Soderbergh interviews Rooney Mara

Steven Soderbergh directed Rooney Mara in Side Effects, and he interviewed her by email for Interview magazine. Why aren't more interviews this entertaining? Did this interview remind anyone else of how Kevin Spacey's Francis Underwood would speak to  Kate Mara's Zoe Barnes in House of Cards? Forget the Kardashians, can we get a reality show called the Mara's?

[Warning: you may need to fiddle with your browser or go into print view to see the entire interview as the site is built in a way that tries to be so fancy it failed in my browser about seven times before I could see the entire interview and not just one page of it. This is not a browser-friendly page, it's downright ornery.]

NBA players in short sleeves?

A coworker shared this at work: the Golden State Warriors are going to debut a short sleeve jersey in their game Feb. 22, and they'll wear it for two more games this season.

Though that's what the majority of recreational players wear to play basketball, I've gotten so used to seeing pro basketball players in tank tops that the idea sounds strange.

If the idea spreads and sticks, though, it may be economic reasons and not fashion reasons that lead the way. Says an Adidas executive in the article:

"Fans like the opportunity to wear a short-sleeve shirt to the games to support their team but also high school kids can wear in the hallways to the mall. It's a great solution for fans to support their teams."

It's easier for kids to wear short sleeve shirts than tank tops. Not mentioned, but perhaps also relevant: shot sleeves provide a bit of additional real estate for ad decals to be affixed should the NBA ever go that route for an additional revenue stream.

Should the NBA ever go down that road, however, they may face a bit of resistance from NBA players, so many of whom have invested a lot of money in elaborate shoulder tattoos, all of which would no longer get much airtime on TV.

The high cost of cheap parking

An informative history of the birth of the parking meter and how its slowness in evolving with the times has helped to prolong the hegemony of the car and driving in America.

In his definitive book, “The High Cost of Free Parking,” Donald Shoup explains that minimum parking requirements “led planners and developers to think that parking is a problem only when there isn’t enough of it. But too much parking is also a problem—it wastes money, degrades urban design, increases impervious surface area, and encourages overuse of cars.” Besides the fact that legally required lots are often more than half-empty, they result in a variety of negative impacts, from environmental runoff issues to inhospitable pedestrian zones. Instead of using the tools available to limit automobile use and encourage free-flowing street traffic, Shoup explains that planners traditionally did the opposite, requiring “enough off-street spaces to satisfy the peak demand for free parking.”

Additionally, such ordinances falsely reduced the explicit cost of city driving, transferring the true expense of so-called “free” parking to every citizen in the vicinity, diffused into taxes, real estate, product, and service fees. In effect, this legislation created an environment where “nobody can opt out of paying for parking,” says Jeff Speck, renowned urban planner and author of the book, “Walkable Cities.”

According to Speck, “people who walk, bike, or take transit are bankrolling those who drive. In so doing, they are making driving cheaper and thus more prevalent, which in turn undermines the quality of walking, biking, and taking transit.” Furthermore, our plethora of free parking resulted in a range of negative consequences still unaccounted for: “The social costs of not charging for curb parking—traffic congestion, air pollution, accidents, wasted time, and wasted fuel—are enormous,” writes Shoup.

At the end of the article, San Francisco is cited as the leading city in swapping out old parking meters for new ones whose rates can be adjusted on the fly and that can be paid in a variety of ways, including by phone (through the PayByPhone mobile app). I've consistently use the mobile app on my iPhone to pay those meters now, and it beats carrying around a pound of quarters.

However, I still find it impossible to find parking in San Francisco most places I go. Perhaps the rates aren't high enough to sit at the intersection of supply and demand curves. The ideal pricing would have most spots filled but a few spots empty at all times so drivers wouldn't spend their time circling the block looking for a spot.

I'm enthusiastic, but not overly excited

Rob Walker writes of a new punctuation mark proposed by Ellen Susan: the ElRey, a cross between an exclamation point and a period.

