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The Top Ten Wired Articles of 2010

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I subscribed to Wired Magazine (print edition) in December of 2009. I’ve read almost all of the feature articles over the last twelve months. The following is my list of top ten Wired articles which have appeared in print from January until December of this year. I highlight notable passages from each piece as well.

(1) “The Neuroscience of Screwing Up” (January 2010). Jonah Lehrer is one of my favorite science writers (do subscribe to his excellent blog, The Frontal Cortex), and his piece in the January edition of Wired is a good way to begin this list. The piece challenges our preconceptions of the scientific process and how we make mistakes in the scientific quest for answers:

The reason we’re so resistant to anomalous information — the real reason researchers automatically assume that every unexpected result is a stupid mistake — is rooted in the way the human brain works. Over the past few decades, psychologists have dismantled the myth of objectivity. The fact is, we carefully edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists — our views dictated by nothing but the facts — we’re actually blinkered, especially when it comes to information that contradicts our theories. The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored.

(2) “Fill in the Blanks: Using Math to Turn Lo-Res Datasets into High-Res Samples” (March 2010). I highlighted this piece in this entry, and it’s still definitely of the most interesting articles I’ve read this year, not least because the entire concept of compressed sensing was totally new to me:

Compressed sensing works something like this: You’ve got a picture — of a kidney, of the president, doesn’t matter. The picture is made of 1 million pixels. In traditional imaging, that’s a million measurements you have to make. In compressed sensing, you measure only a small fraction — say, 100,000 pixels randomly selected from various parts of the image. From that starting point there is a gigantic, effectively infinite number of ways the remaining 900,000 pixels could be filled in.

(3) “Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World’s Most Ingenious Thief” (April 2010). A fascinating piece about Gerald Blanchard, who has been described as “cunning, clever, conniving, and creative.” Incredible what he was able to accomplish during his stint:

Over the years, Blanchard procured and stockpiled IDs and uniforms from various security companies and even law enforcement agencies. Sometimes, just for fun and to see whether it would work, he pretended to be a reporter so he could hang out with celebrities. He created VIP passes and applied for press cards so he could go to NHL playoff games or take a spin around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway with racing legend Mario Andretti. He met the prince of Monaco at a yacht race in Monte Carlo and interviewed Christina Aguilera at one of her concerts.

(4) “Getting LOST” (May 2010). LOST is my favorite show on television (by far), so it’s with some bias that I select this piece into the top 10. This piece has outstanding trivia about the show, an interview with executive producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, and really excellent infographics (my favorite is this one).

(5) “The Man Who Could Unsnarl Manhattan Traffic” (June 2010). Felix Salmon (whose finance blog I follow at Reuters; unrelated, but I also recommend Salmon’s excellent take on bicycling in New York City.) reports on Charles Komanoff, the man whose goal is to alleviate traffic in New York City.

[It is ] the most ambitious effort yet to impose mathematical rigor and predictability on an inherently chaotic phenomenon. Despite decades of attempts to curb delays—adding lanes to highways, synchronizing traffic lights—planners haven’t had much success at unsnarling gridlock. A study by the Texas Transportation Institute found that in 2007, metropolitan-area drivers in the US spent an average of 36 hours stuck in traffic—up from 14 hours in 1982.

Komanoff tracks ALL of this data in a massive spreadsheet, dubbed Balanced Transportation Analyzer (warning! .xls link, 5.5MB):

Over the course of about 50 worksheets, the BTA breaks down every aspect of New York City transportation—subway revenues, traffic jams, noise pollution—in an attempt to discover which mix of tolls and surcharges would create the greatest benefit for the largest number of people.

(6) “Secret of AA” (July 2010). Some 1.2 million people belong to one of Alcoholic Anonymous’s 55,000 meeting groups in the United States. But after 75 years, we still don’t know how it works. Fascinating:

There’s no doubt that when AA works, it can be transformative. But what aspect of the program deserves most of the credit? Is it the act of surrendering to a higher power? The making of amends to people a drinker has wronged? The simple admission that you have a problem? Stunningly, even the most highly regarded AA experts have no idea.

