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    Goodbye to All This

    Mark Dery’s final essay for True/Slant is a dirge—or, alternatively, a tribute—to involving, surprising, unabashedly literate long-form non-fiction in the age of online page-view driven skimmery.

    The mark of a real writer is that she cares deeply about literary joinery, about keeping the lines of her prose plumb. That’s what makes writers writers: to them, prose isn’t just some Platonic vessel for serving up content; they care about words. Any chief product officer who says “quality online does not equal craftsmanship” is channeling the utilitarian gospel of the managerial class, an instrumentalist vision of journalism that presumes writing, online, is just a turkey baster for injecting content into the user’s brain. Undeniably, that sort of writing is everywhere, online, from here to eHow.com, an algal bloom of brain-cloggingly awful prose. It results in reader die-off, in the long run, because bloggers posting in a workplace culture that dismisses the importance of craft will tend, unsurprisingly, to turn out stories that aren’t well-crafted, and what isn’t well-crafted isn’t well-read.

    This was precisely my experience in three-plus years on the IGN.com editorial team. I’m not sure why I expected more, honestly. I do know I left more convinced than ever that good writing matters. We should all savor it, and expect it.

    The Bitch is Back

    Andrew Corsello’s delicious deconstruction of Ayn Rand for GQ.

    It’s the damnedest thing. One day you’ve got a bright young kid dutifully connecting the dots of his liberal-arts education; the next, he’s got Roark and Galt in the marrow and has become…an insufferable asshole.

    I was deep in it back in the day, myself, and call it personal bitterness at what Rand’s keening opinions did to close me off from the world, but I still don’t think she and her philosophy — better, the broader selfish barbarism of which hers, maybe after fascism, was the most shamelessly bloodless expression —have gotten quite the demolishing they deserve.

    “
    There are different species of laziness: Eastern and Western. The Eastern style is like the one practised in India. It consists of hanging out all day in the sun, doing nothing, avoiding any kind of work or useful activity, drinking cups of tea, listening to Hindi film music blaring on the radio, and gossiping with friends. Western laziness is quite different. It consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so there is no time at all to confront the real issues. This form of laziness lies in our failure to choose worthwhile applications for our energy.
    Sogyal Rinpoche
    (this post was reblogged from zachklein)

    “One of the many stupidities we allow our politicians — a stupidity that seems to us as incontestable as the law of gravity — is the phrase ‘jobs for working people.’ Oh yes, we all want that. But what exactly does it mean? Does it refer to jobs in menial and debasing situations from the slaughterhouse to McDonalds to Wal-Mart to the corporate carrel? Why do we think in such an uncomplicated way that these are good and desirable forms of work? Is it impossible to imagine that what politicians mean by prosperity is actually experienced by human beings as boredom? As weariness? As betrayal? And just who are these ‘working people,’ after all? Are some people not working people? Doesn’t the term refer to those among us who have little choice except to do anything, regardless of the destructiveness of the task, so long as it is dignified with the title ‘job’?”

    — Curtis White, The Barbaric Heart

    Rise of the Tablog

    Nick Cernis wonders where the pleasurable online writing has gone.

    It’s frightfully hard to write a blog without feeling that it must do something: even the most humble blogger is encouraged to create a unique selling point, target a ‘laser-focussed niche’, embrace social media, spawn viral content, track stats, and have a dedicated marketing drive; they must teach and inspire, build ‘authority’, start a ‘conversation’, and foster a ‘community’; they should seek out a purpose, a gameplan, a revenue stream, and an exit strategy.

    I imagine someone like Douglas Rushkoff would certainly have points to add to this, given that the above bit describes the rewiring of a once-freewheeling Internet to serve corporate needs. Rushkoff touches on this in Life, Inc. (a book I’ll slip in a clumsy recommendation for any time).

    Big Food vs. Big Insurance

    Michael Pollan writes another acute op-ed for The New York Times.

    But so far, food system reform has not figured in the national conversation about health care reform. And so the government is poised to go on encouraging America’s fast-food diet with its farm policies even as it takes on added responsibilities for covering the medical costs of that diet. To put it more bluntly, the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.
    Paul Roberts, in his book The End of Food, calls this the “protein paradox”: meat production has outstripped people production. Through advances in breeding and grain feeding, the cost of one pound of meat is cheaper now than at any time in history. And yet that downswing in cost hasn’t led to any kind of meat-eating democracy. If anything, it has enabled—and at this point, even encouraged—a kind of pork chop dictatorship. Not only do we eat too much meat, we also eat too much of the wrong parts. We don’t know where our meat comes from, we don’t know what the animal we’re eating ate, and we sure don’t know how to get behind the stove and take control of what we put in our mouths. We ought to start by looking at the great food cultures of the world. The traditional cuisines of Asia and North Africa, not to mention France and Italy, are based on rice, wheat, spices and smatterings of all cuts of meat. In just about every other cuisine, protein plays second fiddle to grains and vegetables. When meat appears, it does so modestly; it takes up less space on the plate, and more often than not it’s a piece of the animal—tripe or oxtail—that Americans so willingly discard. Why Cooking Matters by Dan Barber

    Paul Roberts, in his book The End of Food, calls this the “protein paradox”: meat production has outstripped people production. Through advances in breeding and grain feeding, the cost of one pound of meat is cheaper now than at any time in history. And yet that downswing in cost hasn’t led to any kind of meat-eating democracy. If anything, it has enabled—and at this point, even encouraged—a kind of pork chop dictatorship. Not only do we eat too much meat, we also eat too much of the wrong parts. We don’t know where our meat comes from, we don’t know what the animal we’re eating ate, and we sure don’t know how to get behind the stove and take control of what we put in our mouths.

    We ought to start by looking at the great food cultures of the world. The traditional cuisines of Asia and North Africa, not to mention France and Italy, are based on rice, wheat, spices and smatterings of all cuts of meat. In just about every other cuisine, protein plays second fiddle to grains and vegetables. When meat appears, it does so modestly; it takes up less space on the plate, and more often than not it’s a piece of the animal—tripe or oxtail—that Americans so willingly discard.

    Why Cooking Matters by Dan Barber

    Big food companies hilariously attempt to regulate themselves