The underlying problem is of course overuse of the traditional exclamation mark in the email/social network era, to the extent that the meaning of this venerable symbol has been severely undermined. I can recall coming across advice when I was in college in the late 1980s suggesting that it was permissible to use an exclamation mark once every twenty years or so. Today I probably type one every twenty minutes. I’m not doing so in published work, naturally, but rather in email: “Thanks!” “Congrats!” “See you soon!” It’s not just me. Even as I was writing this paragraph, I got a  note from a highly erudite editor of a widely respected literary/cultural journal: “You are too kind!”

I actually hadn’t been kind to any excitable-making extent in the missive he was responding to. But we both knew that. Consider a non-exclamation-point version of my correspondent’s message: “You are too kind.” That reads dry, chilly, possibly even sarcastic. Which suggests how the function of the exclamation mark has changed: It no longer connotes remarkable enthusiasm; it just signals a sort of general friendliness and baseline cheer, the equivalent of saying “Howyadoin?” in a chipper voice.

I encounter this problem all the time, the phrase ending in a period that ends up looking too cold on the page. It's a curse of the prevalence of sarcasm and irony in this age that just writing something in a plainspoken way is read far too often as  disingenuous.

Lest you think I'm exaggerating the importance of conveying genuine warmth, I've had at least two arguments with friends over the tone of an email message sent with nothing but the friendliest sentiment. I've often wondered if there was a defect in the language itself.

So to compensate, I've tried all the popular alternatives to an exclamation point. Adding a smiley face:

Thanks. =)

Friendly, but it doesn't feel right for me (don't even bring up emoji). I've tried setting it in bold for visual emphasis.

Thanks.

That usually feels too serious, and while I'm usually an even keeled guy, I do feel and wish to convey genuine enthusiasm.

I'm not sure if the ElRey is the solution, but I feel the need for that mark or something like it.

RELATED: 10 interesting obscure punctuation marks

Day One: my new day job

Last night I had a dream in which I was running through the hallways of a school on the first day of school. I kept looking at my class schedule on my mobile phone and finding I'd double or triple or quadruple booked myself for classes every hour of the day. Why had I signed up for such a nonsensical class schedule? Every class I sat in on, my professor's loaded me up with assignments, all of which sounded quite formidable.

This was a new variant on a dream I used to have quite often, that iconic dream in which it's the last day of the quarter, you're running to a series of final exams, and you realize with a stomach-dropping panic that you haven't studied any of the subjects at all, not once the entire quarter. It's a dream that tends to pop up when you're feeling unprepared for something in real life, and thankfully it's been a long time since I've had it.

[Incidentally, I find it amazing how many people share that dream, and it says something fascinating about how our nightmares are shaped and drawn from our real world experiences. What does it mean that some people have nightmares about their teeth falling out or walking around naked while others, like myself, always end up in that school hallway, with no idea where our locker is, where the classroom is, or how it was possible we'd signed up for a course and been so reckless and negligent as to not crack open the textbook once the entire quarter?]

This dream last night came with a different feeling, one of excitement and an impatience to get traction, or the feeling of forward progress. As soon as I woke up and the physical universe poured in and usurped my consciousness, it all made sense. I was starting a new job today.

At Amazon, Jeff Bezos used to say it was still Day One all the time, across all seven years I was there. I don't know if he still says it, but in many parts of their business I'm sure he still believe it (I think on some parts of their business they're on Day Two, but it's not quite as catchy, is it?). Today was literally Day One for me at Flipboard, where I joined as the head of product.

It feels like early on Day One for Flipboard, and that's so much of what excites me. It reminds me of joining Amazon in 1997, when Amazon was a domestic online bookseller, just before it began to extend its mission to other product lines and other parts of the world. Flipboard has done so much already, and yet most of its potential still lies in the future, and I'm sure that's how so many at Amazon still feel even today. Perhaps it's a function of being in the technology industry, where it always feels like Day One in the world at large, everything set at a level best thought of as "the worst this will ever be from this day forward."

What Flipboard wants to do in many areas matches a lot of my personal interests, a lot of projects brewing in the back of my head are ones that are already being worked on at Flipboard or that would fit in with their larger mission, and so the decision ultimately was an easy one.

It did feel like the first day of school today. The first day at a very gifted school, with lots of exceedingly bright and friendly people, and really nifty school supplies (the retina display on this Macbook Pro, I mean I can't even...). It's an honor to be one of their classmates.