(7) “The News Factory” (September 2010). You’ve probably seen those videos from Taiwan recounting events of the moment through hilarious animated videos (see The iPhone Antennagate; Chilean Miners). What’s fascinating is that there’s an entire company working to create these videos. Next Media Animation (NMA) is a factory churning out  videos:

The team at Next Media Animation cranks out about 20 short clips a day, most involving crimes and scandals in Hong Kong and Taiwan. But a few are focused on tabloid staples in the US—from Tiger Woods’ marital troubles to Michael Jackson’s death. Seeing them filtered through the Next Media lens is as disorienting as it is entertaining.

How can they create such impressive (relatively speaking) videos in such a short period of time?

It takes Pixar up to seven hours to render a single frame of footage—that is, to convert the computer data into video. NMA needed to create an animated clip in a third of that time and render more than a thousand frames of animation in just a few minutes. A team spent two years wrestling with the problem, experimenting with one digital tool after another—Poser, 3ds Max, Maya. “It didn’t look good, and it took too long,” says Eric Ryder, a Next art director. “But Jimmy doesn’t want excuses.”

(8) “The Nerd Superstore” (October 2010). An excellent look into ThinkGeek, a site for nerds. ThinkGeek is a profitable company that carries an assortment of products:

Today ThinkGeek has 51 employees. Single-day orders occasionally top out at $1 million, and an astonishing amount of that product is caffeine. You can purchase it online or from the mail-order catalog in the form of mints, candy, gum, jerky, sprays, capsules, chews, cookies, and powders, as well as in lip balms, brownie mix, and soaps (liquid and solid). The company has thus far pushed more than 1 billion milligrams of the stimulant.

Where else could you purchase awesome sauce, brain freeze ice cubes, and an 8-bit tie all in one place?

(9) “The Quantified City” (November 2010). What can a hundred million calls to 311 reveal about a city? Steven Johnson uses New York City as an example where the collected data is quantified:

As useful as 311 is to ordinary New Yorkers, the most intriguing thing about the service is all the information it supplies back to the city. Each complaint is logged, tagged, and mapped to make it available for subsequent analysis. In some cases, 311 simply helps New York respond more intelligently to needs that were obvious to begin with. Holidays, for example, spark reliable surges in call volume, with questions about government closings and parking regulations. On snow days, call volume spikes precipitously, which 311 anticipates with recorded messages about school closings and parking rules.

The 311 complaints, visualized in an infographic, for one week in September (question for the reader: do you think population density matters here?)

(10) “Teen Mathletes Do Battle at Algorithm Olympics” (December 2010). Excellent piece by Jason Fagone about kids competing at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). While the piece focuses on two students, it’s important to note how elite this event is:

China’s approach to IOI is proof of just how serious the contest has become and how tied up it is in notions of national prestige and economic competitiveness. To earn a spot on the Chinese team, a coder has to beat 80,000 of his compatriots in a series of provincial elimination rounds that last an entire year.

But what’s the downside of such intense training and competition? I ponder the possibilities with some personal reflections in this post.

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Notes:

1) For some of the titles above, I’ve used the titles presented in the print edition of Wired (the titles are usually longer on the Web).

2) If you’re a fan of Wired, what’s your favorite article from 2010? Feel free to comment below.

The Merits of the PhD Degree: Is It a Waste of Time?

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I read over a dozen articles this weekend, but it was an article in The Economist which I thought was worth mentioning here. Aptly titled “Why Doing a PhD Is Often a Waste of Time,” the author goes in depth discussing reasons why attaining a PhD degree isn’t worth the cost or the time commitment. As always, I encourage you to read the entire piece, but I do highlight some notable passages below.

