Stuff from February, 2011
This is the archive of tumbledry happenings that occurred on February, 2011.
This is the archive of tumbledry happenings that occurred on February, 2011.
Malcolm Gladwell debunks college ranking systems in the New Yorker:
… at a time when American higher education is facing a crisis of accessibility and affordability, we have adopted a de-facto standard of college quality that is uninterested in both of those factors. And why? Because a group of magazine analysts in an office building in Washington, D.C., decided twenty years ago to value selctivity over efficacy, to use proxies that scarcely relate to what they’re meant to be proxies for, and to pretend that they can compare a large, diverse, low-cost land-grant university in rural Pennsylvania with a small, expensive, private Jewish university on two campuses in Manhattan.
The title track of Radiohead’s 2000 album Kid A is incredible. There’s an ambient feel to it (echoing synth-marimbas), unique rhythm, electronic scratches and pops. Yet it’s more than the sum of those parts. Until recently, I’d never listened to it and I don’t know why. I mean, I loved “In Rainbows”, so I don’t know why I didn’t give Radiohead’s previous albums a better listen.
I have always found the cycle of the seasons reassuring. One year at Cannes I was told by Tony Curtis, born in New York, that the problem with living in Los Angeles was that without seasons it was always the same year: “You go to sleep by your pool one afternoon, and when you wake up you’re 60.”
Merz has a great song called Moi et Mon Camion. It’s extremely lovely. He also does electronic stuff… but his guitar-driven folksy stuff is a bit more pleasant.
“The Someone You’re Not” in Esquire magazine is about a man wrongfully imprisoned for almost 30 years.
He loves work. He got out May 5 and started working June 21. Hell, I’ve been vacationing for thirty years. He wears a smock and pushes a mail cart. He stops at all the cubicles, greets everyone with his friendly smile. Ray even loves commuting to work, especially now, in his new car, a black Ford Focus. He’s like a sixteen-year-old who can finally drive himself to school. It costs almost the same to park as it does to take the train.