James Bowman:

Of course the cartoon is a fake! But it's a genuine fake.

John Lanchester:

If I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable.

Bowman:

While on planet Earth half of the 6,500 languages spoken by actual people are expected to die out before the end of the century, our popular culture triumphs in inventing an artificial language for a people who have never existed.

Avatar is really not a simulacrum in the way that we are used to seeing movies, like other works of art, as being. Pandora is a new and improved creation unlike anything in the world -- though it may be, in a desultory fashion, like lots of things in the world -- and therefore, at its most fundamental level, a denial of the tradition of mimesis, the imitation of reality, in Western art.

Decius:

I've gotten old enough that I now understand why adults seek to escape reality. Paradoxically, I think I was better at escaping reality when I was younger.

An exchange:

Someone once accused Craig Venter of playing God.

His reply was, "We're not playing."

Bowman:

Pandora equals Earth, but with the addition of magic -- Earth re-imagined by a superior creator as a habitation much to be preferred to the tired old original by the vast throngs who have bought tickets in order to experience it. In that case, what is to be made, politically speaking, of the film's representation of Earthlings as we know them in the role of corporate exploiters of the alien world?

Paul Graham:

It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.

Louis Menand:

Television was the Cold War intellectuals' nightmare, a machine for bringing kitsch and commercialism directly into the home. But by exposing people to an endless stream of advertising, television taught them to take nothing at face value, to read everything ironically. We read the horror comics today and smile complacently at the sheer over-the-top campiness of the effects. In fact, that is the only way we can read them. We have lost our innocence.

Bowman:

Audiences expect no imitation but allusion to reality and to other "art" or artifice indiscriminately and would regard as irrelevant any complaint that it doesn't look like the real world. The world of the movies and television and the other visual media is probably more real to them anyway.

"Leonard Nimoy":

It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies. And in the end, isn't that the real truth?

The answer ... is No.

Peter Munro:

Why bother the brain with dross when technology can pick up the slack? But deeper thought, too, seems to be skipping away in a ready stream of information.

Neil Postman once asked if we had known the impact the motor vehicle would have on life, would we have embraced it so thoroughly. Robert Fitzgerald says it's time we asked the same question of computers.

Avatar and the Flight from Reality

Chris Jones, in the April 2010 issue of The Walrus:

I saw her only once, ten days before the earthquake.

Later, Phil ran into her in the laundry room. "Have you ever been to Haiti?" she asked.

Haruki Murakami:

One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl.

Lisa Moore:

It has always been this way.

Finite.

But at forty-five you realize it.

David Foster Wallace:

If you've never wept and want to, have a child.

Cormac McCarthy, "The Road":

We're going to be okay, aren't we Papa?
Yes. We are.
And nothing bad is going to happen to us.
That's right.
Because we're carrying the fire.
Yes. Because we're carrying the fire.

Aftershock

Joe Nocera:

They just want theirs. That is the culture they have created.

Michael Osinski:

When you're close to the money, you get the first cut. Oyster farmers eat lots of oysters, don't they?

Etay Zwick:

At the best of times, Wall Street provides white noise amidst entrepreneurs' and workers' attempts to actualize their ambitions and projects. We are still learning what happens at the worst of times.

An exchange:

"In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working," Mr. Waxman said. "Absolutely, precisely," Mr. Greenspan replied.

Peter Schiff:

I think things are going to get very bad.

Nouriel Roubini:

Things are going to be awful for everyday people.

Viktor Chernomyrdin:

We wanted the best, but it turned out as always.

Simon Johnson:

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government. Recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we're running out of time.

Zwick:

During the last economic "expansion" (between 2002 and 2007), fully two-thirds of all income gains flowed to the wealthiest one percent of the population. In 2007, the top 50 hedge and private equity managers averaged $588 million in annual compensation. On the other hand, the median income of ordinary Americans has dropped an average of $2,197 per year since 2000.

A blogger at The Economist:

By some measures, America already has a lost decade in its rear-view mirror. A couple more would mean a lost generation. Worst of all, it would mean my generation. I thought I was unlucky graduating into the tech bust. I had no idea.

Of course, the past ten years hasn't been lost in the way that the next ten years might be.

Chris Dixon and Caterina Fake:

"We're helping save the next generation of college grads that would have gone over to Morgan Stanley."

"We're pulling them back from the dark side."

Zwick:

One senses that the goals of the avaricious aren't really their goals -- can they really want those ugly mansions or gaudy cars? -- but a way of not confronting their lack of goals, desires, hopes and joys. Who believes that traders are truly happy?

John Bird and John Fortune:

They thought that if they had a bigger mortgage they could get a bigger house. They thought if they had a bigger house, they would be happy. It's pathetic. I've got four houses and I'm not happy.

Decius:

Life is too short to spend 2300 hours a year working on someone else's idea of what the right problems are.

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

Predatory Habits

Craig Lambert:

Becky Cooper has an omnivorous appetite for learning and experience: new fascinations constantly beckon, and she dives in wholeheartedly. Yet the ceaseless activity leaves little space or time for reflection on who she is or what she wants.

