Write Essays Archive

15

How to Reject Advertising Dollars

By
Tom OHare
– June 16, 2011

Yesterday was a landmark day for the good people at Brutish&Short: we received our first solicitation from an advertiser! We were all like, “Aww, fuck yeah! Make money get paid!” because, and let me make this as plain as can be: we are not averse to advertising. In fact, when we started this site and our plans for it were much grander, we had The Advertising Discussion. It went roughly as follows:

Me: We should have ads.

Ben: Yeah, we should.

Trevor: Yup. Do you think we should wait a little bit, though?

Ben: Hmmm.

Me: Fuck no, let’s have ads. Free money is free money.

Trevor: We could roll them out after a month or so.

Ben: Maybe after we’ve gotten to a milestone, like 100,000 hits or something.

Me: Fine, fuck it. We don’t even have a name yet. What should our name be?

Fin.

We’re now well past 100,000 hits, and still no ads. Why? General laziness, and an aversion to self-promotion mostly. We probably could have made the money we invested in this little adventure back by now (as it was only about $50) if we were smarter about the whole thing, but the truth is that it’s a sunk cost. Plus, I still owe Ben and Trevor my share. Sorry, guys! I’ll pay you real soon!

Anyway, up at the top of the site, there’s a little “Contact” button, which, when you click it, reveals that we have an email address. Sometimes people click it and send us mail. It’s exciting! A little thrill runs up the leg when that happens, if you know what I mean. So, yesterday somebody clicked it, and this is what she wrote. Her name is Christie.

Read the rest of this entry »

1

Still going tanning? Well, you know, STOP. Just stop.

By
Trevor Macomber
– June 9, 2011

Look, I get it: being tanned is attractive. It evens out skin tone, masks unsightly blemishes and freckles, and implies a vigorous outdoor lifestyle — or at least the socioeconomic status necessary to enjoy multiple sun-drenched vacations a year.

Of course, as my fellow polar bear and not-yet-fellow (on my part) comedian Hari Kondabolu once pointed out, you don’t hear a lot of Indian guys getting complimented on their tans — nor, for that matter, has it historically done much for the central and south American, Caribbean, or African populations around these parts — but on white people, they’ve evolved into something of a prerequisite for upward mobility, even to the point where a micro-trend seems to have developed in which the obscenity of one’s tan is directly related to the obscenity of one’s power.

See, for example:

Read the rest of this entry »

0

The Week is Over

By
Tom OHare
– May 27, 2011

For some reason this week felt long, didn’t it? It did. You cannot escape the fact that this week felt long. It felt so long, in fact, that I haven’t the energy to impart to you any anecdotes or hijinks from my personal life, as is my custom. Things happened. Events occurred. Most of us are still here. Those of us who aren’t have been sacrificed to oblivion, but hopefully they lived it up a bit when they had the chance.

Dear God, what have you wrought?

Enjoy the long weekend, my fellow Americans.

4

A Story About Wondering About Rachel Zolf’s “The Neighbour Procedure”

By
Ben Nolan
– May 27, 2011

A couple of days ago I had to write what’s called a “wonderment” about Rachel Zolf’s book “Neighbour Procedure” for this poetry salon thing called Influency that I’ve been participating in. Here Zolf is performing a poem from the book with Judith Butler:

And here’s the description Coach House (the book’s publisher) provides on their website:

Rachel Zolf’s powerful follow-up to the Trillium Award-winning Human Resources is a virtuoso polyvocal correspondence with the daily news, ancient scripture and contemporary theory that puts the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine firmly in the crosshairs. Plucked from a minefield of competing knowledges, media and public texts, Neighbour Proceduresees Zolf assemble an arsenal of poetic procedures and words borrowed from a cast of unlikely neighbours, including Mark Twain, Dadaist Marcel Janco, blogger-poet Ron Silliman and two women at the gym. The result is a dynamic constellation where humour and horror sit poised at the threshold of ethics and politics.

