Search Results for: This Recording

How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance

A close-up of a human eye on an IBM computer monitor, 1983. (Photo by Alfred Gescheidt/Getty Images)

Shoshana Zuboff | An excerpt adapted from The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power | PublicAffairs | 2019 | 23 minutes (6,281 words)

 

In 2000 a group of computer scientists and engineers at Georgia Tech collaborated on a project called the “Aware Home.” It was meant to be a “living laboratory” for the study of “ubiquitous computing.” They imagined a “human-home symbiosis” in which many animate and inanimate processes would be captured by an elaborate network of “context aware sensors” embedded in the house and by wearable computers worn by the home’s occupants. The design called for an “automated wireless collaboration” between the platform that hosted personal information from the occupants’ wearables and a second one that hosted the environmental information from the sensors.

There were three working assumptions: first, the scientists and engineers understood that the new data systems would produce an entirely new knowledge domain. Second, it was assumed that the rights to that new knowledge and the power to use it to improve one’s life would belong exclusively to the people who live in the house. Third, the team assumed that for all of its digital wizardry, the Aware Home would take its place as a modern incarnation of the ancient conventions that understand “home” as the private sanctuary of those who dwell within its walls.

All of this was expressed in the engineering plan. It emphasized trust, simplicity, the sovereignty of the individual, and the inviolability of the home as a private domain. The Aware Home information system was imagined as a simple “closed loop” with only two nodes and controlled entirely by the home’s occupants. Because the house would be “constantly monitoring the occupants’ whereabouts and activities…even tracing its inhabitants’ medical conditions,” the team concluded, “there is a clear need to give the occupants knowledge and control of the distribution of this information.” All the information was to be stored on the occupants’ wearable computers “to insure the privacy of an individual’s information.”

By 2018, the global “smart-home” market was valued at $36 billion and expected to reach $151 billion by 2023. The numbers betray an earthquake beneath their surface. Consider just one smart-home device: the Nest thermostat, which was made by a company that was owned by Alphabet, the Google holding company, and then merged with Google in 2018. The Nest thermostat does many things imagined in the Aware Home. It collects data about its uses and environment. It uses motion sensors and computation to “learn” the behaviors of a home’s inhabitants. Nest’s apps can gather data from other connected products such as cars, ovens, fitness trackers, and beds. Such systems can, for example, trigger lights if an anomalous motion is detected, signal video and audio recording, and even send notifications to homeowners or others. As a result of the merger with Google, the thermostat, like other Nest products, will be built with Google’s artificial intelligence capabilities, including its personal digital “assistant.” Like the Aware Home, the thermostat and its brethren devices create immense new stores of knowledge and therefore new power — but for whom? Read more…

The Story of Country Music’s Great Songwriting Duo

Jared Brainerd, Faber & Faber Social

Dylan Jones | Wichita Lineman | Faber & Faber | September 2019 | 26 minutes (5,155 words)

 

In 1961, like most fourteen-year-old boys Jimmy Webb was obsessed with three things: music, cars, and girls. In an effort to curb these distractions, his Baptist minister father got his son a part-time job ploughing wheat fields near Laverne, Oklahoma. One day, while listening to music on the green plastic transistor radio that hung from the tractor’s wing mirror, the young Jimmy Webb heard a song called “Turn Around, Look at Me,” sung by a new artist called Glen Campbell.

Webb loved that record, not just because of the tune, but mainly for the voice, which he thought was sweet and true.

Read more…

Rock Me Gently

Kevin Winter / Getty, Danni Konov / Getty

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | August 2019 |  9 minutes (2,273 words)

