Life During Wartime

In the film Stop Making Sense it is during “Life During Wartime” that David Byrne begins running in circles around the stage, around the band, even behind Chris Frantz’s riser. The gesture is paradoxical—mute and eloquent, a singer running away from his microphone and at the same time seeming to say look at all I can encircle. Look at all that the alchemy of my fear and desire has brought into being. My wartime has become a party in my mind and yours. … It is the running of an animal measuring the limits of its cage.

—Jonathan Lethem, Fear of Music, 122.

“Thank you! Does anybody have any questions?”

Reading “Steve Jobs”

Steve Jobs

On October 5, 2011, the night Steve Jobs died of cancer, Lapham’s Quarterly posted this tribute to him, paired with a grainy photograph:

Genius: Range of mind, power of imagination, and responsiveness of soul: this is genius. The man of genius has a soul with greater range, can therefore be struck by the feelings of all beings, is concerned with everything in nature, and never receives an idea that does not evoke a feeling. Everything stirs him and everything is retained within him….

— Jean-François de Saint-Lambert, from the Encyclopédie.

He was a charismatic leader, a genius not in technical ability but in the emotive, associative, synthetic sense of St.-Lambert’s definition. If Walter Isaacson’s book Steve Jobs proves nothing else about the man, it is that Steve “never receives an idea that does not evoke a feeling.” This sensitivity to the outside world—especially to the design of objects and experiences—is one of Jobs’s defining characteristics and a major subject of the book. Continue reading →

Voice and Tone

Voice & Tone is a site developed by the people behind Mailchimp to lay out their house copywriting style. It’s exemplary in a few ways:

  1. This is how to make a simple but charming website. It’s got bright colors, clear structure, intuitive navigation (including keyboard shortcuts), smooth animation, and it’s responsive to different screen sizes. Try resizing your browser window.
  2. This is how to write for the web. Omit needless words, pick meaningful expressions, and teach your readers something new. When appropriate, be funny.
  3. This is how to market your company to people who might not otherwise care—-by sharing and defending the philosophy behind it. I don’t see many internal style guides with their own domain names.

This is good work.

Vannevar Bush’s Democracy: “Modern Arms and Free Men”

This post is adapted from an assignment for an American intellectual history seminar.

Modern Arms and Free Men

The first half of Vannevar Bush’s Modern Arms and Free Men (1949) is a straightforward explanation of the progress made in military technology since 1918. This is the “Modern Arms” part of the book: Bush wants to be certain the reader understands recent developments before he tackles what they mean for “Free Men.” He is careful not to alienate readers without an existing grasp of the subject, and he also seems to step very carefully in establishing his authority: “For ten years,” he writes, “thanks to the accidents that direct men’s lives in a democracy, I was in a position to see as much as any single man could see… It is part of the obligation of any citizen who has been given such responsibility and opportunity as I have, no matter by what accident, to set down for the record what he has learned, and to share with others any light it may throw on the great question of war or peace that haunts us all.” In the second half of the book, he ruminates on democracy and the coming Cold War, as well as on the influence of modern military technology on both issues.

In general, Bush comes across as a technocrat who believes that scientifically trained experts can and must have a disproportionate influence on national policy, particularly as the United States continues to face off against totalitarian powers like the Soviet Union. But this technocracy and elitism is tempered by a democratic idealism that seems to rely on alchemy, a faith in a political process that works in eldritch ways to make everything turn out for the best. Continue reading →

“Because the seams are hid from us, you see.”

This is what paragraphs were invented for:

What does Caborca know of Huisiachepic, Huisiachepic of Caborca? They are different worlds, you must agree. Yet even so there is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these also are the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And whether in Caborca or in Huisiachepic or in whatever other place by whatever other name or by no name at all I say again all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.

—Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (143)

Believing in Belief: William James’s “Varieties” and the New Atheism

This post is adapted from an assignment for an American intellectual history seminar.

The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902) is a collection of William James’s lectures on what you might call the parapsychology of religion. It’s an exploration of personal religiosity through two lenses: first, the philosophy of pragmatism that James would come to symbolize, and second, the experimental psychology that James had pioneered at his Harvard laboratory in the late 19th century. Continue reading →