600 descendants. Two distinguished novels: Gravel Heart (Bloomsbury) by Abdulrazak Gurnah, which pits its sympathetic Zanzibari narrator/protagonist against the complexities and dishonesties of his turbulent times, and John Lucas’s moving, enthralling Summer Nineteen Forty-five (Greenwich Exchange), where two boys confront the disappearance of an evacuee girl in

From Harper's : States with more evangelical Christians have more Google searches for the word “porn.” From The Economist : Morgan Stanley, a bank, expects Amazon to grow by an average of nearly 20% a year between now and 2025. From The New Yorker : In most places on earth, staying is the norm. Mobility is regarded with ambivalence: leaving is turnover; it weakens families and social trust. But in America, a country formed by the romance of the frontier and populated mostly by people who had left somewhere else, leaving has always been the celebrated story—the bold, enterprising, properly American response to an unsatisfactory life at home. Americans were for a long time the most mobile people in the world, and this geographic mobility drove America’s economy, and its social mobility as well. Because Americans moved for work, mostly from poor areas to richer ones, after 1880 incomes around the country steadily converged for a hundred years. From The Guardian (Kathe

From The Economist : One logical response to the diminishing number of workers per pensioner is to raise the retirement age. But that will exacerbate old-age inequality, if mildly. Longer careers will give richer workers more time to compound their advantages. And when retirement eventually arrives, the poor, who die earlier, will have less time to enjoy their pensions. From The TLS (M. John Harrison on "If you could make a change to anything you’ve written over the years, what would it be?"): There’s more than one piece I’d like never to have written at all. I’d line-edit some of the older stuff, but it would be a mistake: novels would be longish short stories by the time I’d finished with them. You can ask the question, “Is this word/sentence/paragraph really neccessary?” too often, and anyway it’s best asked at the time, not forty years later. Graham Greene was right, you just shouldn’t publish your first three novels. From Harper's : Senegalese doctors comp

From The TLS (M. John Harrison on "Is there any book, written by someone else, that you wish you’d written?"): The Erasers, Alain Robbe-Grillet. A View of the Harbour, Elizabeth Taylor. The Mint, T. E. Lawrence. Play It as It Lays, Joan Didion. The House on the Borderland, William Hope Hodgson. The Spider’s House, Paul Bowles. Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf. The Madman of Freedom Square, Hassan Blasim. The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane. Fast Lanes, Jayne Anne Phillips. Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson. Good Morning, Midnight, Jean Rhys. From The Economist : Alibaba describes itself as providing the pipes and cables for all kinds of business. “To some extent we are a utility company,” says Daniel Zhang, its chief executive. “We are trying to provide an infrastructure for digital commerce.” From Bookforum (Karl Ove Knausgaard on "Experimental Fiction"): I do admire Infinite Jest and welcome everything that expands the form of the novel, because without someone ope

From The Economist : Old age, the OECD notes, is a “leveller”. From  Oliver Burkeman's The Antidote (quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions): Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute. From The Guardian (Nicola Barker on "My writing day"): When I am writing a big novel my desk is covered in dozens of half-read books. Sometimes I take notes in jotters but I rarely return to them. Often I scribble in the text. I am very disrespectful. I like mini Post-its in different colours. When I wrote The Cauliflower I had about 50 books scattered around me at all times, each one with 40 or more Post-its poking out. The texts will generally be frantically underlined (I also draw little pointy fingers and scribble three stars if something is VERY IMPORTANT. There will be much NB-ing). With that novel I needed to remember where certain facts/aphorisms/b

From The Guardian (Nicola Barker on working on old laptop): I’m back to using my old laptop again and constantly muttering about its crappiness. Everything is slow and irritating. Even the clock is wrong. Part of me suspects that I enjoy an element of adversity – even welcome it. You only truly appreciate the stuff you battle for. From The Guardian (Tessa Hadley on "The book that had the greatest influence on my writing"): Discovering Alice Munro’s stories – Open Secrets was the first collection I read – unlocked so many insights, helped me to begin. She’s an extraordinarily innovative writer. The illusion of her stories is richly alive; and yet she’s found a way of putting her authorial hesitations down on the page: is this really how it was? You can feel Munro’s influence everywhere in contemporary fiction. From The TLS (Mary Beard on Books of the Year 2017): Three “picture books” of very different kinds. The wonderful catalogue of Damien Hirst’s Venice exhibit

