One of the best new shows of this summer TV season was Louis. As with Seinfeld, the series stars the titular comedian playing himself, a standup comedian, and each episode commingles scenes of Louis CK doing standup with dramatizations of events in his life.
Unlike Seinfeld, the series isn't family-friendly. It's what you'd hope Seinfeld would be if it got translated for FX. Louis doesn't tone down his standup material subject matter or language for this show, and that's one reason it works (unlike his previous TV series Lucky Louie). Each episode can start on one subject and end up somewhere entirely unexpected, almost like a Simpsons episode (Seinfeld always brought its story threads together each episode, but episodes of Louis can skip across multiple subjects, giving it the feel of a standup routine). The wide tonal range of the show is one of its signatures. Some episodes aren't comedic at all, and many of those are the strongest of the series.
One standout was the episode "Bully" which covers as much ground as Louis himself in the episode, starting one place and ending somewhere entirely unexpected (because of its meandering subject matter from one episode to the next, watching the series out of order isn't problematic):
The series ranges from the dark tragedy at the root of standup, but within the same episode can introduce sudden moments of grimy sublimity as in the visually lyrical closing scene to the first season:
The show has been renewed for another 13 episode season. Good stuff.
As badly as Democrats have done recently at constructing narratives (a very underrated skill for leaders, especially in bad times), the Republicans seemed to fumble an easy path to a sweeping midterm takeover in November. David Frum thinks so, and Nate Silver, while not going that far, certainly believes that electing O'Donnell in Delaware was a poor outcome for Republican chances to take over the Senate.
Wired profiles the history of the board game Settlers of Catan. I played it soon after its release as some early awards lent immediate cachet with friends who were board game fanatics. And then for a few years as I moved around, it lay in the back of my closets, untouched.
But recently it has seemed to surge in popularity in the U.S. People I would have never expected to play the game are suddenly proposing it during dinner parties. It may be time to pull my copy of the game out of the back of the closet and dust it off. I'm still curious how it suddenly broke through to the mainstream after feeling like a board game aficionado product for so many years. Or had it crossed the tipping point long before and I just hadn't noticed it?
Jonah Lehrer (author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist) writes in Wired of possible inherent flaws in the human reasoning process. This is important. The mere act of trying to reason something out may lead to errors like confirmation bias.
Much of it stems from this paper (PDF) by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. The abstract (the emphasis is Lehrer's):
Reasoning is generally seen as a mean to improve knowledge and make better decisions. Much evidence, however, shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests rethinking the function of reasoning. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given human exceptional dependence on communication and vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology or reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing but also when they are reasoning proactively with the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow the persistence of erroneous beliefs. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all of these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and favor conclusions in support of which arguments can be found.
I'm always trying to fight this instinct in my own thinking, but it's easier said than done. To have no personal attachment to your own ideas, to be purely rational and logical, is like trying to be purely altruistic. When someone disagrees with your idea, it takes intellectual courage to evaluate their argument at face value and reassess your own thoughts.
But this probably explains why I distrust people who never change their minds and why I try to surround myself with people with a broad spectrum of viewpoints. That is, I try to put checks and balances into the structure of my environment.
I suspect the reason few people past a certain age come up with revolutionary ideas is that people's ideas inevitably calcify, not just because they gain real world empirical data to support one view or another but because it's just less taxing to resort to rules-of-thumb or shortcuts, to past patterns, than to take each idea at face value in the current context.
Interesting as ever, Tyler Cowen answers a reader who asks why Cowen thinks being interesting is more important than being happy.
"Happiness" to me sounds boring, as if the person has a limited imagination when it comes to wants and an inability to be frustrated by the difficulty of creating new peak experiences.
I'm not sure if I believeHe points to a Penelope Trunk post on the same topic where she posts a survey to test whether you're inclined towards one pole or the other. The test indicates that I'm inclined towards being interesting, and perhaps that explains why I feel like I could be happier.
Writes Trunk:
The culmination of my four-year obsession with happiness research is that I think people need to choose between an interesting life or happy life. (Note: This does not mean you are interesting or not interesting. I am talking about what values guide your decision making.) I think the things that make life happy have to do with complacency, and the things that make life interesting have to do with lack of complacency.
One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.
And...
The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulses, should be brought to bear on what we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting.
I don't really understand the Justin Bieber phenomenon, but I'm not sure I'm happy about that. It could be my pop culture sensitivity is showing its age.
But it could also be that I was thrown by this surprisingly vicious act of retribution.
Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz parted ways with George Lucas after The Empire Strikes Back over creative differences. Kurtz felt that merchandise sales were driving the story.
I hadn't read details of Kurtz and Lucas' original outline for Return of the Jedi, but they're intriguing.
“We had an outline and George changed everything in it," Kurtz said. “Instead of bittersweet and poignant he wanted a euphoric ending with everybody happy. The original idea was that they would recover [the kidnapped] Han Solo in the early part of the story and that he would then die in the middle part of the film in a raid on an Imperial base. George then decided he didn’t want any of the principals killed. By that time there were really big toy sales and that was a reason.
A few Sundays back, I caught The Swell Season at the Hollywood Bowl. That was the fourth time I'd heard them live, and they only get better. Glen Hansard is as charismatic a front man as there is in the music business right now.
Earlier this year, The Swell Season played a benefit show at The Largo at the Coronet for an Ed Norton charity. I lucked into a pair of tix, and it ranks among the top 5 concerts I've ever attended. Small venue, long set, plenty of breathing room between songs for Glen Hansard to charm as the Irish raconteur we all wish we could share drinks with at the pub.
The goosebump moment was their cover of The Boss's "Drive All Night." No recordings of it have been issued, but here's a YouTube video of one of their live performances of the Springsteen track.
[One month since my last post. That may be a record, but it's a sincere measure of the dearth of my free time.]
Apple announced a refresh of its Mac Pros recently, and the response from the professional community was, for the most part, one of weary disappointment. Brook Willard's post titled "The State of Apple's Professional Line" became the unofficial lament around which the pro community rallied.
My old G5 desktop, nearly a decade old, happens to be on its deathbed, and so I happen to be in the market for a desktop. I was waiting for the Mac Pro refresh announcement with some excitement, and it was somewhat of a letdown that so many anticipated upgrades failed to come to pass (more PCI slots was the one I really wanted). I'm a prosumer more than a pro, but my video editing needs are pro-level, as are those of my production team.
When fans lament that a band has sold out, it's often seems like some selfish reflex on the part of fans who'd prefer to feel that their tastes are distinguished by being in the minority. That seems illogical and spiteful if the band hasn't evolved its sound to be more mainstream in nature.
In this case, though, I have empathy for the pro community because their beloved enthusiast brand has shifted its attention to the mainstream. Shareholders won't mind, it's the logical financial moves in this case to address the broadest market possible, especially when even the mainstream products command such healthy margins (often the margin/sales volume disparity between the pro and consumer markets are sharper, but Apple's hardware/software design edge has allowed it to keep high margins on its hardware across the board). I'd love to see continued focus on taking products like Final Cut Pro to the next level, but I'm not hopeful.
Can a company of that size be the brand of choice for both the pro and consumer market? Will there be impacts down the road if there isn't a pro line from which technology can trickle down to more mainstream models?
The fact that Macs could be found in the offices of professionals in the video business always added a certain mystique to the brand, serving as aspirational brand markers the same way runway show outfits that never hit the actual market serve as prestige signals in the fashion world. Will that change?
Besides being an amusing profile of each World Cup participant, this n+1 preview also called the final champ, Spain (though many had them as the favorite).
It is July, and with it comes a morning ritual for me, watching the Tour de France on Versus. This year, for the first time, I can watch in HD, which makes up for having to get up at 5 to 6am here on the West Coast to catch the action.
Today the Tour covered several sections of the famed Paris-Roubaix course. Its famously brutal pavé, or cobblestone paths, throw a thousand jackhammer jabs at cyclists flying past, beating road bikes used to smooth surfaces into submission.
Among the GC contenders, Lance Armstrong was the most notable big loser today, suffering a front tire pinch flat soon after being stranded behind Frank Schleck's race-ending crash. The combined misfortune cost Armstrong not insignificant time to his two top contenders, Andy Schleck and Alberto Contador, and the truth is that we could've seen Lance's chances at winning come to an end already, here in just stage 3.
I love the gritty aesthetic of Paris-Roubaix, and I can't deny the somewhat sadistic appeal of sending professional athletes through the gladiatorial test of the cobbles on such a grand stage. It adds a twist to the already cruel Tour gauntlet. I'm reminded of U.S. Open golf officials letting the rough grow wild and trimming the greens down to glass-like consistency.
At the same time, it doesn't interest me if alterations to playing conditions merely increase randomness of results. A flat tire determining the winner of the Tour de France doesn't interest me as a narrative. I may be exaggerating the impact of Lance's flat, but if the course or challenge is no longer an accurate arbiter of who the best actually are, then we might as well throw darts. If the U.S. Open course, for example, was groomed in a way that it consistently scattered golfers randomly all over the leaderboard rather than filtering the cream of the crop like Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods to contention, I wouldn't judge it to be a good test of golf.
Saxo Bank came out with a great strategy today so I'm not arguing Andy Schleck didn't earn a lot of his advantage today. But if the Tour was decided today, I'd probably find myself agreeing with Jens Voigt who said after the stage that Tour organizers should issue an apology to the riders.
More on the relationship between parenting and happiness. Much of interest within. One of the many noteworthy passages:
Before urbanization, children were viewed as economic assets to their parents. If you had a farm, they toiled alongside you to maintain its upkeep; if you had a family business, the kids helped mind the store. But all of this dramatically changed with the moral and technological revolutions of modernity. As we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed. (The Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer describes this transformation of a child’s value in five ruthless words: “Economically worthless but emotionally priceless.
This short video on how Mariano Rivera has been successful for so long throwing one pitch over 80% of the time explains a lot succinctly. It accompanied this NY Times Magazine profile.
Rivera really is a serene assassin, like Tuco's cousins in Season 3 of Breaking Bad, only not as mean-looking.
Is that true? I liked this suggestion from one of the comments:
I would like to offer a competing explanation for the fact that we treat athletes and musicians differently. Athletes play sports, and to a large extent sports are about winning and losing — in other words, sports are largely (not entirely) about competitive success. People have a strong desire to believe that the world is just, and in a just world success is granted to those who deserve it. Thus through a mix of the just-world fallacy and the halo effect there will be a temptation to build up a mythology around successful athletes, to attribute their success not just to physical gifts but to moral character. Such mythologies are a double-edged sword, however, which is why people felt “betrayed
Bryan Caplan writes that the negative impact of children on parents' happiness is overstated, but more intriguing to me is his suggestion that parents are working too hard on parenting, with little impact on outcomes for their children. It ties in to a book I read years ago by Judith Harris called The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. Harris asserts that parents play a much smaller role than peers in children's emotional and intellectual development.
Caplan extends the idea that micro-managing parents are largely ineffectual. Like Harris, he cites behavioral genetics studies that show that variance in parenting techniques has shown little demonstrable effect on children's morals, happiness, grades, health, etc. But he sees this as a good thing.
Many find behavioral genetics depressing, but it's great news for parents and potential parents. If you think that your kids' future rests in your hands, you'll probably make many painful "investments"—and feel guilty that you didn't do more. Once you realize that your kids' future largely rests in their own hands, you can give yourself a guilt-free break.
If you enjoy reading with your children, wonderful. But if you skip the nightly book, you're not stunting their intelligence, ruining their chances for college or dooming them to a dead-end job. The same goes for the other dilemmas that weigh on parents' consciences. Watching television, playing sports, eating vegetables, living in the right neighborhood: Your choices have little effect on your kids' development, so it's OK to relax. In fact, relaxing is better for the whole family. Riding your kids "for their own good" rarely pays off, and it may hurt how your children feel about you.
And if parenting is not as stressful and costly, then he says you might as well consider having more children.
The only part of this thesis that doesn't mesh with my experiential assessment is that first generation Asian parents in the U.S. are notoriously strict with their kids, and growing up I came to accept that as a reason why 1.5 or 2nd generation Asian-Americans like me studied our butts off. Has anyone has done a study to assess whether there's any validity to that theory or whether it's just a myth? I certainly don't have any confidence in just the anecdotal evidence from the childhood experiences of me and other Asian-American peers, but I'm not willing to dismiss it out of hand, either.
The recent Spotifyupdate added some sweet-looking social features. I say they look impressive because Spotify has yet to release its service in the U.S. With at least four major music labels to negotiate with to get a critical mass of tracks, the woods are thorny indeed, but if they manage to clear that significant hurdle and roll out the following feature set, I'd be ready, at long last, to switch to a subscription service over the model of buying and owning my own music:
Sasha Frere-Jones wrote about the shift of online music to the cloud in a recent issue of The New Yorker. He mentions the usual players (Pandora, MOG, Spotify) and concludes that the age of the computer DJ is upon us.
Similarly, the anonymous programmers who write the algorithms that control the series of songs in these streaming services may end up having a huge effect on the way that people think of musical narrative—what follows what, and who sounds best with whom. Sometimes we will be the d.j.s, and sometimes the machines will be, and we may be surprised by which we prefer.
I think he's partially right. DJ HAL is doing a good job (you can throw Apple's Genius in with those other services), but I still suspect that what Spotify and what I'm sure will be an iTunes cloud-based subscription service will facilitate is the sharing of playlists and discovery among humans. I enjoy MP3 blogs, but I'd much rather follow the lead of musical tastemakers more directly through the same applications I use to listen to music rather than having to read their blogs, go find the music they reference, and then spin those into playlists in iTunes to transfer to my iPod.
Current bandwidths for WiFi and 3G are sufficient to stream music to my iPhone. I'm ready for a cloud-based music subscription service that adds a follower-based social layer (where you can find good tastemakers and choose to follow them even if they don't care to follow you). Such a service is dynamic and ideally improves and changes every time you visit it.
I'm ready for this same revolution to occur in books, too, and with Amazon's latest Kindle app, we're just starting to see the first pebbles of the avalanche skipping by our ankles.
Recently I read David Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace on my iPad through the Amazon Kindle app. As I was reading, I noticed some passages had been underlined already. When I clicked on the underlined passage, a box would pop up noting "57 other readers have highlighted this passage".
Ah.
What was frustrating about the battle between Amazon and publishers over digital book pricing was that no one was talking about how to enhance the value of the digital book by capitalizing on what a digital, internet-connected book delivery service could provide, and that is a social reading experience. Publishers were demanding that Amazon charge higher prices for Kindle editions of books, but not once did I read anyone saying how they might justify that price hike by creating something more valuable for the reader.
In college, I hated buying used copies of textbooks, despite the significant price savings, because a book that was marked up and highlighted violated some aesthetic sensibility, especially if the previous owner had highlighted passages I didn't consider important.
But with the Kindle, you can enable highlights and notes to be turned on selectively. To pivot off of David Foster Wallace for a moment, recently the University of Texas acquired the David Foster Wallace archive. DFW was a voracious reader, and besides drafts of his writing the archive contains actual books from his personal collection.
There are also some two hundred books from Wallace’s own library. “Virtually all of the books are annotated, many are heavily annotated,
All the press mentions of Swype have me intrigued. Is this method of data entry on touch screen mobile phones, in which you drag your finger around a QWERTY keyboard from letter to letter, really the fastest way to type on a mobile phone?
Swype isn't available for the iPhone, but a similar alternative called Shapewriter was in the iPhone App Store, at least until recently when they were purchased by Nuance Communications. I haven't tried any of these options, and it looks like I'll have to wait a while longer.
Atul Gawande gave the commencement speech at Stanford Med School this year. Long-time readers know I am programmed to read everything he writes (The New Yorker really has a murderer's row of regular contributors). His talk hit on many topics he's written or spoken about recently, including health care costs and the complexity of the health profession. The latter was the focus of his latest book, The Checklist Manifesto, which I read earlier this year. Its thesis: using a simple checklist is one of the most effective ways of coping with the complexity of so many modern challenges.
It sounds almost too mundane a topic for a book, even as slim as it is, but when the costs of a misstep are as high as they are in medicine, it seems negligent to ignore the possibilities. From his commencement speech...
Having great components is not enough. We’ve been obsessed in medicine with having the best drugs, the best devices, the best specialists—but we’ve paid little attention to how to make them fit together well. Don Berwick, of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, has noted how wrongheaded this is. “Anyone who understands systems will know immediately that optimizing parts is not a good route to system excellence,
