February 2012
5 posts
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“It turned out, we discovered one day, that my son, who was a little boy at the...”
– Nabokov, as quoted by Steve Silberman from Inside the Mind of a Synaesthete
I almost wish that is how genes actually work.
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January 2012
9 posts
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What’s the point in comparing Joan Didion and David Foster Wallace? The first reason is mere coincidence. After a long trip abroad and away from my books, I finally returned to finish two books I began long ago – Slouching Toward Bethlehem and A Supposedly Fun thing I’ll Never Do Again. And if my college classes were any indication, Didion and Wallace are held respectively as the queen and king...
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Here is New York
“Mass hysteria is a terrible force, yet New Yorkers seem always to escape it by some tiny margin: they sit in stalled subways without claustrophobia, they extricate themselves from panic situations by some lucky wisecrack, they meet confusion and congestion with patience and grit — a sort of perpetual muddling through. Every facility is inadequate — the hospitals and schools and...
“Halay found evidence of a 19th-century woman so destitute her only possession...”
– A 375-Year-Old French Bank Forgives Debts of Paris’ Poorest
I joke a lot about being poor and living in Manhattan on minimum wage but things like this remind me I am not poor at all.
“We will see that the 1.5 kilograms (3 pounds) of bees in a honeybee swarm, just...”
– Thomas Seeley, Honeybee Democracy (via David Dobbs, The True Hive Mind)
December 2011
18 posts
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WatchNorth Korea and the Media
After several days cajoling their North Korean guides and brownnosing by paying homage at the country’s many shrines, Vice’s reporters are finally let into the studio of famous filmmaker Kim Jong Il. At 4’30”, they’re in a museum dedicated to the late great director, and the camera focuses on a guitar that is in the museum not because Kim...
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Draco and the Malfoys - All I Want for Christmas
...
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There should be word, somewhere between disillusionment and touching down to reality, that describes the experience of someone you’ve long admired on the internet turning into an ordinary person. Because getting to know someone through bylines in beautifully designed online lit mags, a posed and composed and DSLR-lensed profile photo, or tweets of bon mots does not give you access to the...
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“In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties,...”
– Up and Then Down : The New Yorker
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Retrospective
About 6 months and 100 posts ago, I wrote a retrospective for this tumblr. Then I never posted it — I’m not sure why. Perhaps I was embarrassed by the narcissistic exercise of putting it together in the first place. Remarkably, all of the sentiments expressed here still held up when I read this retrospective in retrospect. Then I decided it was worth posting.
This is post number...
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Why We Fight: The Imagination of Lana Del Rey | ... →
Alter egos and the difference beween pop and indie:
Pop music treats imagination roughly the same way stage musicals do: You can take up the trappings of any aesthetic you like, roving anywhere through style and history, costume, and theme. But the music is always bedrock; it always needs to function as pop. This is how, say, Katy Perry can put across her Candy Land-pinup persona, and Ke$ha can...
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My name is Sarah. I graduated from Harvard and...
This would be really funny if it weren’t also really true.
But at least I’m getting paid?
The magazine world capitaled in New York feels more than a few continents away as I sit in Israel. Science journalism has been difficult to explain to most of my friends, both of my parents, and pretty much everyone I’ve met here. Yet like every other obscure corner of the world, once...
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“The visitor to the Museum of Jurassic Technology continually finds himself...”
– Inhaling the Spore: Field trip to a museum of (un)natural history
I wonder if this essay could have been written today, in the age of Google and instantly verifiable facts. Much of it follows the author as he digs through archives and makes phone calls to verify which of the museum’s exhibits...
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November 2011
16 posts
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(math ∩ fiction) ∩ (math ∩ feminism)
Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama, David Foster Wallace in Science
The Sexual Politics of Genius, Moon Duchin (via dianakimball)
These two essays pair are a spectacular pair of complementary reads. I mean “complementary” in its standard English definition rather than its mathematical one because the two essays have a common element: a dissection of the narrative and tropes of...
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云南十八怪 / 18 weird things about Yunnan*
*More commonly translated as “Yunnan’s 18 oddities”
Although I was born in Shanghai and the only place I’ve ever lived in China is Shanghai, certain members of my family have always insisted that my real laojia or hometown is in Yunnan. The logic had an uncomfortably paternalistic twist even to seven-year-old me: Yunnan is where my father grew up. Nevermind where I grew...
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Why Occupy Harvard - ComPost →
The most shared article in my Facebook feed garnered a dozen “likes” for everyone who posted it. I had to read it 4 times because I just could not figure out whether it was for or against Occupy Harvard.
Alexandra Petri was somewhat of a humor celebrity during my time at Harvard and she currently writes a humor blog for the Washington Post, where this piece was published. While I...
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Arbitrage
» The practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets…it is the possibility of a risk-free profit at zero cost.
+ Occupy McDonald’s
Willy Staley in The Awl has a theory about when and why McDonald’s chooses to bring back the ever elusive McRib. The money shot? A graph that shows McRib campaigns to be timed exactly with drops in the price of pork.
...
Moose Moufle « Four Pounds Flour →
Moose and caribou steaks are far better for hanging several days, but some of the choicest morsels of the moose and the caribou are unobtainable far from the woods where the animals live. The nose, the liver, and the kidneys though highly esteemed by hunters, are never brought to market. Moose nose in particular is an exceptional delicacy. The nose of the caribou, though also good, is much...
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A foreigner abroad, a fish out of water
“Isn’t it stressful to be in a country where you don’t know the language?” asked an American girl. A Jew—a JAP to be honest—she knew enough Hebrew to haggle with taxi drivers. For an American, she was a ruthless haggler.
I didn’t answer for a moment because I was wondering why I should be stressed—aren’t language barriers just a part of traveling? True, when I first...
Don't Let It Get to You
Name of the new song from Rostam Batmanglij (Vampire Weekend, Discovery). Fell in love with it instantly and playing on loop.
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From this article on suicides at the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, a prevention strategy that is simultaneously terrible and clever, made all the more terrible that you could find it clever: “In the southern city of Guangzhou, workers had been ordered to smear...
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Vitamin String Quartet - Une année sans...
The Cordial Enmity Of Joan Didion And Pauline Kael... →
David Kipen: “The story of modern American cultural criticism is the story of three California girls who went East—Pauline Kael, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion.”
October 2011
13 posts
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So you want to travel to a war zone... →
WikiTravel is one of those internet miracles, amazingly thorough about local custom and practical details. It gets knee deep in all the gory details, like how in Israel you should not wave to stop a bus because the driver will think you are waving it away. (Hey Sarah, remember that time you almost kinda got stranded in the middle of the desert overnight because the bus didn’t stop for you?...
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I spent Yom Kippur in Jerusalem. The holiest city in Judaism may be the best or worst place to spend the holiest day in Judaism. I’d originally planned to cross the border and spend the day in Bethlehem, but like everything else (Jewish) in this country, the Israeli checkpoint was closed that day.
Yom Kippur was on October 8 this year. Although circumstances have thrown in me a bit of a time...