On physical books

Here is an article discussing how the absence of physical books and records (or tapes or CDs) in modern houses can affect the exploration of the world by the young.  If your folks or your friends or the other people you interact with don't have books and stuff lying around, you're not likely to be exposed accidentally to new cultural influences that you didn't know about before.  With a plethora of movies and books and music on-demand in a personalized cloud, you are exposed mainly to what you already know.  This leaves a lot less space in the world for the sort of idle pondering, confronting novel ideas, and generally fortunate accidents that inspire broad, critical, adventurous thinking.  That's a shame.

A delight for me in the past few years has been to go through my dead father's old stuff, especially his book collection from college, which sat dormant in our basement for decades.  I am now able not only to read what he read, see what shaped his mind when he was a young man becoming away of a wide, awake world beyond the bounds of his humble upbringing.  No, I even get to see his margin notes, notice what he highlighted, what struck him most when he was half the age I am now.  None of this would be possible had he done all his college reading on a Kindle and disposed unceremoniously of the pdf files once he was done reading them.

I recently read "The Constant Gardener" by John LeCarré, an author I got into a few years ago when I finally picked up some of my dad's old books of his that I'd seen around the house for over 20 years but had never ventured to read.  It isn't by any means one of LeCarré's best; its tone is very different from much of his earlier work, replacing quiet, impotent ambiguity that grinds through apathetic systems, with a crusading moral certainty that fights against evil vested interests.  But it adds one more piece to the mosaic of the author's lifelong opus; not every book has to or even can be the best, but each one is its own contribution to the author's (and the reader's) conception of the world.  Again, I would not be as aware of this opus if I didn't have physical books with a list of the author's other works on the inside jacket.  And had my father simply read this on a Kindle while he was dying, I probably wouldn't have known that it was the last book he finished.  As is, even though my copy is just from the library, I could share vicariously with my father as I read through the plot's twists and turns, just as the book's protagonist follows in the footsteps of his dead wife as he takes up her search for the truth.

Another funny post from Damon Young

This one declaring 2015 the year of average, even mediocre white people, and their aggressive quest to quell opportunities and recognition for any non-white people.

Another reason to throw away your "smart" phone

An interesting article about the effect of excessive phone fiddling on your posture and your general feelings of wellbeing.  I've been surprised a few times recently at social occasions to see some people arrive and immediately sit down in a corner to mess with their Iphones.  Please you guys, come back to the realm of the living!

Happy Abolition Day

I just learned that it was 150 years ago today that slavery was abolished in the US.  Good for us!  I'm glad it hasn't left any bitter, indelible legacy of an oppressive caste system in our society all these years later.

Disdain for others, quantified

Here is an article discussing the so-called racial tipping point, the relative number of black people (and especially poor black people) that the average white person will accept living around before running away to a new house to avoid black people.  It's sad and absurd that this concept should even have to exist, based as it is on a conception of blacks as a sort of epidemic disease, but there seems to be a rather rigorous way of quantifying the intolerance of whites for living near blacks.  Sadly, this tolerance level seems to top out at only 14%, meaning that if a neighborhood has a higher proportion of black residents than that, all the white folks will likely move out in short order.  Then as blacks attempt to flee this now-blighted area by moving to the place where the whites moved, the whites will again move farther out.  It is a more statistically rigorous way of characterizing a phenomenon I discussed in a past blog post, of everyone disdaining everyone else, which leads to an ever-widening suburban sprawl as those who deem themselves desireable move farther and farther away from city centers or inner suburbs populated by those they deem to be undesireable.  My wife, a very insightful outside observer of the US, has repeatedly remarked that if something will be our undoing as a nation, it is these deep rifts we maintain between races.  I agree with her.  Such rifts stem from, and further promote, our inability to conceive ourselves as a single people, to see our neighbor as a neighbor and not a suspicious, tainted other.  How shameful.

Racism as addiction

Here is an interesting take on racism from a development blogger I enjoy reading.  He likens racism to an addiction, and recommends a sort of twelve-step program to overcome racism collectively, as a society.  I don't know how sound all of his analogies are, or how much I agree with his proposed solution, but his idea is interesting.