From The Economist : All men are created equal, but they do not stay that way for long. From The TLS (Terri Apter on Books of the Year 2017): [The] most moving is Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A memoir of (my) body (Corsair). Gay depicts the terrifying banality of a gang rape that marked her physical and emotional life from the age of twelve. Her survivor’s story is both understated and inspiring. Another, very different highlight of 2017 is Peter Clarke’s The Locomotive of War (Bloomsbury). Clarke reveals the subtle interplay between personalities and history. We see how the key figures – David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and John Maynard Keynes – had very different experiences of war and how these shaped our political, social and economic histories. Clarke also provides an original, intriguing and sometimes disturbing account of the role liberal guilt has played in triggering and justifying war. From The Guardian (Tessa Hadley on "The boo

From The New York Times (Andy Weir on "Who is your favorite novelist of all time?"): I grew up reading my father’s science-fiction collection, a huge collection of those pulpy mass-market paperbacks from the ’50s and ’60s. Making my way through the Holy Trinity of Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke was what made me fall in love with science fiction, and to some extent that experience has shaped my life ever since. So I’d have to pick one of them. From  Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle : Strangely enough, the journey back always seemed much faster than the journey there. From The TLS (Jesmyn Ward on "If you could make a change to anything you’ve written over the years, what would it be?"): In my first novel, Where the Line Bleeds, I was too kind to my characters – I wanted to spare them the pain I saw around me, I didn’t want them to hurt. But I’ve come to understand that the world doesn’t spare people like those that I write about, and I want my fiction to

From The Economist : [The] British are more confident about the existence of ghosts than they are of a divine creator, or heaven. From  Teju Cole's Known and Strange Things : It is about the incontestable fundamentals of a person: pleasure, sorrow, love, humor, and grief, and the complexity of the interior landscape that sustains those feelings. Baldwin was astonished that anyone anywhere should question these fundamentals, thereby burdening him with the supreme waste of time that is racism, let alone so many people in so many places. From  Journal of Experimental Social Psychology  (H/T: Kevin Lewis ): In this paper, we reexamined the question of automaticity in social comparison by testing the hypothesis that subliminal social comparison affects explicit self-evaluations. In two high-powered experiments, young women were subliminally exposed (or not) to a high standard of comparison (media images of ultra-thin women). Next, they made explicit self-evaluations of their b

From  Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet : I'll never write a page that sheds light on me or on anything. From Harper's : It is possible, if a snail has a good memory and a bad memory stored on a single neuron, to erase just the bad one. From The New York Times (Celeste Ng on "What’s the last great book you read?"): I keep finding new great books, but since you asked for the last one: “The Tsar of Love and Techno,” by Anthony Marra. They’re interconnected stories about the Chechen-Russian wars, but really they’re about all the ways we try to reclaim the things and people we love after they’re gone. I got a galley of it ages ago, and only read it recently, and was blown away. From  The New York Times  (Celeste Ng on "Whose writing today most inspires you?"): Rebecca Solnit is a clarion voice of reason. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s work — both fiction and nonfiction. The poets Jane Hirshfield and Maggie Smith. And Heather Havrilesky’s “Ask

From Harper's : Unborn fiddler rays are traumatized by their mothers’ capture. From  Teju Cole's Known and Strange Things : The music you travel with helps you to create your own internal weather. From The Economist : In America Amazon is showing, week by week, the havoc that an innovative e-commerce firm can wreak in a giant, mature market. From The Guardian (Yaa Gyasi on "My writing day"): I start working at around 10 if I’m feeling motivated, 11 if I’m not. I reread the work from the day before and/or passages that I think I got right in order to try to set the tone. I write a sentence. I read it aloud. I delete the sentence. I look at the clock and wonder if it’s too early to think about lunch. I tell myself that, if I can make it to 300 words, I can break for lunch. I write another sentence. This one I might like. If I’m lucky, it leads to a second sentence. I think: “What is the point of all of this? Is anyone truly happy?” I delete the second sen