I have no reason not to believe Rolling Stone when it calls cover star Harry Styles a “21st century rock star.” He certainly looks like one: shirtless, tattooed, his hair a tousled mess, and a smile that may not say big dick energy but definitely says he knows what to do with it. He could be 1977 cover star Peter Frampton, when he was named “Rock Star of the Year.” There’s even a tagline to the left of Styles’s nipple promising sex and psychedelics. But then you start reading, and the setup begins to break down. Sure, he has a reputation for fucking a lot, but it all sounds very consensual and age-appropriate. He also seems unfailingly polite, not to mention sunny. I mean, he gets sad — his new album is “all about having sex and feeling sad” — but he’s not broody and doesn’t seem like he’d ever trash a hotel. This is a guy who appears to sort his problems out the way therapists tell us to: friendships, meditation, even work. “I feel like the fans have given me an environment to be myself and grow up and create this safe space to learn and make mistakes,” he tells the magazine. He describes himself as vulnerable and loose (the mushrooms and weed can’t hurt). Rolling Stone describes one moment as “rock-star debauchery” but all he did while tripping was bite off the tip of his own tongue — the only person he bled on was himself. As for everyone else, he just wants them to feel loved. “I’m aware that as a white male, I don’t go through the same things as a lot of the people that come to the shows,” he says. “I’m just trying to make people feel included and seen.”

The classic ideal of the rock star — the depraved renegade with infinite hotel bills, addictions, and infidelities — is dead. The charismatic young white man (it was usually a young white man, sometimes several) who rebranded selfishness as revolution has been overthrown, taking with him a part of the individualist, white, patriarchal capitalist system he came from. In his place, new rock stars, sometimes white and male, often not, have sprung up to nurture rather than destroy — instead of shutting us out, they let us in. Read more…

Shelved: Van Morrison’s Contractual Obligation Album

Ian Dickson/Redferns/Getty Images

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | August 2019 | 12 minutes (2,134 words)

 

Sometime between the massive success of his first single “Brown-Eyed Girl” and the extraordinary musical statement of Astral Weeks, Van Morrison walked into a New York studio and recorded thirty-one of his worst songs.

To be fair, he was terrible on purpose. What became known as Morrison’s “revenge” or Contractual Obligation album is perhaps the most distinguished of many record label f-yous. Comprised of over thirty songs supposedly recorded in an afternoon, with titles such as “The Big Royalty Check” and “Blow In Your Nose,” the work was, understandably, shelved. Apparently that was the point: Morrison wanted to get out of his contract with Bang Records and make a new home with Warner Brothers, and the Contractual Obligation songs were supposedly central to that transition. Morrison’s Bang Records contract stipulated quantity, not quality. The truth, about all of it, is a lot more interesting.

Read more…

The Reluctant Propagandist

Illustration by Saman Sarheng

Maija Liuhto | Longreads | August 2019 | 15 minutes (4149 words)

 

It’s 7 a.m. in Kabul. As usual, hundreds of thousands of cars are stuck in traffic jams around the city, where police checkpoints, Humvees, and blast walls congest the perilous streets. Taxi drivers in faded yellow Corollas roll up their windows and try to shoo off street children blowing heady incense — meant to ward off evil spirits — inside their cars. Policemen yell “boro, boro” (move) through the loudspeakers of their dark-green pickups. Fruit sellers calmly navigate the madness, pushing heavy carts laden with dark-red pomegranates, juicy grapes, and Pakistani mangoes while dust lingers in the air behind them.

Here, nothing is ever certain: Any minute, a bomb could go off, destroying families, livelihoods, and hopes.

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Mountains, Transcending

Illustration by Jason Raish

Ailsa Ross | Longreads | August 2019 | 22 minutes (6,062 words)

It’s the winter of 1923 and a five-foot tall woman is shooting at brigands in Tibet. She’s surviving a blizzard by eating boot leather. She’s accepting a maggot-dancing stew from a drug-addled butcher and having a face-off with a snow leopard.

This woman is Parisian opera singer-turned-anarchist Buddhist lama Alexandra David-Néel, and she’s kicking through Tibet’s wild hills and steppes as she strides on foot across the Himalayas from Kanchow to Lhasa.

Alexandra’s starlit memoir recounting her adventure is no Thoreauvian nature journal. This is a tale that demands to be read in a cool bed while the night paws at the windows — or in my case, by the fire while my dad watches Come Dine With Me repeats on a black January afternoon.