This was a nice introduction to the PhD degree:

In most countries a PhD is a basic requirement for a career in academia. It is an introduction to the world of independent research—a kind of intellectual masterpiece, created by an apprentice in close collaboration with a supervisor. The requirements to complete one vary enormously between countries, universities and even subjects. Some students will first have to spend two years working on a master’s degree or diploma. Some will receive a stipend; others will pay their own way. Some PhDs involve only research, some require classes and examinations and some require the student to teach undergraduates. A thesis can be dozens of pages in mathematics, or many hundreds in history. As a result, newly minted PhDs can be as young as their early 20s or world-weary forty-somethings.

Some consider graduate work (working for the PhD) as slave labor (see Reference 1 at bottom):

One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some describe their work as “slave labour”. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle. “It isn’t graduate school itself that is discouraging,” says one student, who confesses to rather enjoying the hunt for free pizza. “What’s discouraging is realising the end point has been yanked out of reach.”

An interesting implication in the passage below (that because professors are expensive to hire and cultivate, it is much easier to employ graduate students, regardless of whether they go on to acquire a PhD):

But universities have discovered that PhD students are cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour. With more PhD students they can do more research, and in some countries more teaching, with less money. A graduate assistant at Yale might earn $20,000 a year for nine months of teaching. The average pay of full professors in America was $109,000 in 2009—higher than the average for judges and magistrates

The large number of drop-outs from PhD programs in the United States was a striking statistic:

In America only 57% of doctoral students will have a PhD ten years after their first date of enrolment. In the humanities, where most students pay for their own PhDs, the figure is 49%. Worse still, whereas in other subject areas students tend to jump ship in the early years, in the humanities they cling like limpets before eventually falling off. And these students started out as the academic cream of the nation. Research at one American university found that those who finish are no cleverer than those who do not. Poor supervision, bad job prospects or lack of money cause them to run out of steam.

But I think the most important passage in the piece is this one, regarding the premium that a PhD affords (or not) over Masters and B.S. degrees (I bold the two sentences most revealing sentences in the entire piece):

PhD graduates do at least earn more than those with a bachelor’s degree. A study in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management by Bernard Casey shows that British men with a bachelor’s degree earn 14% more than those who could have gone to university but chose not to. The earnings premium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master’s degree, which can be accomplished in as little as one year, is almost as high, at 23%. In some subjects the premium for a PhD vanishes entirely. PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages earn no more than those with master’s degrees. The premium for a PhD is actually smaller than for a master’s degree in engineering and technology, architecture and education. Only in medicine, other sciences, and business and financial studies is it high enough to be worthwhile. Over all subjects, a PhD commands only a 3% premium over a master’s degree.

Sobering to read these statistics (and I wish The Economist linked to some outside sources for vetting).

The article is factual in nature and doesn’t go in depth of non-economic purposes of pursuing a PhD degree:

Many students say they are pursuing their subject out of love, and that education is an end in itself. Some give little thought to where the qualification might lead.###

And it’s hard to argue with that argument: there will always be students who are passionate about research or have found a particular problem that they want to solve. For the rest of us, a PhD degree is out of reach, and perhaps for the reasons explained in the article, that’s a good thing.

One last note: always be cautious of the bias present in journalism, such as this dinger near the end of the piece:

Many of the drawbacks of doing a PhD are well known. Your correspondent was aware of them over a decade ago while she slogged through a largely pointless PhD in theoretical ecology

Overall, I think this is a really solid article, articulating the draw-backs of the PhD degree. As I mentioned above, I would be interested in reading the other side of the argument from respected sources.

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Reference:

1) A letter from Erick Carreira (an associate professor at Caltech at the time) to a member of his research team, in which Carreira explains that work on evenings and weekends is required. But also see Carreira’s response in The Boston Globe.

On Procrastination

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I generally don’t link to book reviews, but The Thief of Time is outside my price range, and I really enjoyed James Surowiecki’s piece on how procrastination works.