Becky Cooper:

Harvard kids don't want to do 5,000 things at 97 percent; they'd rather do 3,000 things at 150 percent.

Roger Cohen:

Being "always on" is being always off, to something.

Samantha Power:

The French film director Jean Renoir once said, "The foundation of all great civilizations is loitering." But we have all stopped loitering. I don't mean we aren't lazy at times. I mean that no moment goes unoccupied.

Olivia Goldhill:

People are going nonstop, and there are a lot of negative implications. You don't have time to dedicate to your friends or to yourself--or to thoughts that you haven't been taught to think.

David Lazarus:

To be sure, time marches on.

Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

Judith H. Kidd:

There was a time when children came home from school and just played randomly with their friends. Or hung around and got bored, and eventually that would lead you on to something. Kids don't get to do that now.

Michael Chabon:

The thing that strikes me now when I think about the Wilderness of Childhood is the incredible degree of freedom my parents gave me to adventure there. A very grave, very significant shift in our idea of childhood has occurred since then. The Wilderness of Childhood is gone; the days of adventure are past.

Nonstop

Scott Berkun:

When I was younger I thought busy people were more important than everyone else. Otherwise why would they be so busy?

The busy must matter more, and the lazy mattered less.

This is the cult of busy.

Caterina Fake:

So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

Richard Hamming:

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.

Netflix Culture:

It's about effectiveness -- not effort.

John Tierney:

When people were asked to anticipate how much extra money and time they would have in the future, they realistically assumed that money would be tight, but they expected free time to magically materialize.

Gordon Crovitz:

Getting our heads around information abundance will mean becoming more discerning about what information is worth our time and what kinds of tasks require real focus.

Berkun:

It's the ability to pause, to reflect, and relax, to let the mind wander, that's perhaps the true sign of time mastery, for when the mind returns it's often sharper and more efficient, but most important perhaps, happier than it was before.

Louis CK:

Maybe we need some time ... because everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy ...

Samantha Power:

The French film director Jean Renoir once said, "The foundation of all great civilizations is loitering." But we have all stopped loitering. I don't mean we aren't lazy at times. I mean that no moment goes unoccupied.

Carolyn Johnson:

We are most human when we feel dull. Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life's greatest luxuries.

The cult of busy

Annekathryn Goodman:

This is a place of lost treasures: lost lives, families, limbs, homes, work, wishes, hopes, and futures. It is easy to lose one's name here.

Each day, a new woman in active labor arrives. In my last 24 hours in Haiti, four women deliver their babies in our hospital. Each difficult labor reflects the trauma and insecurity of this shifting world. I notice that every woman in labor wants to be held. We develop a system whereby one of us sits behind the woman and holds her, another rubs her back, and I sit or kneel near her, touching her belly and legs, whispering words of encouragement. I pray, and I watch the woman's face for clues as the labor progresses. After the lost children arrive, I notice the similarities in the way we cradle them and the way we hold the laboring women. This ministry of hugs reflects our desperate attempt to stabilize the random, cruel chaos in this world of loss and grief.

David Foster Wallace:

If you've never wept and want to, have a child.

Atul Gawande:

The social dimension turns out to be as essential as the scientific.

Caterina Fake:

So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be.

Temple Grandin:

When I was younger I was looking for this magic meaning of life. It's very simple now. Making the lives of others better, doing something of lasting value, that's the meaning of life, it's that simple.

Paul Romer:

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

Decius:

Life is too short to spend 2300 hours a year working on someone else's idea of what the right problems are.

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

Ministry of Touch

William Deresiewicz:

When we look around at the American elite, the people in charge of government, business, academia, and all our other major institutions -- senators, judges, CEOs, college presidents, and so forth -- we find that they come overwhelmingly either from the Ivy League and its peer institutions or from the service academies, especially West Point.

So I began to wonder, as I taught at Yale, what leadership really consists of.

What I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers.

Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things -- the leaders -- are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn't usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering.

We have a crisis of leadership in this country, in every institution. Not just in government.

For too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don't know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don't know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they're worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don't have are leaders.

Decius:

Life is too short to spend 2300 hours a year working on someone else's idea of what the right problems are.

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

Paul Graham:

It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.

George Friedman:

That is what happened at the CIA: A culture of process destroyed a culture of excellence.

Richard Sennett:

From an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

Roger Cohen:

Being "always on" is being always off, to something.

Winifred Gallagher:

You can't be happy all the time, but you can pretty much focus all the time. That's about as good as it gets.

Solitude and Leadership

George Packer:

Even before Obama was inaugurated, the incoming Administration had set a political trap for itself.

The Recovery Act was meticulously designed to favor the substantive over the splashy, but an unintended consequence was that its impact became nearly invisible.

Tom Perriello, freshman House Democrat:

The surest way to win Obama over to your view is to tell him it's the hard, unpopular, but correct decision.

