Midday update
No line but a steady stream of people. Let’s see what after work looks like. It continues to be a beautiful day.
ReaderWriterVille
Blog in progress
Tag: electoral politics
June 4, 2016
Return of the links
I beefed up my RSS feeds to make up for going on Twitter hiatus, and luckily for me several of my subscriptions link me to interesting stuff.
The Awl has a terrific piece on time travel movies and books and how they are grounded in (mostly unacknowledged) white privilege:
Whether it’s Marty McFly in 1950s Hill Valley or Jake Epping in segregated Texas, the entire genre of American time-travel fantasy, with its chaos theory nerdery, butterfly-effect affectations, and desire to reshape the present, is irrevocably linked to the very real idea of white privilege. No narrative of time-travel makes this case more powerfully than Octavia Butler’s masterpiece “Kindred,” which both deconstructed and revolutionized the genre by using time travel to explore the experience of slavery and its lingering effects on the present.
Unlike Back to the Future and “11.22.63,” there is no clear mission to speak of in “Kindred,” at least not one that Dana, the black writer at the center of the novel, is aware of. The circumstances for her time travel are ambiguous and entropic and, for a while, aimless. No rabbit holes. No flux capacitors. The time travel just occurs, suddenly, to Dana, and soon, to her white husband. Butler’s point is not that we are better and more self-aware than the backwards people of the past, nor is it that the past only fills rooms with roaches and erases photographs of family members. Rather, it’s that the past can weigh on the present in devastating ways. “Kindred” reminds us that, for some protagonists, traveling back in time is the opposite of escapist fantasy. The past is alive, says “Kindred.” The past is us.
Next up, the wonderful, inimitable, invaluable Laurie Anderson in a wide-ranging interview at The Atlantic. She talks about politics, blockbuster Broadway musicals, and concerts for dogs (OMG she doesn’t love Hamilton! and is brilliant on Trump):
Aside | August 6, 2015
[I’m trying a new type of post, which WordPress calls “aside” posts. They’re supposed to be like notes, and this theme supports them, but they seem to look like every other post but without a title. Which is not really that helpful in distinguishing them from regular posts. So if you don’t see a title, it’s an Aside post.]
The GOP debate is so frustrating to me. On the one hand, this is five months before the first primaries, ten months before the last primaries, and nearly a full year before the Republican Party’s nominating convention. Most voters aren’t paying attention. The main people who care are scholars, political junkies, and media types who have to fill the 24/7 news hole. And you can probably add to that list, people who enjoy reality shows with a substantial humiliation component. Nate Silver observed that the correlation between GOP candidate standing and media coverage is .92, which almost entirely explains Donald Trump.
On the other hand, campaigns don’t run on votes, they run on money. And right now is when candidates are jockeying for donors. Not the you and me kind of donors, but the Koch and Soros kinds of donors. And if they don’t get money now, they won’t be around when the you and me donors (and voters) start to pay attention. So even though the whole enterprise feels like a sideshow with clowns, it has important consequences. However much we hate it, this is our circus (if you’re a US voter), and they’re kind of our monkeys.
I didn’t get into political science for politainment, but that seems to be the main course these days.
Still not watching, though.
April 8, 2015
ReaderWriterLinks
I’ve been collecting links for a while, since before the blog move, but kept putting off the post. But I said I would have links at the new blog, so here we go.
First up, the enduring appeal of feature phones. I mentioned in my last post that I’ve gone back to using my Nokia featurephone. It gives me phone, text, email, and a severely compressed browser that mostly allows me to read news sites. It has useful offline stuff too, like an alarm clock, timer, and ToDo list app. The battery lasts for days and the phone itself is tiny.
When I was in Japan a few years ago I was enraptured by the oversized flip phones that I saw people using. Apparently they’re still popular. Engadget has a story that suggests why:
The Japanese editor-in-chief of our sister site Autoblog JP was eventually browbeaten by coworkers (and this guy) into buying an iPhone, but his eyes light up when we ask him about the gara-kei thing. Why do you love these phones? “It’s light,” he says. “It’s small; it’s easy to type on, easy to talk into.” He then flips one open, adding, “It’s cool.” He flips it shut.
What has he gained from the upgrade to a smartphone? He’s silent: He doesn’t use the map app, and says the camera on his flip phone was good enough. I’m at a loss for words. Would he go back to a feature phone? “I just bought this thing,” he says as heaves the iPhone 6 up, “but maybe.”
I think it’s also the simplicity. If you can get the hang of typing on a 10-key pad, then you can communicate when necessary but for the most part your phone is just your phone, plus maybe a planner and a quick reference tool. It’s not a mini-computer and lifeline to the social media world.
Obviously we feature phone users are a dying breed. The same Engadget author wrote a second article about how difficult he found it to live with a feature phone even for a week:
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