I started reading My Journey to Lhasa because I love adventure stories. And while I’ve never pushed myself to extremes, still I felt a kinship with Alexandra. “Ever since I was five years old,” she wrote, “I craved to go beyond the garden gate, to follow the road that passed it by, and to set out for the Unknown.” She didn’t dream of towns or parades, but a solitary spot where she could “sit alone, with no one near.” As a child, her nannies often found her crouched behind bushes or hidden up trees in Paris gardens.

Quiet spaces — I’d needed those since I was a teenager.

I was most in search of a quiet space while teaching in Seoul in 2012. I was twenty-four and tired — of living in that crunching city of 26 million, of being in a job I was no good at, of lying awake in the self-hating 2 a.m. dark with a burnt throat from smoking cigarettes on the kindergarten rooftop. I wanted to feel clean again, like a child who’d spent the day by the sea. Read more…

Searching for The Sundays

Hayley Madden / AP

David Obuchowski | Longreads | July 2019 | 35 minutes (6,336 words)

 

What makes a band your favorite band? Is it the quality of their songs? Is it their politics? Is it because they pioneered a certain sound? An emotional association? I don’t know. Any of those are valid reasons for crowning a band as your favorite.

For most of my life, starting in high school through my 30s, the Smiths were my favorite band. And to be sure, I still love the Smiths. But a few years ago, I came to a simple and somehow comforting realization: My favorite band is the Sundays.

Read more…

Free Solo

Hulu, Photo Illustration by Homestead

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | July 2019 |  8 minutes (2,101 words)


The original cut of the
Veronica Mars pilot had a cold open set to “La Femme d’Argent,” the first track from AIR’s 1998 debut album, Moon Safari. A neon take on noir, the scene has the 17-year-old titular blond (Kristen Bell) alone in her car in the middle of the night outside Camelot, one of her local “cheap motels on the wrong side of town.” Her camera — along with a calculus textbook — sits on the passenger side and her lips are glossed as she watches through the rain-streaked window of her convertible. The silhouette of a couple can be seen having sex in one of the motel rooms.“I’m never getting married,” she says.

Instead of this kick-ass intro — which accompanies the DVD version at least — the series, whenever it airs on television, opens on a brightly lit trio of cheerleaders tearing through a school parking lot to the pop-rock strums of the Wayouts’ “What You Want” (Bite, 1993), also under Veronica’s voice-over: “This is my school. If you go here your parents are either millionaires or your parents work for millionaires.” It’s simple exposition, with none of the mood or the bite of the original, and it sets Veronica Mars up as a teen show with a babe at the center, not the contemporary noir revolving around a precocious P.I. that it actually was. Rob Thomas’s series, which first aired on UPN in 2004, takes a typical sun-kissed California girl, murders her best friend, turns her sheriff dad  — and eventually Veronica herself — into an outcast, has her mom abandon them both, and, as if that weren’t enough, has her raped at a class party (the network tried to get rid of that part), then the new sheriff laugh down her report. All of this happens in the pilot, by the way. The whole ordeal turns Veronica into a cynic and ultimately her dad’s sidekick at his newly launched private eye agency.

Every time Thomas sees the actual opening, it breaks his heart, he recently admitted to Vanity Fair. He was proud of his version, but Les Moonves, the chairman and CEO of CBS (owner of UPN), was not into a prologue in which the hottie appears as a hardboiled antihero. “It’s a high school show,” he said, according to Thomas. “It should start in a high school.” But it’s 15 years later and Moonves is out, having resigned in disgrace amidst a series of sexual misconduct allegations, and there’s a new season of Veronica Mars, this time on Hulu, at the top of which Veronica is back outside a seedy motel, alone. The image of the lone woman is as strong as it ever was. And perhaps it is even more poignant these days as a symbol of transgression in the wake of our collective awareness around men’s control of the world. In this moment, the singular femme represents the possibility of a future without the trappings of the past. She’s less marshmallow than s’more. Read more…

On Keeping a Notebook: A Reading List

“I can feel my brain changing.” Those were the first words I wrote in what would eventually become a continuous journal spanning thousands of pages and dozens of notebooks.

It was the middle of the night, and after I jotted the thought down, I added, “Is it permanent?”