Surowiecki’s piece is a bit long, but by the end of it, you’ll have a better answer to this question: “Why do we procrastinate?”. I highlight notable passages below…

What is procrastination and from where does the term come from?

Procrastination is a basic human impulse, but anxiety about it as a serious problem seems to have emerged in the early modern era. The term itself (derived from a Latin word meaning “to put off for tomorrow”) entered the English language in the sixteenth century, and, by the eighteenth, Samuel Johnson was describing it as “one of the general weaknesses” that “prevail to a greater or less degree in every mind,” and lamenting the tendency in himself: “I could not forbear to reproach myself for having so long neglected what was unavoidably to be done, and of which every moment’s idleness increased the difficulty.” And the problem seems to be getting worse all the time. According to Piers Steel, a business professor at the University of Calgary, the percentage of people who admitted to difficulties with procrastination quadrupled between 1978 and 2002. In that light, it’s possible to see procrastination as the quintessential modern problem.

I like Surowiecki’s humor, who mentions that he procrastinated in writing this article. I procrastinated writing this post, even though I planned to do it more than a month ago:

Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author’s own problems with finishing the piece. (This article will be no exception.)
On the essence of procrastination (this may be a surprise to you):
The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy.
Surowiecki highlights notable philosophers in his piece, and I liked this passage about the “divided self”:
Viewed this way, procrastination starts to look less like a question of mere ignorance than like a complex mixture of weakness, ambition, and inner conflict. But some of the philosophers in “The Thief of Time” have a more radical explanation for the gap between what we want to do and what we end up doing: the person who makes plans and the person who fails to carry them out are not really the same person: they’re different parts of what the game theorist Thomas Schelling called “the divided self.” Schelling proposes that we think of ourselves not as unified selves but as different beings, jostling, contending, and bargaining for control. Ian McEwan evokes this state in his recent novel “Solar”: “At moments of important decision-making, the mind could be considered as a parliament, a debating chamber. Different factions contended, short- and long-term interests were entrenched in mutual loathing. Not only were motions tabled and opposed, certain proposals were aired in order to mask others.
I was really pleased that Surowiecki highlighted one of Dan Ariely’s experiments on procrastination (Ariely writes about it in his Predictably Irrational, which I highly recommend reading):
A few years ago, Dan Ariely, a psychologist at M.I.T., did a fascinating experiment examining one of the most basic external tools for dealing with procrastination: deadlines. Students in a class were assigned three papers for the semester, and they were given a choice: they could set separate deadlines for when they had to hand in each of the papers or they could hand them all in together at the end of the semester. There was no benefit to handing the papers in early, since they were all going to be graded at semester’s end, and there was a potential cost to setting the deadlines, since if you missed a deadline your grade would be docked. So the rational thing to do was to hand in all the papers at the end of the semester; that way you’d be free to write the papers sooner but not at risk of a penalty if you didn’t get around to it. Yet most of the students chose to set separate deadlines for each paper, precisely because they knew that they were otherwise unlikely to get around to working on the papers early, which meant they ran the risk of not finishing all three by the end of the semester. This is the essence of the extended will: instead of trusting themselves, the students relied on an outside tool to make themselves do what they actually wanted to do.
Last but not least: this is my favorite video on procrastination. It’s really well done:
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Now that you’ve learned more about procrastination, has your perception of procrastination changed? What are you going to do today that you have been putting off for days, weeks, or months?

Readings: Google in the News

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Two interesting stories in the New York Times appeared this weekend, both relating to Google:

1) “Google Grows, and Works to Retain Nimble Minds” [New York Times] – a nice explainer about Google’s unparalleled growth, and a side effect: employees who are leaving the company for smaller companies or for start-ups:

Recent departures include low-level engineers, product managers and prominent managers like Lars Rasmussen, who helped create Google Maps and Wave before he left for Facebook, and Omar Hamoui, the founder of AdMob who was vice president for mobile ads at Google and is now looking for his next project. At least 142 of Facebook’s employees came from Google.