Nothing wrong with the facts, but I think it suffers from the same thing that was making writing a wonderment about the text extremely difficult: the tone is queasy-making (at least to me). Off but in a way that’s impossible to put one’s finger on. Maybe it’s that the mood is too concrete (which means narrow).  

Read the rest of this entry »

0

Sam Harris’ Fans Don’t Like Me AND! Why Sam Harris is a Bad Atheist

By
Ben Nolan
– May 26, 2011

Surprise, surprise: my last post on Harris — benignly titled “How to Blame Poor People For the World’s Problems” — made a number of Redditors (people with accounts at www.reddit.com) very angry. Apparently it was “an exercise in profound intellectually dishonesty” (ouch) “mixed in with mental masturbation” (yeah, there was some of that in there), and it was “ten times as long as it needed to be in order to express its message,” that message being, apparently, “the Bible can be dangerous, and Sam Harris doesn’t want that danger because he’s privileged, so he wants to strip the Bible of its power” (not what I was trying to say, but if that’s how people are reading it, I guess that’s on me). Mostly though, I apparently set up “a pathetic straw man” because Sam Harris totally “does not advocate ‘science-based morality” (O RLY?) and I need to “adjust [my] meds” (I’ll be sure to tell my doctor).  I’m also, apparently, “a bloody-minded pervert” (that one seemed unfair).

As much as I think these criticisms/insults are a bit (fascinatingly) off the deep end, Tom wasn’t wrong in last week’s “The Week is Over” to characterize the post as wildly extrapolative (shut up, red squiggly line, it’s a word now). Its extrapolations do seem, upon sober second reading, pretty wild. The quote that prompted it was just kind of a dam-breaking drop of water and I just found myself swept up in the angry current that burst forth (not to put it too grandly or anything). Turns out I’ve accumulated a pretty solid reservoir (to stick to the metaphor) of extraneous-to-the-particular-quote issues through my various encounters with Harris’ work over the years.

As wildly random as they may have seemed, these issues did (do) come from somewhere. And, if only to assuage the many polite concerns articulated in the comments I linked to above, I think I’d better  take up and unpack, in a few individual follow-up posts, some of the more controversial among them. Hopefully whatever ends up resulting from this closer and more sober engagement will be at least somewhat convincing and marginally less bloody-minded and perverse (still don’t really get that one).

Tentative plan for follow-up-post topics:

  1. Concerning the Claim that Sam Harris is a Bad Atheist (Below)
  2. Concerning the (Un)Measurability of States of Consciousness as Expressions of Values (Tomorrow, maybe)
  3. Concerning Sam Harris’ Terrible Theory of Motivation and Legitimation (Monday, unless I go to my friend’s cottage this weekend)
  4. Concerning the Surprisingly Controversial Claim that the Bible Contains Some of the Most Profound Existential Insights in Literature (Tuesday, but probably not)
  5. Concerning the Claim that Sam Harris is in the Business of Blaming Poor People for the World’s Problem AND A Clarification of My Theory As to Why He’s in Said Business (I’m gonna guess Friday)

Before proceeding the follow-ups, though, I want to nip a couple likely bugaboos in the bud:

  • No, I don’t believe in a magical God that cares about me or how I treat people. In fact I don’t believe in any kind of literal God. Some of my earliest memories are of thinking that the Catholic bullshit they were trying to get us to swallow at Sunday school was bullshit. I’m not arguing for the sake of some secret religious agenda.
  • No, I don’t think that any social practice within our global social system is beyond reasonable criticism (I have no trouble criticizing the Taliban). Demonstration: The way the Taliban treats women is wrong and bad. See?