I felt as if a tuning fork had been struck, its echo reverberating in my head. We were living in Atlanta then, and our house had one of those oversized master suites, inherited from the previous owner, so once out of bed, I was standing in a small sitting room that adjoined the bedroom. Next to me, a lamp I’d spirited away from my grandfather’s house cast a small glow, easing the insomnia I was experiencing. I kept repeating a phrase to myself, “The rough places made smooth.” I wasn’t sure if it was a biblical quote, or whether I had combined two different sayings (Atlanta is the birthplace of Martin Luther King, Jr., and I had the vague idea that Dr. King had said something to that effect). I only knew I felt relief at committing some of my inner turmoil to paper.

The next night, awake again at 3 a.m., I wrote about what I called “adventures in mind-expansion.” The journaling struck me as unusual. I was a reporter at an NPR station at the time and had been a news journalist for more than a decade. But this was different — akin to the writing I’d done when I was 9 and my teachers predicted I would be a writer.

I can partly chalk it up to something that happened a week later — my son’s birth. When I went into labor and headed off to the hospital that warm July day, I packed a notebook, a practice I’d abandoned years before when my expat days in Italy had concluded. One of the first photos I have with my newborn shows me writing in the maternity ward while nursing him. From there, a notebook became my constant companion. Some days in early motherhood, I couldn’t stop writing. I’d fill notebook pages at different intervals of the day, like an ongoing Twitter thread.

I was preparing for motherhood to change my life; it was the transformation I’d trained my eyes on entirely. But instead a parallel transformation involving writing also emerged.

Writing anchored me through my first year as a working mom. I’d pull off the road to write on my way home from work, or jot a few lines in the daycare parking lot. I found the twister of passing buildings, pedestrians, music on the radio, and the sounds of my son floating up from the backseat inspired me to experience new joys or simply savor old ones from a new vantage point. Sometimes I would even write while leaning the journal against the steering wheel, my eye moving between the page and the road.

Motherhood had reunited me with writing, which once again became my confidant, my forever friend. Another event could have been the trigger — a death, a divorce, a relocation. But either way, the pivotal instrument was a notebook — not a computer, not a tablet, not a phone.

Once I began writing again in earnest, I created computer files to record my ideas at greater length. But I wanted to be writing all the time, and one cannot write on a laptop all the time with a baby. A notebook is the solution. You can always write in a notebook — on a plane, in the car, even while out on a lake in a canoe. It’s almost never a breach of etiquette to pull out a notebook. I now teach, and I’ll often write in my notebook if I’ve arrived early for class. A notebook also never loses power and never has a glitch.

I keep lots of notebooks, but perhaps the most important is the small one I stash in my purse. It’s a baby notebook used for appointments and reminders that doubles as a “bits journal,” to steal a phrase from poet David Kirby, since I use it to record any image, phrase, or event that strikes my fancy and could contribute to a piece of writing later. I look at it obsessively throughout the day, re-reading my to-do list or jotting down ideas for stories, articles, poems, or gifts for my son. A typical day reads something like this:

Follow up on sleep pitch.
1 p.m. haircut.
Add “intimacy junkie” to the Di Lascia translation pitch cover letter.
Pick up birthday cake.
Finish book review for the Kenyon Review.
What about a piece called something like, “In Defense of Sleeplessness?”

On my way out of the house, I instinctively grab this daily notebook since I never know when I will think of lines I want to add to a piece in progress.

What’s more, it has given me a constant vocation that doesn’t allow much time for obsessing about other concerns. I’ll get a new phone if I lose the one I have but if my daily notebook goes missing? I’d lose my mind. In fact, it has such power — and provides such security — that I fear (somewhat ridiculously) for its safety.

I now take a notebook with me on every trip, which is fortuitous because I began writing the piece you’re reading while vacationing on a small, remote island in Vermont. The following longreads explore the joys of keeping a notebook and the art of writing longhand.

1. Are We Different Writers When We Move From Longhand to a Screen? (James Draney, August 2017, Literary Hub)

Like an intellectual historian, James Draney brings us a survey of how different authors and thinkers viewed developments in writing — specifically the instruments we use to write instead of writing longhand. He laments that “alas, the page that once contained the essence of the human voice has given way to a simulation of itself on the digital screen.” A simulation. Oh, that’s good. I feel as though I should call the fire brigade or yell, “Stop the presses!”