I like this phrase used in the article: “Corporate sclerosis.” In the last five years, Google has grown from 5,000 to 23,000 employees, while its revenue has increased by more than seven-fold, from $3.2B to $23.7B. So what is Google doing to prevent employees from leaving the company?

Google is taking aggressive steps to retain employees, particularly those with start-up ambitions. Google has given several engineers who said they were leaving to start new companies the chance to start them within Google. They work independently and can recruit other engineers and use Google’s resources, like its code base and servers, according to half a dozen employees.

This is a highly innovative move, and rarely seen in other companies (I think). Of course, financial motivation is there too: this month Google gave every employee in the company a 10% raise.

Nevertheless, the biggest takeaway for me was this: if someone has the drive to do something on their own, compensation packages and promises to work on independent projects can only go so far. This was the best line in the story:

Part of Google’s problem is that the best engineers are often the ones with the most entrepreneurial thirst.

Is it that surprising that these engineers are looking for greener (but perhaps riskier) pastures?

2) “A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web” [New York Times] – an amazing and horrifying story of a sunglasses merchant who thrives on negative feedback to boost his Google search rankings (which leads to more people buying fake/poor merchandise from him). Not much is below this merchant: threats, intimidation, non-delivery (or fake delivery) of product.

This story left me fuming (I refuse to provide the name of the merchant). What’s interesting, and other people have pointed this out, is that Google does not appear to perform sentiment analysis; that is, a “negative” link to a website might be as beneficial as a link of praise, and Google’s algorithms (which are, in fact, a secret) don’t distinguish between them. So for instance, we have this from the NYT, where people posted complaints about the company:

Between then and now, hundreds of additional tirades have been tacked to Get Satisfaction, ComplaintsBoard.com, ConsumerAffairs.com and sites like them.

But because those web sites are reputable, if they point to the offending website, it’s essentially more “Google juice” and the merchant described in the article benefits.

One last note: the reporter, David Segal, appears to take a liking to this merchant:

It’s almost painful to say, but Mr. [Redacted] is amusing company. He is sharp and entertaining, although much of the entertainment comes from the way he flouts the conventions of courtesy, which he does with such a perverse flair that it can seem like a kind of performance art.

I thought the sympathy was undeserving, but perhaps this is a psychological phenomenon: if we tend to get close to someone (even if we do so objectively, such as reporting for the New York Times), we tend to begin liking the one we’re with to help us cope and/or help us approach the subject. Familiarity breeds good journalism, it seems.

Update (12/01/10): News of the New York Times article has made the rounds at Google headquarters, and Google has acted swiftly. In a blog post titled “Being Bad To Your Customers Is Bad for Business,” Google explains that they have modified their search rankings, incorporating user reviews in Google’s search algorithm:

Instead, in the last few days we developed an algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience. The algorithm we incorporated into our search rankings represents an initial solution to this issue, and Google users are now getting a better experience as a result.

Huge props to Google on this quick, worthy update.

On Careers and Happiness

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I’ve been thinking about the subject of careers and happiness recently, and stumbled upon this Q&A session with Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com. From this piece, I learned that Tony Hsieh studied computer science at Harvard and that Tony is really interested in the science of happiness (so am I!).

The entire piece is a great short read, but Tony’s response with how students should approach pursuing a career is what resonated with me the most:

I would say rather than focus on what will make you the most money or be best for your career, figure out what you would be passionate for in 10 years and go pursue that. A lot of people work hard at building a career so that one day down the road they think it will bring them happiness. And most of the time, when they finally accomplish their goal, they realize that it doesn’t really end up bringing happiness or fulfillment for the long term.

