Teju Cole on Instagram

Double Take:

But the rise of social photography means that we are now seeing images all the time, millions of them, billions, many of which are manipulated with the same easy algorithms, the same tiresome vignetting, the same dank green wash. So the problem is not that images are being altered—I remember the thrill I felt the first few times I saw Hipstamatic images, and I shot a few myself buoyed by that thrill—it’s that they’re all being altered in the same way: high contrasts, dewy focus, over-saturation, a skewing of the RGB curve in fairly predictable ways. Correspondingly, the range of subjects is also peculiarly narrow: pets, pretty girlfriends, sunsets, lunch. In other words, the photographic function, which should properly be the domain of the eye and the mind, is being outsourced to the camera and to an algorithm.

Speaking for the 47 percent

Erin Belieu:

I see who you are, Mr. Romney: you’re the kid in the locker room who assaults a boy for being gay. You grew into the guy who thinks it’s okay to tie your family dog to the top of your car for a road trip. You’re a man who lacks a basic empathy chip in your hard wiring, the essential character to experience other beings as more than percentage points or likely voters in swing states. You have the suit. You have the haircut. You have more money than God. But you don’t have the soul to actually imagine others outside of your small and privileged experience. And this, I’m afraid, is your personal tragedy. Please, don’t make it ours.

Factitious

Idle Words:

And really, what are you supposed to do if you suffer from a factitious disorder? Go to the doctor? You’re already at the doctor! And anyone who wants to get better, by definition doesn’t have the disease.

Why we need war stories

Hoarded Ordinaries:

I suspect my students think they were assigned to read The Good Soldiers so they could be better informed about the war in Iraq, and presumably that is part of the common reading’s purpose. But a good book, like a true war story, does so much more than merely inform. Given the pictures that both Finkel and O’Brien paint of war, what does either writer want us to “do” with that information? Once you get a vivid taste of what war was like for a particular group of soldiers at a particular time, how does that awareness change you as a reader and a citizen?

A good book, like a true war story, can help you become better informed, but it also can (and perhaps should) make you a more earnest asker of questions. Forget about what happened in Vietnam or Iraq; instead, raise the question of why it happened. If there is a lesson to be learned in any war (or in any war story), what are those lessons, and have we learned them?

Why poets need experimental filmmakers

Peter Wullen:

Poets are egotistical and selfish creatures. They don’t like others to play with their words. But in these videopoems the ego is finally abolished. The words stay visible and primary but somehow they disappear inside the videopoem. The viewer or reader has to look very carefully to find them. The meaning of the videopoem is the perfect integration of word, sound and image.

September day

The Rain in My Purse:

The day was September, cool oozing from the dying wildflowers.

Cease beeping, we said to just about everyone.

We put up a sign outside the church: Park your car, forget your anger.

The leaves clattered, practically metallic, the café tables round as coins.

They built it

Hoarded Ordinaries:

This year, the right is rallying behind the cry of “I built this,” a shorthand slogan pointing to the importance of individual initiative and industry. Labor Day is a holiday to acknowledge the workers whose collective effort make our individual accomplishments possible: I am able to build this because they worked so hard to build that. When you drive to work every day, who built that road? When you negotiate orderly, crime-free streets, who protects your safety? When you go to the grocery story to spend your hard-earned paycheck, who stocked those shelves?

Whenever I’m grocery shopping and see a delivery man stocking shelves, I smile because my Dad did that, driving a bread route for years. If there was bread on the shelf when you went grocery shopping this week, it was because some hard-working Teamster like my dad drove a truck to deliver it: it didn’t just appear there by accident or chance.

Thirty-five rings in the river

Todd Boss:

We poets are used to solitude, and when we publish our work, it’s hardly an event that attracts attention. But this project would be seen by everyone on the riverfront in my home city of Minneapolis, for a whole month. I admit I had more than one sleepless night about this project. Would victims of the collapse be offended? Would the project get criticized in the media? Who was I to speak for my community this way?

Morning refuge

mole:

Until enlightenment I take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and in the supreme assembly of the Sangha, I mutter, but I don’t really: I take refuge in the car starting and in scrambled eggs and in coffee fatted with cream. I think of all the cancers growing in my friends, and in strangers, possibly in myself: the race between cells that know restraint and cells that don’t is not a hard one to call. The worst are full of passionate intensity, and single-mindedly, bloodily intent on replication. The faces in the Republican Convention hall didn’t even look human to me: they looked like masks.

The future of copyright copyrestriction

Mike Linksvayer:

Although it is often said that a work is protected by copyrestriction, this is strictly not true. A work is protected through the existence of lots of copies and lots of curators.

[…]

Free and open source software has demonstrated the ethical and practical value of the opposite of copyrestriction, which is not its absence, but regulation mandating the sharing of copies, specifically in forms suitable for inspection and improvement. This regulation most famously occurs in the form of source-requiring copyleft, e.g., the GNU General Public License (GPL), which allows copyrestriction holders to use copyrestriction to force others to share works based on GPL’d works in their preferred form for modification, e.g., source code for software. However, this regulation occurs through other means as well, e.g., communities and projects refusing to curate and distribute works not available in source form, funders mandating source release, and consumers refusing to buy works not available in source form.