Draney cites a wide list of authors, including the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who viewed the typewriter as something “charged with an unthinkable crime.” Draney writes:

For him, this writing machine was no benign piece of secretarial equipment: it was actually destroying the very essence of the human, click by mechanical click.

Draney weighs the impact of “tapping out a word, perhaps backspacing, deleting, highlighting, copying and pasting,” asking, “how do these mechanical ways of writing change the way we think?”

It’s interesting to note that unlike the other authors or subjects of the links here, Draney is not necessarily pro-longhand. That’s because writing in longhand isn’t a skill he acquired long before learning to type on a computer.

It’s odd to think that writers born today will not have any paper in their archives. It’s even funnier to think that these future writers may never actually learn to write. This was what it was like for me, born in 1990. I learned to write by hand at the very same time I learned to type. But rather than focus on my penmanship, I learned to process words on a machine for which writing, typing and processing were one and the same functions. Before the swirl of the pen, there was the plastic click of the keyboard. Not one continuous movement but thousands of discrete ones: arachnid fingers on a plastic pad.

2. Woke Up This Morning (Louis Menard, December 2007, The New Yorker)

There are many ways to use a notebook: anything from journaling, brainstorming, note-taking, and writing in one’s diary. Louis Menand focuses on that last substratum of notebook use, probably the most common form until recently. He is appropriately skeptical about the average person’s ability to remain faithful to a diary, largely because it requires that one input all thoughts, not just the pretty ones or the ones that sound good. “Most people don’t confess; they repress,” he writes.

“Never discriminate, never omit” is one of the unstated rules of diary-keeping. The rule is perverse, because all writing is about control, and writing a diary is a way to control the day—to have, as it were, the last word. But diaries are composed under the fiction that the day is in control, that you are simply a passive recorder of circumstance, and so everything has to go in whether it mattered or not—as though deciding when it didn’t were somehow not your business.

He adds that if the journal in question doesn’t contain a lot of unimportant drivel (“dross”), it’s not a diary. “It’s something else — a journal, or a writer’s notebook, or a blog (blather is not the same as dross).”

3. Mostly True (Sarah Manguso, February 2015, T: The New York Times Style Magazine)

One of the more noted diarists of recent years is writer Sarah Manguso who, unlike Anaïs Nin, didn’t publish her diary but rather published a book about it called Ongoingness: The End of a Diary. Manguso kept her diary for several decades. In this article from the New York TimesT Magazine, she tells us about the impetus of her diary and its contents, but perhaps one of the most interesting snippets to my mind is that she does not fetishize the actual container of the diary, which is to say the “little black books” she’s used.

In my late teens, overburdened by an excess of life, I built a storage facility for it: a diary. After I wrote things down I could safely forget them. It was the only relief I ever found, and I kept at it. I don’t keep a routine, but the diary gets written daily — usually several times daily, even in transit, in hospitals and at parties. In little black books and, as of this year, on my phone. Since 1992 I’ve created a new text file on my computer every New Year’s Day. Whatever I have written gets transcribed into the file and I throw the draft away. A little black book is a beautiful object, but I don’t care about the objects; I care only about the words in them.

4. 8 Writing Tips from Jeff Vandemeer (Jeff Vandemeer, March 2018, Chicago Review of Books)

The impetus for this article was a single word buried amid some writing tips from blockbuster science fiction author Jeff Vandemeer. Specifically, the word “luddite.” It appears in a tip about recording bits of inspiration whenever they come to you. He writes:

There is an immediacy to writing it on paper that appeals to me, too. This doesn’t strike me as a luddite thing, but a thing about the human brain.

As a journeyman writer, I gained all kinds of useful info on his writing process and the story behind the huge success of his “Annihilation” series of books from the piece, but the killer line for me is the one about being (or not being, as the case may be) a luddite. He seems almost apologetic about suggesting that the offline, old-school technology world might be all right, too. Which is too bad because his ideas are fantastic.