I do think Tony’s advice is applicable not just for students in college, but for aspiring entrepreneurs and those that are working in the corporate environment. It seems the advice is recession-proof: so long as you’re passionate about what you’re doing, you can feel proud of your efforts, that what you’ve worked for has not been in vain. My only criticism is this: you never know how your life may unfold and what interests you may discover in living your life. So figuring out what you might be passionate about in ten years might not work for everyone.

I also liked Tony’s response to the question below:

Interviewer: What did Harvard bring out in you that you might not have had when you arrived on day one?

Tony: For me, most of what I got out of Harvard was outside the classroom, including people that I met and running the pizza business. My concentration was in computer science because that’s what I was most passionate about at the time, but I also learned to discover other passions through other classes (for example, linguistics).

What do you think of Tony’s advice on choosing a career? Do you have any advice of your own?

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Note: the best book I’ve read on happiness is Eric Weiner’s The Geography of Bliss. I highly, highly recommend it.

Writing Advice from Stephen King

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Love him or hate him, Stephen King is a prolific writer. But he’s a damn good writer.

I recently posted a link on Twitter to his advice on writing, which he gave in 1986. And even though the advice seems dated, it is still perfectly applicable today. I encourage you to read the entire entry, but I highlight the most important parts below.

Stephen King makes a great point about giving advice (and who listens to it):

I am going to tell you these things again because often people will only listen – really listen – to someone who makes a lot of money doing the thing he’s talking about.

King writes that talent is absolutely essential to write well. But I like how he factors the importance of rejection into the mix:

If you’re not talented, you won’t succeed. And if you’re not succeeding, you should know when to quit. When is that? I don’t know. It’s different for each writer. Not after six rejection slips, certainly, nor after sixty. But after six hundred? Maybe. After six thousand? My friend, after six thousand pinks, it’s time you tried painting or computer programming.

Don’t rely on reference book(s) when doing the first draft:

You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time.

In this day, just substitute the World Almanac and encyclopedias for Wikipedia, and you’ve essentially got the same advice.

This is the kicker for me:

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word.

Don’t be afraid to kill things if they’re bad:

When it comes to people, mercy killing is against the law. When it comes to fiction, it is the law.

You can read the entire piece in ten minutes (which is Stephen King’s intention). Highly, highly recommended.

Haruki Murakami on Writing

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I recently finished reading Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (I loved this book; I am still thinking about how to write a review), and it made me think about his style of writing and what things in his life have inspired him.

Many of my questions were answered in this absolutely fascinating interview with Haruki Murakami posted in Paris Review.

The entire interview is worth reading, but I highlight three of the most notable parts below…

Continue reading →

Readings: Diller’s Creative Process, Google Cars, Africa’s Soccer Impostors

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Some interesting articles I’ve read recently:

1) “Picturing Failure, Sketching Dreams” [Wall Street Journal] – an excellent profile of Elizabeth Diller and her creative process. She’s the architect behind The High Line in New York City. This passage about the creative process resonates with me strongly:

Ms. Diller said her creative breakthroughs usually come when she isn’t working. She might be watching a play by the experimental Wooster Group, or seeking out work by late French Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, known for his irreverent use of everyday objects. They might come while she’s reading—from an academic journal to People magazine. (Mr. Scofidio [Elizabeth Diller’s husband] sticks mostly to novels; the frequent traveler sometimes rips out each page of a paperback after he finishes it to lighten his load.)

Read the entire piece here, and please also check out my photo essay on The High Line.

(2) “Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic” [New York Times] – very interesting development from Google. This is fascinating:

With someone behind the wheel to take control if something goes awry and a technician in the passenger seat to monitor the navigation system, seven test cars have driven 1,000 miles without human intervention and more than 140,000 miles with only occasional human control. One even drove itself down Lombard Street in San Francisco, one of the steepest and curviest streets in the nation. The only accident, engineers said, was when one Google car was rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light.

So is Google competing with DARPA’s Urban Challenge?

(3) “Africa’s Soccer Impostors” [Slate] – this is a sad, incredible story about a team that pretended to be Togo’s national soccer team while playing a game in Bahrain in September 2010. How did it happen?

