Author Archives: shaun

tumblr

shared content

“

The irony of the business of baseball is that the business has a seriousness that the game lacks: the fortune of a billion-dollar company rests on the shoulders of the twenty-five players competing to hold their spots on the roster, and an enormous pride comes with being one of those players. Now that I’ve quit, I will never again find myself in a position where the stakes are so high and I’m held accountable. I miss that the most. But quitting, for me, was still the right move.

A few days into the start of this season, my friend Anthony Rizzo, who plays first base for the Cubs, called me to say that he had told A. J. Burnett that the rookie who broke up his no-hitter had retired. Burnett replied, half joking, “I wish the kid had retired one year earlier.”

Sometimes I wish the same thing. For whatever reason, I was never the sort of player who could enjoy a game, a play, or a hit before moving on to prepare for the next one. It was only after I quit that I wished I hadn’t always kept my head down, relentlessly climbing to reach the top of the game, to fulfill an American dream. I wish I had looked up more often, even at the cost of some of my success. The American dream didn’t tell me that an experience only matters if I acknowledge it, that losing yourself in the game is a good way to lose what makes life meaningful. When you’re standing at the plate and you hit a sharp foul ball to the backstop, the spot on the bat that made contact gets hot; the American dream forgot to tell me to step back and enjoy the smell of burnt wood.

”

– http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sportingscene/2013/10/why-i-quit-major-league-baseball.html

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“

In science, the days are long gone when Michael Faraday, who started out as a bookseller’s apprentice, could teach himself enough to revolutionise a field. But “the questions that philosophy asks are questions that my 11-year-old nephew could understand, and I think that’s significant,” says Crane. If there is a God, who made God? But he adds: “Philosophy is a discipline. You’ve got to discipline your thought. It’s not just making stuff up. And disciplining your thought is very hard to achieve.”

Even so, amateurs have managed it. Ludwig Wittgenstein was an engineering student when he began reflecting on philosophy, and if we no longer categorise him as an outsider, that’s only because his work proved so persuasive. Copernicus and Galileo were spurned by the mainstream, but we never hear about the countless outsiders whose ideas rightly sank into obscurity. Anyway, the problem with theories such as Birnbaum’s is not that they’re ridiculous, Crane argues; it’s that they don’t go deep enough. “Lots of philosophers have thought of potential as being something that really exists,” he says. “But if it’s going to explain anything, it has to be something real. And if it’s something real, then it can’t explain how reality itself came into existence.” Philosophy’s darkest question persists.

”

– http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/19/david-birnbaum-jeweller-philosopher

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“Graffiti art, let’s remember, is purposefully one of the less controlled and more transient of art forms. It is inherently communal, whether in the enjoyment or in its genesis and longevity. Performance art, of course, is more fleeting by definition, but both graffiti and performance art take away much of the control from the artist, whether limiting themselves in time or creating a painting that will necessarily be under the community’s control. Both though, tend to raise a strange frustration in people, perhaps because these forms so diverge from our traditional notions of art as eternal, as belonging in a museum. Graffiti takes the city as its canvas, the walls, alleyways, and windows of lived life, an intrusion of art into the stuffiness of the city, but always as part of the city. To then treat it as an objet d’art, to quarantine it off, transforms it and takes it out of its natural and proper context.”

– http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/joe-winkler-objectified/

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“

Why coffee? For starters, it’s the second-largest traded commodity in the world, after oil. Despite heavy marketing efforts, hardly anyone picks a gas station for the brand. But they’ll administer a pistol-whipping over coffee.

Pierre Bourdieu, whose 1979 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste is rather impenetrable, had a theory I like:

>

Pour-over coffee—waiting ten minutes for coffee to trickle through a specially-made Japanese funnel—comes to mind. Taste, including the mouth stuff, is completely inseparable from culture. We own no part of our aesthetics. Instead we use preferences to create and understand the social structures we are part of. Hard workers “Run on Dunkin’.” Most Bay Area snob-shops offer a personal coffee experience, each cup made just for you.