I carry a pen and a small notebook or loose notecards with me at all times. I also keep them on the nightstand next to the bed. I have pieces of paper in the kitchen, too. Over the past twenty years especially, I have not lost or forgotten a single idea or scene fragment or character observation or bit of dialogue because I have always written it down immediately, no matter what situation I’m in (this includes when I had a day job).

Over time, my subconscious has rewarded me more and more for taking It seriously. If your subconscious brain “knows” you are going to write it all down and use what it gives you, a loop is created where, at times, and depending on other factors, the problem isn’t lack of ideas but having too many ideas.

Like Vandemeer, I feel as though similar accusations are coming my way when I think about how a notebook’s “technology” is actually superior to a phone or computer. I open it and voilà, my dear ones, my notebook is ON. Close it, then open it again, and I’ve “rebooted” it. When I want to transcribe a thought, an idea for a project or the next line of this piece, I want to do it instantaneously and a notebook is the only instrument that can meet that demand (excluding, of course, writing on my hand). If I were Vandemeer and had written multiple best-selling novels, I hope I wouldn’t be shy about saying what to me is obvious.

5. Messy Attics of the Mind: What’s Inside a Writer’s Notebook? (Philip Horne, Paul Theroux, Susie Boyt, and Amit Chaudhuri; April 2018; The Guardian)

The way the writers featured in this piece describe their notebooks, I know they are besotted with the practice. They are kindred spirits, and they write beautifully about it. This is especially so with Susie Boyt, who calls her notebooks “messy little attics of the mind.” It’s such a lovely, original description that I almost find it aspirational — do my notebooks really look like messy little attics of the mind? If not, I’ll be working on that today. The expression appears in an extended description of her notebook history:

I have always kept notebooks — messy little attics of the mind, an odd assortment of shapes and colours stuffed into drawers next to defunct phones and balls of string. They feel private and tender, a bit like night clothes; or embarrassing, like over-eager little sisters.

I admire writers who operate their notebooks rigorously, with mathematical co-ordinates of character and plot, in the fashion of the Euston Road School painters, but mine are filled with a jumble of poetry, prose and criticism, lists, plans, with occasional personal anecdotes in which I often emerge the slightee.

6. Joyce Carol Oates: The Art of Fiction, No. 72 (Robert Phillips, Fall-Winter 1978; The Paris Review)

OK, so many writers and artists keep notebooks — this we know. But some actually compose their first versions of their work in a notebook. In other words, they write longhand. In this wonderful interview from the Paris Review, prolific author Joyce Carol Oates includes a brief mention about writing longhand and how typing on a typewriter is now “an alien thing.” Arguably I could have just written “Joyce Carol Oates” and any argument about the potential virtues of writing longhand would cease. Joyce Carol Oates does it. Need I say more? It’s especially so since she has written about five dozen books. And she isn’t just using a notebook — she is composing entirely in longhand before ever touching a computer file. (I assume the practice began after Them, her 1969 novel, which won the National Book Award and runs 500 pages, but still).

“Childwold needed to be written in longhand, of course. And now everything finds its initial expression in longhand and the typewriter has become a rather alien thing—a thing of formality and impersonality. My first novels were all written on a typewriter: first draft straight through, then revisions, then final draft. But I can’t do that any longer.

The thought of dictating into a machine doesn’t appeal to me at all. Henry James’s later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it’s transcribed into written prose.

I love the way she says that “now everything finds its initial expression in longhand.” On a par with the way you might have changed your morning routine once you learned about coffee, or the way you might structure your life once you’ve understood the vagaries of unbridled love.

7. Mary Gordon on the Joy of Notebooks and How Writing By Hand Catalyzes Creativity (Maria Popova, February 2013; Brainpickings)

Mary Gordon, a novelist and memoirist from New York, is a true acolyte of writing longhand. And her essay on the topic, “Putting Pen to Paper, but Not Just Any Pen to Just Any Paper,” is excerpted generously in this piece from Brainpickings about a book of essays by writers on their writing processes. We learn about Gordon’s writing process, how she reads and listens to music before composing anything herself. We also see her deftly locate the essence of notebook use:

For related reading, here’s a piece from BookRiot on the finer points of writing in pencil.