After what must have been a grueling piece of detective work, the investigators pinned their suspicions on Tchanile Bana, a former national-team coach who had recently been suspended for taking another fake team to a tournament in Egypt.

The story is even more insane than most people would expect… In January 2010, Togo’s real national team traveled by bus into Angola’s Cabinda province, the site of its first match in the Africa Cup of Nations tournament, and this is what happened:

As the Togo team’s bus crossed into Cabinda, armed soldiers from a separatist sect opened fire, killing the driver and two staff members and wounding several players. The team’s French manager, Herbert Velud, was shot in the arm. For around half an hour, the rebels fired on the bus with machine guns and fought with the team’s Angolan security force while the players crawled under the seats.

So unfortunate and bizarre. Are there any national soccer teams that have had worse luck and misfortune? I should mention that the article is written by Brian Phillips, who authored a post that I claimed is an absolute must-read.

On Reading Fiction

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All forms of desire have their natural enemies and I find that nothing saps my desire to read fiction like the Internet does.

I just finished reading Kevin Hartnett’s essay “When I’m in the Mood for Fiction,” and it has definitely got me thinking (the quote above is from that essay). Are there times or circumstances when I prefer to read fiction over non-fiction? In general, I read both fiction and non-fiction, and my response to the question would be something mundane: after I read a few non-fiction books in a row, I want to experience something more imaginative. But that almost seems like a cop-out, and I don’t really have a good answer. Hartnett’s essay hits the nail on the head:

The more I’m engaged with life—and particularly with other people—the more I want to read fiction.  At the peak of a wedding reception or in the throes of a night out when the crowd has given itself over to celebration, I often want to sneak off and read a novel. It’s a contradictory impulse, to want to retreat into a book at the precise moment I am most enthralled with life, but such are the circumstances we live by.  What I’m after, I think, is a kind of synergy that can only happen when I approach a novel while my body is still charged with the feeling of being present and alive.

This thinking does seem contradictory, but I think it makes sense. When you’re on a roll or on an emotional high, you want to keep it going. Fiction provides this outlet, or in this case, extends it. When you’ve been reading news or get sucked into politics, perhaps it’s more difficult to get “into” fiction. Then again, the critic in me knows there are others who will chime in as follows: after a long day of reading the boring on the Internet (see Hartnett’s quote at the top which began this post), the first thing you may want to do is unwind with fiction. Interesting how I turned that around, right?

I don’t think there’s a black-and-white answer for me, but I do agree with this point:

At the same time, several of my most memorable encounters with fiction have taken place when I’ve been my most alone.

I should mention that at the moment I’m reading Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is what the Washington Post Book World cited as Japan stuffed “into a single fictional edifice.” Which begs this extracurricular question: are there degrees to fiction? Can something be more fictional than something else?

I don’t have all the answers, but I’d like to close with this (I say it because it’s true for me): non-fiction stirs the mind, but fiction—well, it stirs the soul.

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Questions for the reader: what do you think of Hartnett’s take on reading fiction? Do you agree with him? When do you prefer reading fiction over non-fiction? Can you even pinpoint your mood or a set of circumstances, or is the answer something vague (like my answer is)?

The Unseen Sea: A Beautiful Time Lapse of San Francisco

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This post has nothing to do with reading…But this time-lapse video taken in and around San Francisco is one of the most beautiful videos I have ever seen. Simon Christen, an amazing photographer, spent a year creating this video… “The Unseen Sea” is a feast for the senses.

Please take three minutes of your time and watch it. You will not be disappointed.

Here is how @KrisLindbeck on Twitter described the video:

In redwood time/ fog flows like surf / airplanes circle like flies/ and the moon kisses the sea / softly.

Beautiful. I love everything about this video, but perhaps most amazing to me is the heavenly, undulating motion of the clouds at around the 2:05 mark. And that ending? Simply sublime.