But enough dilly dallying…

***

Follow-up Post 1:
Concerning the Claim that Sam Harris is a Bad Atheist
(Disclaimer: this is wonkish as fuck)

Sam Harris’ thought goes off the rails the moment he makes the claim that whatever we call values can be “reduced” to states of consciousness (read on for the source). He flies off a cliff when he claims that these states of consciousness are objectively measurable (but we’ll get to that in the next post). Sucks for him that these two moments come in immediate succession right at the axiomatic foundation of his moral reasoning. Why does it suck for him? Well… make a guess based on the title of this follow-up post and read on to see if you’re right…

Read the rest of this entry »

11

Jodi Picoult’s Gonna Make You Fat

By
Laura Macomber
– May 23, 2011

A friend and I had lunch with our high school English teacher recently, a small, lively woman with an acid tongue and a penchant for gossip that had not diminished in the years since we’d last seen her. Over soup and sandwiches at Panera, we discussed other members of the faculty who had come and gone, teachers who’d had babies, teachers who’d retired, teachers who were new when we knew them and were now head of the department. My friend, an ESL teacher on her way to a secondary English degree, had many questions for our former educator — a conversation that culminated in two terrifying words: Jodi Picoult. Apparently, our ex-teacher informed us with no little scorn, a Massachusetts public high school English syllabus is something to be modeled after a book club for suburban moms. And author Jodi Picoult has officially made the cut.

When did reading become play instead of work, and when did school become the place where we promote it as such? Reading used to be an edifying, active pastime, a skill acquired with time and effort, as one might learn to play the violin or speak a foreign language. Zadie Smith gives an elegant summary of what it means to be a reader in her 2006 interview with KCRW’s Bookworm series when she says:

The problem with readers…is, “I should sit here and I should be entertained.” And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.

Read the rest of this entry »

7

Why Not Celebrate A Killing?

By
Lindsay Atnip
– May 17, 2011


Like most schools, my alma mater donated a fraction of its undergrads to the national party following the killing of Osama bin Laden. Being the opposite of a party school, the University of Chicago’s response was no match for, say, Penn State’s riotous street party, but nonetheless (according to an article in our student paper), one fraternity’s members “marched, chanting and singing patriotic songs” to a local bar to celebrate and planned a party for the following night, “America!!! F*CK YEAH!!!” The accompanying picture of two dozen or so exuberant undergrads decked out in red, white, and blue made me feel slightly ill, which, according to Jonathan Haidt’s editorial in the New York Times last week (“Why We Celebrate a Killing,” 5/7/11) classes me with those who “[missed] all that was good, healthy and even altruistic about last week’s celebrations.” Agreed. But I believe in the end that it’s Haidt’s argument that is missing something essential — specifically, a legitimate step from our tribal evolutionary heritage to a moral justification for any modern expression of that heritage.

Haidt argues that (a) the post-ObL celebrations exemplified what Durkheim called “collective effervescence” — the strong, ego-dissolving emotion that allows individuals to experience themselves as part of the group (in this case, the tribe of America), and (b) we therefore should embrace this kind of response as good and perhaps even necessary for us to “[step] out of [our] petty and partisan selves” and act in service to something larger.

I believe that (a) is more or less correct, and (b) is dangerously wrong.

Read the rest of this entry »

2

How to Blame Poor People For the World’s Problems

By
Ben Nolan
– May 16, 2011

A couple of weeks ago, Sam Harris — standard-bearer for New Atheism, advocate of science-based morality — gave an interview to the New Statesman. Here’s an exchange from that interview:

NS: Richard Dawkins wrote a piece for the New Statesman at Christmas praising the King James Bible precisely as a work of literature.

SH: And we would have no problem if everyone read these books the way we all read Shakespeare. There are no wars being fought over rival interpretations of King Lear.

The implication is clear — as Harris sees it, the salient distinction between scripture and literature is that people take scripture to heart. It has a kind of meaning to them that propels them to action. Literature, by contrast, is benign — something pretty which we can appreciate for its prettiness but from which we, as political animals who act in the world, are removed. This sentiment underlies the Dawkins piece too, which highlights particularly familiar and elegant passages from the King James, but says nothing of substance about what makes them powerful or beautiful — he praises in the negative: Ecclesiastes appeals at least in part because it’s “hardly religious at all.”