Packer:

This pride in responsible process is the closest thing to an Obama ideology.

Paul Begala:

But that's not where voters are right now. Citizens are angry and anxious about the economy, not about whether we're too uncivil or partisan or corrupt in our politics.

An aide:

One of the problems with this Administration is it has tried to have a grownup, sophisticated conversation with the public. [But] the President is having a very eloquent, one-sided conversation. The country doesn't want to have the conversation he wants to have.

Packer:

To be an effective communicator, a President needs a strong world view, a fundamental vision of why things are the way they are and how they ought to be, which can be simplified into a few key ideas and images -- in short, an ideology. For Obama and his advisers, there is no worse pejorative.

One Administration official told me that the Obama team remained staffed with young campaign aides, was tightly controlled by a coterie of political advisers, and was devoted more to the President personally than to any agenda. "Ideas aren't that important to them," the official said of the senior White House staff.

Louis Menand:

Ideas are not "out there" waiting to be discovered, but are tools -- like forks and knives and microchips -- that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves. Ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals -- ideas are social. Ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment. And since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability.

Ideas should never become ideologies -- either justifying the status quo, or dictating some transcendent imperative for renouncing it ... [There is a need for] a kind of skepticism that helps people cope with life in a heterogeneous, industrialized, mass-marketed society, a society in which older human bonds of custom and community seem to have become attenuated, and to have been replaced by more impersonal networks of obligation and authority. But skepticism is also one of the qualities that make societies like that work. It is what permits the continual state of upheaval that capitalism thrives on.

David Kilcullen:

People don't get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks.

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

k:

You want a return to civilized dialogue and respectful disagreement, but you'll have to forgive my cynical laughter.

Viktor Chernomyrdin:

We wanted the best, but it turned out as always.

Obama's Lost Year

Jonah Lehrer:

The Victorians had many names for depression, and Charles Darwin used them all.

His pain may actually have accelerated the pace of his research, allowing him to withdraw from the world and concentrate entirely on his work.

Cormac McCarthy:

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Charles Darwin:

Work is the only thing which makes life endurable to me.

Richard Sennett:

It's certainly possible to get by in life without dedication. The craftsman represents the special human condition of being engaged.

Curtis White:

Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs.

Rattle:

Paranoia about the conspiracy is always justified. It's just usually misplaced.

Louis Menand:

The aim of the conspiracy is to convince us that it's all in our heads, or, specifically, in our brains -- that our unhappiness is a chemical problem, not an existential one.

Ashby Jones:

Happiness exists just around the corner, it's just a matter of figuring out how to get there.

David Foster Wallace:

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

Winifred Gallagher:

You can't be happy all the time, but you can pretty much focus all the time. That's about as good as it gets.

Alexandar Hemon:

In my twenties, I was prone to anxiety and depression, which I experienced as a depletion of my interiority, a vacuum of thought and language. I went to the mountain to replenish my mind, to reboot its language apparatus. My reclusion worried my parents, and my friends thought I was crazy. But I loved the silence cushioning me while I read. At night, the only sounds came from the bells of roaming cattle and the branches scratching the roof. Excited birds would bid me a good early morning, and I would start reading as soon as I opened my eyes. The controllable austerity healed whatever hurt I had carried up the mountain.

Lehrer:

Maybe Darwin was right. We suffer -- we suffer terribly -- but we don't suffer in vain.

On John McCain:

In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both "an idea and a cause".

He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself.

But many voters would rather not suffer at all.

Nancy Andreasen:

If you're at the cutting edge, then you're going to bleed.

An exchange:

Someone once accused Craig Venter of playing God.

His reply was, "We're not playing."

Depression's Upside

Kurt D. Bollacker:

I wondered: Had I had simply misplaced my faith, or was I missing something? Why are these new media types less durable? Shouldn't technology be getting better rather than worse? This mystery clamors for a little investigation.

Georgie Binks:

Where do computer files go when you die?

David Lynch:

So many things these days are made to look at later. Why not just have the experience and remember it?

John Maynard Keynes:

In the long run we are all dead.

Lisa Moore:

It has always been this way.

Finite.

But at forty-five you realize it.

Stewart Brand:

Photographic prints, especially color prints, degrade badly over time. Edward Burtynsky went on a quest for a technical solution.

Brad Lemley:

It is a clock, but it is designed to do something no clock has ever been conceived to do -- run with perfect accuracy for 10,000 years.

Stewart Brand:

We're building a 10,000-year clock, designed by Danny Hillis, and we're figuring out what a 10,000-year library might be good for. If the clock or the library could be useful to things you want to happen in the world, how would you advise them to proceed?

An exchange:

Moe: Homer, you need to focus here. You gotta ... think hard, and come up with a slogan that appeals to all the lazy slobs out there.
Homer: Can't someone else do it?
Moe: "Can't someone else do it?", that's perfect!
Homer: It is?
Moe: Yeah! Now get out there and spread that message to the people!

Avoiding a Digital Dark Age