Writing by hand is laborious, and that is why typewriters were invented. But I believe that the labor has virtue, because of its very physicality. For one thing it involves flesh, blood and the thingness of pen and paper, those anchors that remind us that, however thoroughly we lose ourselves in the vortex of our invention, we inhabit a corporeal world.

8. Why I’m Obsessed With Reading Books About Writing in Notebooks (Josephine Wolff, February 2019; The Washington Post)

There is an adjacent topic to writing in a notebook and that’s the publishing industry sector that’s grown up around the practice (or aspirational practice) of writing in a notebook (this is still America, after all). A delightful look into this phenomenon comes to us here by way of a professor not of writing but of cybersecurity. Here, we find notebook devotees — professional notebookers, you could say — trying to indoctrinate everyone by selling specific types of notebooks.

One reason I’m so transfixed by notebook experts is that their systems bring together free-form, individualized artistic expression and the structured formatting and rigid rules of computer science. This may be key to the appeal of notebooking: In an increasingly algorithmic world, these systems let us crack open the black boxes of our lives, allowing us to develop systems of our own and helping us figure out what matters to us along the way.

Selfishly, I’ll add that for me the best line in the piece is where it becomes clear she is truly as obsessed with notebooks as I am. She writes that at any moment, she keeps “one for daily to-do lists and appointments, one for notes and ideas, [and] one for teaching.” If she added a sleep diary (which I began keeping this year), we’d be about even.

* * *

Jeanne Bonner is a writer, editor, and literary translator whose work has been published by the New York Times, Catapult, Marketplace, and CNN Travel. She won the 2018 PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature for her translation-in-progress of Mariateresa Di Lascia’s Passaggio in Ombra. She will be a short-term fellow at the New York Public Library in 2020.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

This (Wo)Man’s Work

Bulat Silvia / Getty, photo collage by Homestead

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | June 2019 |  11 minutes (2,804 words)

What is it about my work that makes it so much less esteemed than so many men’s? Was it not produced with enough sweat? With enough brain power? With enough complaint? What is it that gives a man sitting in an ergonomic chair, staring at a computer screen, typing on a laptop, so much more gravitas? Maybe he’s not doing it with a fan pointed at him, like I am. Maybe he doesn’t have a bottle of water next to him. Or is it the bouquet of flowers on my desk? Does the smell transfer to my work? Is labor produced in a sweet-smelling room less insightful? If you shut your eyes and I put my work in one of your hands and a man’s in the other, will you be able to weigh the difference? What if neither of us have done anything yet? Will you be able to weigh it then?

“1 in 8 men believe they can make a better film than Andrea Arnold,” one person tweeted last week. I laughed. It was a quip amalgamating two stories that dominated social media that same week, both impressively undermining women’s work. One was a survey of 1,732 Brits conducted by YouGov that found that 12 percent of the men believed they could win a point off Serena Williams, a tennis champion who holds the most Grand Slam titles combined — singles, doubles, mixed doubles — of any player currently on the pro tennis circuit. The second was a report from IndieWire, citing a number of anonymous sources, that claimed the second season of Big Little Lies, directed by British auteur Andrea Arnold, was ripped out from under her and put back in the hands of first season director Jean-Marc Vallée to do with what he pleased. To be clear, Arnold is an Oscar-winning filmmaker who has claimed the jury prize at Cannes three times. Vallée is not. Like him, she has directed episodes on four TV series. But there’s one key thing that Vallée had that she didn’t: an established rapport with Big Little Lies creator David E. Kelley.

Oh, male bonds; so reserved and yet so unconditional. This is the kind of alliance that has Eddie Murphy backing John Landis to direct Coming to America a year after Landis was charged with involuntary manslaughter (he was acquitted). This is the kind of camaraderie that has Prince Andrew attending a welcome-back-to-New-York party that registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein reportedly threw for himself. These are extreme examples, but in essence, they show men supporting men they like, no matter the quality of their work, what they’ve done. 

Imagine how men who have done nothing so problematic are treated by their male friends. Imagine if literally any women were treated that way.

Read more…