But as soon as the middle class latches onto the favorites of the rich and famous, the wealthy move on.

Starbucks worked for awhile, with its grande/venti code and delightfully artsy interior. But lattes haven’t been enough for years; even McDonald’s serves them now. Where to go but snobbier precincts?

”

– http://www.theawl.com/2013/10/what-does-your-coffee-say-about-you-and-is-it-something-terrible

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“

Global wine consumption has been on the rise almost without interruption (save for a short stint between 2008 and 2009) since the late 1990s. The US and China, in particular, have been drinking more. The US, which guzzles roughly 12% of the world’s wine, has seen its per capita consumption double since the start of the century. And China, which is now the world’s fifth largest import market, has doubled its consumption not once, but twice in the past five years.

World production hasn’t managed to keep pace. Outputs have steadily declined in a number of the world’s most prosperous regions. Overall, global production has been on a downward trend ever since the early 2000s, when there were still massive excesses. Peak wine, the report holds, isn’t merely upon us; it already happened—back in 2004.

”

– http://qz.com/140602/a-global-wine-shortage-could-soon-be-upon-us/#140602/a-global-wine-shortage-could-soon-be-upon-us/

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“

THE moving assembly line was the simplest of inventions, born of necessity to meet the exploding demand for automobiles in America in the early 20th century.

And while it turned 100 years old this month, “the line” remains as integral to the progress of the auto industry as it was in the days of Henry Ford.

The assembly line is a constantly evolving industrial ballet of workers and robots building cars. And automakers like the Ford Motor Company are finding that building multiple models on the same line is a huge key to success in the intensely competitive global marketplace.

”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/30/automobiles/100-years-down-the-line.html?pagewanted=1&ref=todayspaper

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“

One decade after “Saturday Night Live” began in 1975, it added the first black woman to its primary cast. Danitra Vance, a gifted downtown actress and Second City veteran, lasted just one season.

“Saturday Night Live” later cast Ellen Cleghorne (1991-95) and Maya Rudolph, a biracial star who left in 2007. And that’s it. In this context, it’s no wonder that the cast member Kenan Thompson set off a debate this month when he explained the show’s dearth of black women this way: “It’s just a tough part of the business,” he told TV Guide. “Like in auditions, they just never find ones that are ready.”

Let me state the obvious: That “Saturday Night Live,” once home of the Not Ready for Prime Time players, has hired only three black women for its main cast— in addition to Yvonne Hudson, a featured player in 1980 — in four decades says more about the show than about the talent pool. That doesn’t mean that the show’s executive producer, Lorne Michaels, discriminates so much as he doesn’t put a premium on this kind of diversity.

”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/30/arts/television/for-snl-cast-being-diverse-may-be-better-than-being-ready.html?ref=todayspaper

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“

The café and the final cup are the biggest culprits in the energy vacuum that is the coffee supply (and demand) chain. Of the 10 to 11 pounds of carbon emissions that the average pound of coffee creates, as much as 50% is created at the retail and consumer level.

This not insignificant energy usage is the result of multiple factors. Heating and air conditioning in an environment with constant temperature fluctuations (think of the gust one way or another every time a new customer walks in the door); outlets in constant use behind the counter (toasters, blenders, grinders, brewers, fridges, dishwasher if the baristas are lucky) and in front (laptops, phone chargers); espresso machines and grinders left on 24-7 for efficiency’s sake; lights left on in the bathroom and the basement when no one’s using them; computerized POS, cash register, and/or credit-card machines; mountains upon mountains of paper-cup waste; and, of course, the perpetual flowing of water through coffee equipment, toilets, and sinks.

”

– http://drinks.seriouseats.com/2013/10/calculating-coffees-carbon-footprint-energy-usage-to-farm-pick-ship-roast-brew-coffee.html

Standard