From The Economist (on AlphaGo Zero): After a single day it was playing at the level of an advanced professional. After two days it had surpassed the performance of the version that beat Mr Lee in 2016. From Nature (H/T: Kevin Lewis ): A long-standing goal of artificial intelligence is an algorithm that learns, tabula rasa , superhuman proficiency in challenging domains. Recently, AlphaGo became the first program to defeat a world champion in the game of Go. The tree search in AlphaGo evaluated positions and selected moves using deep neural networks. These neural networks were trained by supervised learning from human expert moves, and by reinforcement learning from self-play. Here we introduce an algorithm based solely on reinforcement learning, without human data, guidance or domain knowledge beyond game rules. AlphaGo becomes its own teacher: a neural network is trained to predict AlphaGo’s own move selections and also the winner of AlphaGo’s games. This neural network impro

From The Guardian (Chris Ware on Nick Drnaso): After I recommended his first, Beverly, to Zadie Smith, she wrote back a one-word review: “wow,” and she’s just called Sabrina “the best book – in any medium – I have read about our current moment”. From  The Guardian  (Chris Ware on Max Richter's Sleep): [It’s] the only music I know that may capture the sensation of death: that ultimate, freeing apathy towards all things worldly, personal and meaningful – making it among the most personal and meaningful pieces I’ve ever heard. I would love to see it performed live before I die. From Harper's : Men with low resting heart rates are much likelier to be stalkers. From  Stanford Working Paper on Evaluating Digital Information (H/T: Kevin Lewis ): The Internet has democratized access to information but in so doing has opened the floodgates to misinformation, fake news, and rank propaganda masquerading as dispassionate analysis. To investigate how people determine the cre

From The Economist : The better understood a new technology is, the less important it is for those wishing to use it to be near the people and firms where it originates. From Harper's : Gut instinct is trusted more and self-reflection occurs less in men with high testosterone levels. From  Psychological Science (H/T: Kevin Lewis ): We provide clear empirical support for acquiescence: People can have a faulty intuitive belief about the world (Criterion 1), acknowledge the belief is irrational (Criterion 2), but follow their intuition nonetheless (Criterion 3) — even at a cost. From The Guardian (Anne Enright on "The book I wish I’d written"): In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje. From The New York Times (Jennifer Egan on "Whose writing today most inspires you?"): Don DeLillo and Joyce Carol Oates in (I hope) a genetic way, along with Robert Stone, who died recently and whose superb work deserves a new generation of readers. Hilary Mantel

From  Evolution and Human Behavior (H/T: Kevin Lewis ): Three studies using transmission chain protocols suggest a) that there is indeed a preference for the deliberate transmission of threat-related information over other material, b) that it is not caused by a general negativity or emotionality bias, and c) that it is not eliminated when threats are presented as very unlikely. From  Teju Cole's Known and Strange Things : To be a stranger is to be looked at, but to be black is to be looked at especially. From The Guardian (Francis Spufford on "The book I wish I’d written"): Either Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union or the great New Zealand YA writer Margaret Mahy’s The Tricksters. They aren’t books that do the biggest things, but what they do, they do almost perfectly. From The Guardian (Francis Spufford on "The book that had the greatest influence on my writing"): Can I at least have one a decade? 0-10: the Narnia books. 11-20: Urs

From  Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet : [We] are all equally derived from no one knows what; we're shadows of gestures performed by someone else, embodied effects, consequences that feel. From Harper's : In evaluating a new Body Odor Disgust Scale, researchers found that silent smelly farts are the body odor for which disgust differs most widely depending on whether the odor is one’s own or a stranger’s. From The Guardian (Philip Pullman on "The book that changed my life/the world") William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience. From The Economist : Perversely, policies to help the poor unintentionally exacerbate the plight of left-behind places. Unemployment and health benefits enable the least employable people to survive in struggling places when once they would have had no choice but to move. Welfare makes capitalism less brutal for individuals, but it perpetuates the problems where they live. From  Teju Cole's Known and Stran

From Malcolm Gladwell's What the Dog Saw : [Human] beings have a seemingly fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another. As economists would say, they “consumed” the risk reduction, they didn’t save it. From The New York Times (Ron Chernow on "What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?"): I was quite bowled over by Isabel Wilkerson’s masterly saga, “The Warmth of Other Suns.” As Grant’s latest biographer, I’ve been steeped in the history of Southern race relations, but until I read her book I lacked the visceral, fingertip feel of what Jim Crow meant — the thousand and one indignities, overt and subtle, inflicted on long-suffering blacks. Amazing that the great migration from the South had never before received the large-scale narrative treatment it deserved. Thank you, Isabel. From The Economist : In the modern economy scale is increasingly important. The companies with the biggest

From Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants : An earlier generation would find it astonishing that, without payment or even much outcry, our networks of family, friends, and associates have been recruited via social media to help sell us things. From Harper's : Japanese subjects can be trained to unconsciously improve their ability to differentiate English r and l sounds. From The New York Times (Karl Ove Knausgaard on “Remembrance of Things Past”): It opens the world up in a way no other book I have read does. But please don’t stop after two and a half volumes, you have to go all the way; it is all about the accumulation. It won’t make you a better person, nor more empathetic or intelligent, but it will make you see and smell and think slightly differently, also about yourself, and so enrichen your life and your understanding of it. From The TLS (Nicola Barker on "Knausgaard or Ferrante?"): [He] has a generous spirit and a real writer’s attention to detai

From The TLS (Ottessa Moshfegh on "Which of your contemporaries will be read 100 years from now?"): Amie Barrodale is the most important writer of my generation. Her stories should be studied and worshipped. She is a savant and a genius both. I think human consciousness might actually need 100 years to catch up to her brilliance. From The Economist : Tesla is one of a tiny cohort of firms with a license to lose billions pursuing a dream. The odds of them achieving it are similar to those of aspiring pop stars and couture designers. From Teju Cole's Known and Strange Things : We are our habits in sum. From Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet : The funny thing is that, while it's difficult to formulate a definition that truly distinguishes man from animals, it's easy to differentiate between the superior man and the common man. From Harper's : Trustworthy, addictive, unkind, educated middle-aged women are especially susceptible to roman

From The New York Times (Karl Ove Knausgaard on "What’s the last great book you read?"): “Pond,” by Claire-Louise Bennett. From  The New York Times  (Karl Ove Knausgaard on "Who are your favorite Norwegian writers?"): Tarjei Vesaas has written the best Norwegian novel ever, “The Birds” — it is absolutely wonderful, the prose is so simple and so subtle, and the story is so moving that it would have been counted amongst the great classics from the last century if it had been written in one of the major languages. From Harper's : A.I. researchers predicted that the last human job to be replaced by machines will be that of A.I. researcher. From The Economist : [Affairs] can sometimes even fortify relationships, so long as they spur a couple to discuss what has long been left unsaid. From Harper's (Rebecca Solnit on the definition of the present): The present is by common definition the instant between the not yet and the already, a moment as

From The Economist : [The] context of an economic choice matters. That, in turn, means that the way choices are framed, by firms or governments, can influence how people respond. From  Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (H/T: Kevin Lewis ): Compared to participants in the low-autonomy or autonomy-unrelated control conditions, participants in the high-autonomy condition were more likely to behave unethically because they felt less constrained by rules. [The] experience of high job autonomy simultaneously increased unethical behavior and creativity, further demonstrating job autonomy to be a double-edged sword. From The Guardian (Sarah Perry on "The book I wish I’d written"): Either JL Carr’s A Month in the Country, or Fred Uhlmann’s Reunion. Both are technically peerless works, exquisite in style and in structure, seeming very small but containing multitudes. I read them and feel like an apprentice carpenter looking at a Chippendale desk. From Harper'

From Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet : Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many. From The New York Times : If you go into marriage seeking self-actualization, you will always feel frustrated because marriage, and especially parenting, will constantly be dragging you away from the goals of self. From  Columbia University Working Paper  (H/T:  Kevin Lewis ): [Contrary] to prevailing narratives about Donald Trump's deep weaknesses and virtually-inevitable defeat, the President seems strongly positioned to win a renewed mandate in 2020. From The Economist : [Couples] with high expectations are almost twice as happy during easier times as couples with lower expectations--but they are also almost twice as unhappy during hard times. From Harper's : Money

From The Economist : [How] rare it was for single battles or brilliant generals to be decisive. Nearly all the belligerents in 1914 believed they would be fighting a short war, until they found they weren't. From Harper's : People think of themselves as better than average because they think of average as below average. From Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day : It was a fine feeling indeed to be standing up there like that, with the sound of summer all around one and a light breeze on one's face. And I believe it was then, looking on that view, that I began for the first time to adopt a frame of mind appropriate for the journey before me. From The Economist : Caesarean babies are more prone than others to allergies... and that they are also more likely to become fat. From  Cass R. Sunstein's On Rumors : [When] likeminded people get together, they often end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk to