Cristina first eyes Juan Antonio in an art gallery. Later, she is sitting with Vicky in a restaurant, and the artist, dining in the same place, comes over and suggests, with virtually no preliminaries, that the three fly to a small city not far from Barcelona for a weekend of sex. “Life is short, dull, full of pain,” he says. Why not seize any opportunity for pleasure? He’s provocatively teasing the Americans, but he’s neither a cynic nor a user. He gives good value; that’s why he’s a heartbreaker.

One is meant to emerge from “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” believing that happiness may be elusive, even impossible, but that life has a richness greater than one’s personal satisfaction. There’s something stronger in the air—a largeness of spirit, as well as abundant physical beauty.

From the archive:

If Penélope Cruz or Jennifer Lopez sees this movie, she may just give up and become a librarian.

“No one in Hollywood has ever asked me to be anything other than attractive,” Cruz told me at the Cannes Film Festival, where the women of “Volver” shared the Best Actress prize. “They have no idea what women can do. They don’t give them the chance.”

Young Loves

Why do we capitalize the word “I”?

Maybe it's symbolic ...

The word “capitalize” comes from “capital,” meaning “head,” and is associated with importance, material wealth, assets and advantages. We have capital cities and capital ideas. We give capital punishment and accrue political, social and financial capital. And then there is capitalism, which is linked to private ownership, markets and investments. These words shore up the towering single letter that signifies us as discrete beings and connote confidence, dominance and the ambition to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.

Or not ...

“Graphically, single letters are a problem,” says Charles Bigelow, a type historian and a designer of the Lucida and Wingdings font families. “They look like they broke off from a word or got lost or had some other accident.” When “I” shrunk to a single letter, Bigelow explains, “one little letter had to represent an important word, but it was too wimpy, graphically speaking, to carry the semantic burden, so the scribes made it bigger, which means taller, which means equivalent to a capital.”

Me, Myself and I

Privacy is one of the most important concepts of our time, yet it is also one of the most elusive. As rapidly changing technology makes information increasingly available, scholars, activists, and policymakers have struggled to define privacy, with many conceding that the task is virtually impossible.

In this concise and lucid book, Daniel J. Solove offers a comprehensive overview of the difficulties involved in discussions of privacy and ultimately provides a provocative resolution. He argues that no single definition can be workable, but rather that there are multiple forms of privacy, related to one another by family resemblances. His theory bridges cultural differences and addresses historical changes in views on privacy. Drawing on a broad array of interdisciplinary sources, Solove sets forth a framework for understanding privacy that provides clear, practical guidance for engaging with relevant issues.

Understanding Privacy will be an essential introduction to long-standing debates and an invaluable resource for crafting laws and policies about surveillance, data mining, identity theft, state involvement in reproductive and marital decisions, and other pressing contemporary matters concerning privacy.

Adam Shostack had this to say:

If you work in privacy or data protection either from a technology or policy perspective, you need to read this book and understand Solove's approach.

There are three major elements to the book: the first is to take us past the definitional games of "what is privacy." The second is a serious attempt to address the "what do you have to hide" approach to privacy. The third is the taxonomy. Two of these would have been a pretty good book. Three are impressive, even as I disagree with parts of it. Again, this is an important book and worth reading if you work in or around privacy.

From the archive:

The Problems of Information Privacy Law

'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy

Online Data Gets Personal: Cell Phone Records for Sale

The Future of Reputation

The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet

Damn you Adam Shostack!!!

Understanding Privacy, by Daniel J. Solove

Winton's descriptions of water— riding over it or through it, diving deep within it, conquering it or submitting to its overpowering force—are majestic. Much of the drama of Breath, and there is considerable drama, comes from the boys' growing intimacy with the sea. A number of triangle relationships develop in Breath: Pikelet, Loonie, and Sando; Pikelet, Sando, and Eva; but also, and perhaps most important of all, Pikelet, Sando, and the water itself. It is not just convention when Winton names the waves: they are living, roaring, chest-beating characters in this novel. Winton's waves are active, alive, "seething vapor" and "spritzing froth." They rumble, they boil, they flick, and they poleaxe. After Barney's, the boys graduate to Old Smokey, another of Sando's secrets, an enormous, supposedly unsurfable wave, a distant line of white water that breaks a mile offshore. Even getting to Old Smokey requires a trial, a leap from a rocky cliff;

I looked down into the maw and waited for the surge to return.... Birds shrieked behind me. The rocks streamed with fizz. Every crack spilled rivulets and streams and sheets until suddenly the sea came back and Sando started yelling and then I braced and jumped.

The offshore wave, too, feels hellish, with its thunderous noise and vibration, tearing at Pikelet's dangling legs as he waits, terrified: "Mountains of water rose from the south; they rumbled by, gnawing at themselves...." Then, as before, Pikelet is simply too afraid to stay where he is, and when he finally begins to surf, the language turns heavenward: "The angelic relief of gliding out onto the shoulder of the wave in a mist of spray and adrenaline. Surviving is the strongest memory I have; the sense of having walked on water."

Far away, so close:

"Being in the water alone, surfing, sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are."

If Schnabel is a surfer in the sense of knowing how to skim existence for its wonders, he is also a surfer in the more challenging sense of wanting to see where something bigger than himself, or the unknown, will take him, even with the knowledge that he might not come back from the trip.

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen, who play with their boats at sea--"cruising", it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

... What does a man need---really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in---and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That's all---in the material sense.

... Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?

From earlier today:

I honestly believe that for my startup(s), the personal edge I gain from swimming or surfing in the ocean every day in a small town in Florida is larger than any advantage I got by living in Atlanta.

Walking on Water

Inexpert though I am in all other fields, I am a connoisseur of sleep. Actually, my speciality is not sleep itself, but the hinterland of sleep, the point of entry to unconsciousness.

The great delight was in deferring sleep, hovering on the edge, pulling myself back to the same point in the story and trying to move it along, but always dropping off, hanging by the story-thread, the fingertips losing their grip but managing to haul back to the tale on the waking side of the world. The trick was to sustain my stay in the no man’s land for as long as possible, knowing all the while that I would inevitably, sooner or later, lose my grip on consciousness.

Later, you can remember or feel, but the only actual experience of sleep is not-knowing. And not knowing thrills me – retrospectively or in anticipation, of course. That one has the capacity to be not here while being nowhere else. To be in the grip of unconsciousness, and consciously to lose consciousness to that grip.

Far away, so close:

"Being in the water alone, surfing, sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are."

If Schnabel is a surfer in the sense of knowing how to skim existence for its wonders, he is also a surfer in the more challenging sense of wanting to see where something bigger than himself, or the unknown, will take him, even with the knowledge that he might not come back from the trip.

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen, who play with their boats at sea--"cruising", it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

... What does a man need---really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in---and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That's all---in the material sense.

... Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?

From earlier today:

I honestly believe that for my startup(s), the personal edge I gain from swimming or surfing in the ocean every day in a small town in Florida is larger than any advantage I got by living in Atlanta.

Diary, by Jenny Diski | LRB

So here you are, let us say, heading west toward the Caldecott at the end of a July afternoon. The geography, what with the hills rising on either side, pretty much requires you to focus on the thing that is about to happen in front of you — you can see it coming, and sometimes from quite a distance, depending on how bad the backup is. The trick about the Caldecott is that although each bore is two lanes wide, the middle bore switches direction, by means of signage and mechanically raised cone separators, contingent on the flow of the main morning and evening commute. So if you’re driving out of the suburbs toward Oakland at the end of the day, the cars coming the opposite way take that middle bore, which means your side of 24 is being coned off into the one remaining bore on the right — a four-lane to a two-lane funnel.

This is the point at which the North American driving populace, as you know, cleaves into two camps.

See also, for the transportation wonks, "The" Freeway in Southern California, which speculates on the origins of the regional practice of prepending "the" when referring to numbered freeways.

The Urge to Merge: Making it in the Battle for a Lane

The concept may sound antithetical to a digital era defined by ubiquitous communication and interactivity, but Slydial turns out to be only the latest in a breed of new technologies that fit squarely into an emerging paradox: tools that let users avoid direct communication.

Technologies like e-mailing and blogging give the communicator the power to choose the time and manner of expression. Now, some academics, text messagers and creators of technologies say a trend has emerged: We are constantly just missing one another — on purpose.

Don’t Want to Talk About It? Order a Missed Call

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words…..

12 month HPI change, by state, as of May 2008, for single family detached homes

A picture, from Straight Talk about Mortgages and Real Estate

Carla Bruni, first lady of France, has a new album.

"comme si de rien n'était", by Carla Bruni

Ratatat's new album, LP3, came out last month. They've just wrapped up some UK dates and will return to the US in late August.

The folks at Popmatters are underwhelmed but I like it.

LP3, by Ratatat