Dear Dr. Kierkegaard,

All my life I’ve been a successful pseudo-intellectual, sprinkling quotations from Kafka, Epictetus and Derrida into my conversations, impressing dates and making my friends feel mentally inferior. But over the last few years, it’s stopped working. People just look at me blankly. My artificially inflated self-esteem is on the wane. What happened?

Existential in Exeter

Dear Existential,

It pains me to see so many people being pseudo-intellectual in the wrong way. It desecrates the memory of the great poseurs of the past. And it is all the more frustrating because your error is so simple and yet so fundamental.

You have failed to keep pace with the current code of intellectual one-upsmanship. You have failed to appreciate that over the past few years, there has been a tectonic shift in the basis of good taste.

Lord of the Memes

The radio pundit has a bad time doing TV.

Found Objects: Laura Ingraham

Fallingwater has always been my preferred work from one of my favourite architects: Frank Lloyd Wright. I remember seeing and admiring this building in some history book from school since I was a child. There was a photo of its outside with that characteristic point of view: the fall in the foreground and the deep forest surrounding the house. At 13 or 14 years old it seemed to me a very modern construction, almost futuristic; later it surprised me to find out that it dates from the Thirties of the Twenty Century.

With this animation project I have tried to understand —and to explain at the same time— how this house was built, showing its internal structure and offering points of view not so well-known or disclosed. I hope you enjoy it.

Fallingwater

On August 7th 1974, a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit stepped out on a wire illegally rigged between New York's twin towers, then the world’s tallest buildings. After nearly an hour dancing on the wire, he was arrested, taken for psychological evaluation, and brought to jail before he was finally released. James Marsh’s documentary brings Petit’s extraordinary adventure to life through the testimony of Philippe himself, and some of the co-conspirators who helped him create the unique and magnificent spectacle that became known as “the artistic crime of the century.”

Man On Wire

Objectified is a documentary about industrial design; it’s about the manufactured objects we surround ourselves with, and the people who make them.

The term objectified has two meanings. One is ‘to be treated with the status of a mere object.’ But the other is ‘something abstract expressed in a concrete form,’ as in the way a sculpture objectifies an artist’s thoughts. It’s the act of transforming creative thought into a tangible object, which is what designers in this film do every day. But maybe there’s a third meaning to this title, regarding the ways these objects are affecting us and our environment. Have we all become objectified?

Objectified: A Documentary Film by Gary Hustwit

Maybe what it takes to make a sentence great is a kind of spare universality.

In the beginning ...

Jack: (changing the subject) Is it erotic?

Jane: Not at all, really. In fact, most of the time it's anti-erotic. It's about the things you were thinking about when you should have been paying attention. Personally, I would think that at least one of these couples might be portrayed as actually communicating and enjoying themselves. But that's not the point he's making.

Jack: How can you call it Intercourse if it's not erotic?

Jane: I suppose he means that other sort of intercourse: conversation.

Jack: (losing interest) Oh.

From the archive, a selection:

The perceived lack of time becomes real: We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.

In the 1920's and 30's, before the age of air-conditioning, my father once told me that New Yorkers used to leave their apartments to sleep in the park on summer nights. Was America any safer then, or did people take more care of one another during those days?

Lisa: Uh, are you sure that's safe?
Kearny: Well it ain't gettin' any safer.

On Friday, a deeply divided House rebuffed President Bush's demand for retroactive immunity, then defiantly left Washington for a two-week spring break.

Republicans said the secret session proved to be deflating, not because of the quality of the evidence, but because of Democrats' unwillingness to listen.

This book earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly.

Intercourse: Stories by Robert Olen Butler

A high-speed drive through the streets of Paris.

C'était un Rendez-Vous

Tom Wolfe, who calls himself “the social secretary of neuroscience,” often turns to current research to inform his stories and cultural commentary. His 1996 essay, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died,” raised questions about personal responsibility in the age of genetic predeterminism. Similar concerns led Gazzaniga to found the Law and Neuroscience Project. When Gazzaniga, who just published Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, was last in New York, Seed incited a discussion: on status, free will, and the human condition.

Tom Wolfe + Michael Gazzaniga

Kurt Vonnegut:

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you're writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead --- or, worse, they will stop reading you.

How to Write With Style