I read a lot. When I’m on the bus, when I’m traveling, when I’m hanging out with a sleeping baby, when I’ve got a few minutes spare, whenever. I still read print books, but because I do a lot of my reading in low-light situations, lately I’ve been reading more and more in my iPad.
For that, I’ve been using a combination of feedly (as my rss feed reader), Pocket (as my collector of longer pieces), and iBooks (for eBooks) and Adobe Reader (for PDFs) to read. I’ve realized that I read a lot of stuff from around the web—mostly long form journalism—and want to have a place where I keep track of it and share it out both for others and for myself.
So I’m going to try something new here. Near the end of each month, I’ll post a list of the best things I read during that month.
Here’s that first list, a collection of the best articles (mostly longform) I read in the past month:
“The Jungle Is Obscene” — Werner Herzog’s Visceral Nature Writing
This was a fantastic collection of diary entries by German film director Werner Herzog, excerpted from his 2010 book Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo.
The Zany, the Cute, and the Interesting: On Ngai’s by Sianne Ngai
Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting is about aesthetic judgments: an inquiry into the terms and origins of taste.
Anti-Semitism in Western Music by Ruth HaCohen
IN NOVEMBER 1934, Privy Councilor Wilhelm Furtwängler, vice president of the Third Reich’s Music Chamber and conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, imprudently took to the pages of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung to defend the composer Paul Hindemith against the charge of “Jewishness
The Marriage Cure
One July morning last year in Oklahoma City, in a public-housing project named Sooner Haven, twenty-two-year-old Kin Henderson pulled a pair of low-rider jeans over a high-rising gold lamé thong and declared herself ready for church.
Depression’s Upside - NYTimes.com by JONAH LEHRER
The Victorians had many names for depression, and Charles Darwin used them all. There were his “fits” brought on by “excitements,” “flurries” leading to an “uncomfortable palpitation of the heart” and “air fatigues” that triggered his “head symptoms.
Geography, Not Voting Rights Act, Accounts for Most Majority-Minority Districts - NYTimes.com by Nate Silver
The Supreme Court’s decision on the Voting Rights Act on Tuesday — which struck down one provision of the law outright, neutered another and set a precedent that could eventually threaten the rest of the legislation — may reduce the pressure on states to create majority-minority districts when
LANDAYS
The teenage poet who uttered this folk poem called herself Rahila Muska. She lived in Helmand, a Taliban stronghold and one of the most restive of Afghanistan’s thirty-four provinces since the U.S. invasion began on October 7, 2001.
Looking for The Real Carl Rakosi: Collecteds and Selecteds by Andrew Crozier. Sun
From the time when his poems were appearing in Louis Zukofsky’s “Objectivist” number of Poetry (February 1931), in the “Objectivists” Anthology of 1932, and then in Pagany, Contact, and Hound & Horn, Carl Rakosi (aka Callman Rawley, the professional name he adopted in 1926 when he feared
Triumph of the Strange by James Delbourgo
In 1682, anticipating by three centuries the signature scene of Ridley Scott’s science-fiction shocker Alien, a strange creature burst forth from the body of a baker in the city of York.
The Intelligent Plant by Michael Pollan
In 1973, a book claiming that plants were sentient beings that feel emotions, prefer classical music to rock and roll, and can respond to the unspoken thoughts of humans hundreds of miles away landed on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction.
Charles Reznikoff’s
Richard Hyland, Distinguished Professor, Rutgers Law School, Camden, New Jersey, has compiled the fullest account of the sources of a Charles Reznikoff poem, together with a detailed commentary on the Amelia Kirwan case and the poem Reznikoff wrote based on this case.
How Objects Speak by Peter N. Miller
The past has been receding from us at a rate of one second every second, 60 minutes an hour, 365 days per (solar) year for thousands upon millions of years.
Playing Docs Games: The New Yorker 1992 by King of Koogs
Wise Surfboards, the only surf shop in San Francisco, is a bright, high-ceilinged place flanked by a Mexican restaurant and a Christian day-care center out in the far reaches of a sleepy working-class seaside suburb known as the Sunset District.