This pattern of thought is one that sees science as much more than a method for seeking scientific truths about the natural world, but as a model for a way of approaching being. Within this framework, aesthetic and normative truths — which are experienced by what they think of as the subjective individual — are subordinated to the empirically objective, and ought to be cast off the moment they impede the pursuit of empirically objective truth.

Within the scientific disciplines (as well as those disciplines, like much of economics, that would ape it) an accusation of non-objectivity is equivalent to a denial of validity. What is objective, is. What “isn’t,” if it motivates any kind of social action, ought to be flushed along with all the religious bullshit. This works within science, but as a way of approaching life, not so much. It’s fundamentally in conflict with reality as we experience it.

Read the rest of this entry »

4

I Am Mildly Flabbergasted By Modern Technology

By
Tom OHare
– May 11, 2011

My iPod Touch is having problems. It is a second generation iPod Touch, which I was perfectly happy not knowing for as long as it didn’t have problems, but which I was forced to figure out when it came to self-prescribing a solution for said problems. I’ve had this magical device for a year and a few months. A couple days ago, I was bored and then I was like, “I guess I will go for a walk and listen to music.” So I put on my shoes and turn on my music and the left headphone on my second generation iPod Touch starts squigging out on me. All crazy in and out and bzzzt and boing and whizzzbang and whatever. And then silence. Left monitor dead.

No amount of jiggling the headphone jack would bring it back.

One of the difficulties with being relatively ignorant about the inner workings of the technologies that we use on a day-to-day basis is that when they break, we can’t fix them. This is obvious to anyone who’s ever tried to fix anything, but those numbers don’t seem to be trending upward, if I may be so bold as to make broad cultural observations without citing any sources. What I mean is that the pace of change in technology is so rapid that learning how to fix things as they’re released approaches futility: after all, why bother repairing an outdated product when you can replace it with the latest model for the same price?

This is particularly true in the case of Apple, which suggests that I send my iPod to them in exchange for a new one (for $100 and without any of my music on it, which — PROBLEM! — because the last time I updated my iTunes software, you fuckers erased like 20 albums from my library). But it’s also a simple fact of life in an age of Moore’s Law. There’s no point falling in love with a particular technology when the technology is slated for obsolescence in a couple of years.

This is all in stark contrast to the way human beings lived throughout history and up until not very long ago, when life-changing technological innovations were not multiple-times-per-decade types of events. When the VCR broke, you brought it to the VCR repair guy. When the record player needed a new needle, you went to the record player repair guy to get one. You had shoes re-soled, pants hemmed, shirts tailored and patched. Et cetera, et cetera, and get off my lawn while we’re at it, and so on… but the larger point is simple and it is this: your typical consumer product is no longer the same kind of investment it used to be. People willingly spend hundreds and thousands of dollars to get the flattest\shiniest\lightest\fastest gadget there is, and when it inevitably breaks they aren’t like, “WTF, that cost me a lot of money,” they relish the opportunity to buy an even jazzier one!

Read the rest of this entry »

3

Keeping Tabs on eReaders

By
Trevor Macomber
– May 9, 2011

Like many people these days (“these days” being any day after November 19, 2007), I own a Kindle. And while I’m definitely a fan, like any self-respecting Kindle owner, I also wish it were an iPad — not because iPads do what the Kindle does only better (they don’t), or because they do everything else better (they do), but because I could then sell my iPad, buy a Kindle, and still have a couple hundred bucks in my pocket for eBooks and hookers or whatever.

But eBooks and hookers only go so far. [Ed.'s note: don't I know it!] The bigger question is, is there even room for an ereader in a tablet’s world? According to the HuffPo’s Amy Lee, the answer is no. In an article published last Thursday detailing the imminent demise of the dedicated ereader for reasons similar to those discussed during my brief eulogy for the Flip cam, Ms. Lee announces that

The ereader’s days are numbered.

Whoa. Dramatic. Please continue.

Read the rest of this entry »

Page 4 of 7« First...23456...Last »