A Little Bit of Dorkiness

Off On a Tangent: Serious Nonfiction in the Digital Age

offonatangent:

This is a subject that’s been on my mind a lot these past few weeks, driven largely by the absolutely deserved attention cycle given to Robert Caro’s LBJ biography and volume 4, THE PASSAGE OF POWER. It’s not just that Caro is a throwback, someone whose career was the product of a time when…

A room of her own: Where are the female executive chefs?

Essay #72, written by my dear friend Lindsay, about the lack of women leading kitchens in Madison (and elsewhere). I’m probably biased, but I thought it was a great story.

Who Is the Author of Toni Morrison?

Essay #71: For some reason, this particular image (in bold) just cracks me up:

Morrison’s voice is as layered and visceral as her writing. The author growls, purrs, giggles, and barks. Discussing politics, her voice rises in indignation before cresting and breaking into a loud chuckle. (“They should have that in the military, or the prisons—a little affirmative action! Let’s bring some white guys in!”) She surrenders to a wheezing, shoulder-shaking, freight-train laugh when describing a particularly gruesome Funny or Die video. She booms theatrically in recounting the ghost stories her parents would tell every night. (“Sharpen my knife, sharpen my knife, gonna cut my wife’s head off!”) She slows to a pedagogical rhythm while discussing her “invisible ink”—symbols and allusions in her work that would be picked up only by a deep reader, or maybe someone writing a dissertation twenty years from now. And in more confessional moments, Morrison reverts to a register that’s gotten stronger with age, a husky but girlish whisper imparting both vulnerability and authority. That’s how she broaches, gingerly, the death of her son Slade, sixteen months ago, at 45, “which has clouded everything, everything, everything, everything,” she says. “It’ll be with me like a shroud, or a cape, forever.”

The federal fun czar: UW's Constance Steinkuehler shapes the White House's videogame policy

Essay #70 — This is a profile of my former roommate’s graduate school advisor who is spending this year working as a senior policy advisor in the Office of Science and Technology Policym, trying to “coordinating the federal dollars that are now being invested in what’s known as ‘games for impact.”

Our “white people problems” problem: Why it’s time to stop using “white” as a pejorative

I get annoyed whenever anyone slaps a label on something and then presumes that the label itself says all that needs to be said. Whenever a critic or a potential audience member sniffs about “dad rock” or “chick lit” or “one for the fanboys,” it raises my hackles. If you’d rather not engage with what a piece of art actually is—as in, what it expresses and how well it is expresses it—then fine. But don’t presume some kind of superiority because of that choice. One of the biggest fallacies in the way we talk about art is this idea that somehow personal taste equates to quality: That each of us miraculously only enjoys movies and music that are the best of their respective medium, and ergo, any movies and music we don’t enjoy must be terrible. It’s a standard we generally only apply to art. (Well, and politics.) If we dislike salmon, we don’t presume salmon itself to be bad; we just understand we don’t have a taste for it, and we’re generally willing to acknowledge that if prepared properly, we might even be capable of enjoying the occasional piece of salmon. It’s not that degrees of “good” and “bad” don’t exist, but ultimately our taste in art isn’t so different from our taste in food, in that it’s personal, and—if we’re being honest with ourselves—fairly malleable.

I like this quote in the piece quite a bit, particularly the part in bold (emphasis mine, obviously). But the whole piece is worth a read when thinking about the ways we talk about art and culture and whatnot.

Beezow Doo-doo Zopittybop-bop-bop: Behind the name, a complex figure

Essay #69, a story about a Wisconsin man who made national news in January because of his unique name after he was arrested in Madison. I like this story as an example of an essay that uses the story of one person to explore bigger challenges (in this case, of how “the support structures in our society are intended to help and the challenges involved in providing those services.”)