It’s silly to be frightened of being dead by Diana Athill
Back in the 1920s my mother never went to a funeral if she could help it, and was horrified when she heard of children being exposed to such an ordeal, and my father vanished from the room if death was mentioned; very much later, in the 1960s, when the publishers in which I was a partner brought ou
The Toxins That Threaten Our Brains by James Hamblin
Forty-one million IQ points. That’s what Dr. David Bellinger determined Americans have collectively forfeited as a result of exposure to lead, mercury, and organophosphate pesticides.
The ‘Caliphate’s’ Colonies: Islamic State’s Gradual Expansion into North Africa by Mirco Keilberth, Juliane von Mittelstaedt and Christoph Reuter
Chaos, disillusionment and oppression provide the perfect conditions for Islamic State. Currently, the Islamist extremists are expanding from Syria and Iraq into North Africa. Several local groups have pledged their allegiance. The caliphate has a beach.
The Creepy New Wave of the Internet by Sue Halpern
Every day a piece of computer code is sent to me by e-mail from a website to which I subscribe called IFTTT. Those letters stand for the phrase “if this then that,” and the code is in the form of a “recipe” that has the power to animate it.
Slavery and Capitalism by Sven Beckert
Few topics have animated today’s chattering classes more than capitalism.
The mathematical equation that caused the banks to crash by Ian Stewart
The Black-Scholes equation was the mathematical justification for the trading that plunged the world’s banks into catastrophe It was the holy grail of investors.
‘Inverted Jenny’ Stamp On Auction Block
In 1918, stamp collector William Robey bought a sheet of 100 stamps for $24 at a Washington D.C., post office. The sheet featured what turned out to be a very valuable mistake. He sold the “Inverted Jenny” — named for the upside-down biplane — stamps for $15,000.
Were we happier in the stone age? by Yuval Noah Harari
We are far more powerful than our ancestors, but are we much happier? Historians seldom stop to ponder this question, yet ultimately, isn’t it what history is all about? Our understanding and our judgment of, say, the worldwide spread of monotheistic religion surely depends on whether we conclude t
Demystification of DIY — Defining Basketball Analytics Down by Seth Partnow
The furor over analytics (re-)sparked by Charles Barkley’s pre-All-Star Week tirade has gotten us here at Nylon Calculus talking. Moving past the immediate, defensive reactions to Barkley’s particular perspective1, there was something to be taken from the discussion.
The word-hoard: Robert Macfarlane on rewilding our language of landscape by Robert Macfarlane
Eight years ago, in the coastal township of Shawbost on the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis, I was given an extraordinary document.
American Haiku: The Brilliant Ads of Errol Morris by Mike Powell
Marrakech, 2001 or 2002, maybe, and Errol Morris wants camels. Real, spontaneous camels — the kind you see wandering across the desert in children’s books. In his documentaries, Morris is known for staging and re-creation, for artifice.
Though The Heavens Fall, Part 1 by JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN
On Texas, old newspapers, race music, and two black lives that shaped the history of civil rights Part 1. “Editor Love” Some people are by nature compelled to be shown everything. It is a waste of words to tell them certain things; therefore it is expedient to show them.—C. N.
Golden goal: Juninho Pernambucano for Lyon v Bayern Munich (2003)
There was a jarring fragment of radio commentary during the Burnley v Everton game the other day. “Antolín Alacaraz does a Cruyff turn,” said the man on TalkSport. It sounded wrong. But of course it was right, or at least correct.
The Clampdown: How the NCAA Accidentally Killed Scoring in Men’s College Basketball by Brian Phillips
Here are two statements about NCAA men’s basketball, both true. First, NCAA men’s basketball is manic, unpredictable, full of joyful chaos; it’s a crazy sideshow fans love for its combination of upsets, buzzer-beaters, frenzied comebacks, court-storming, dancing, and weeping.