Don’t get distracted. Don’t give in to deceit.

Last week—and, presumably, just in time for The Anniversary—Fareed Zakaria wrote a brief (though concise and effective) piece in Newsweek about what he thinks America has lost in the wake of, and what he correctly labels overreaction to, The Event. The conclusion:

Conservatives are worried about the growing power of the state. Surely this usurpation is more worrisome than a few federal stimulus programs. When James Madison pondered this issue, he came to a simple conclusion: “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germs of every other.” [...]

“No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual war,” Madison concluded.

Though not word-for-word, Zakaria’s missive sounds similar in thesis to a piece of writing (that I’ve quoted before) by my late, great idol, David Foster Wallace:

Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”?

The United States, in its entire history, has never been what you’d call a “peaceful nation”. But for how far humans have come in technological innovation and knowledge of the nature of the world around us, we are still so woefully underdeveloped internally, in our emotional understanding and sympathetic relatability. We should expect better from our leaders, from each other, and from ourselves.

Most who have written have told me that the four-in-hand is too sloppy, lopsided, or small to be suitable. This, of course, presumes that symmetry, neatness and large size are desirable in a necktie knot. They are not. [...]

[A] necktie knot should never be neat. A necktie knot should be expressive. It should be human. As Glenn O’Brien puts it, “Real elegance involves impeccable taste and a peccable sense of nonchalance.”

I like this because it reminds us that a sense of style and appearance is a distinctly human trait, a result perhaps of some confluence of self-recognition and self-consciousness. The idea of being fashionable suddenly becomes less supercilious if you choose to look at it not only as a way of displaying one’s stylistic idiosyncrasies, but also as a way of reflecting one’s very humanness and imperfection.

For me, finally watching Twilight didn’t really confirm or dispel anything. Yes, it was bad. No, it wasn’t as bad as everyone seems to think it is. But then again, I haven’t read the books, so maybe it’s worse than I’m aware. But, in my extremely brief online search, here is the best criticism I found of the series of novels:

Good books deal with themes of longing and loneliness, sexual passion and human frailty, alienation and fear just as the Twilight books do. But [good books] do so by engaging us with complexities of feeling and subtleties of character, expressed in language that rises above banal mediocrity. Their reward is something more than just an escape into banal mediocrity. We deserve something better to get hooked on.

To wit, the most popular definition of twihard on Urban Dictionary: “[O]bsessive people … who are in love with fictional characters and wouldn’t know a good book if it punched them in the face.” All of this echoes the sentiments of a fantastic interview with David Foster Wallace about his essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction. In it, Wallace perhaps offers a little bit of hope to the fiction that Stephanie Meyer is offering:

I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering … We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.

Even “low” art can be redemptive and, whether you believe it’s low art or not, the Twilight series can elicit a feeling of redemption. But I think what distinguishes high art from low art a lot of the time (because the difference sometimes can be unclear) is whether the art encourages you to get outside of yourself and be uncomfortable rather than retreat inside of yourself and imagine a better life—good art forces you to accept that your life is perfect in its imperfectness, rather than the other way around. Say what you want about its love story, but at the end of the day Twilight seems to me only to encourage the viewers/readers to imagine what their lives would be like with Edward, or Jacob, or even Bella. There’s no empathy there for any real-world parallels you might have to these people in your life, probably because these characters are expressly written to be unrealistically gorgeous and romanticized.

So then, besides the whole imprinting on toddlers thing, what’s the real problem with Twilight? Take it away, David.

But now realize that … most kinds of “low” art—which just means art whose primary aim is to make money—is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort. So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s readership is “dumb,” I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today’s readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard.

1. Actually, I primarily watched it because the girlf wouldn’t stay awake for my movie (the hilarious 1984 comedy, Top Secret!), but she seemed pretty chipper for some R-Pattz.

1. We collected 552,000 example user pictures.
2. We paired them up and asked people to make snap judgments.
3. We collated these millions of judgments with the time of day each picture was taken, what the shutter speed was, and so on.
4. We made graphs.

And the results? Well, they’re very interesting to read, but if you don’t care or are too lazy to click through and read, I’ll sum it up for you. Panasonic camera users rated highest in attractiveness, followed by Canon and Nikon. Using a flash makes you less attractive in photos because it makes you all blown out and bright (duh), causing your skin to look weird and emphasizing blemishes. A low f stop will make the background of the photo blurry and make you, the subject, sharper by contrast and, therefore, more intimate and attractive. The best times to take photos is during the afternoon. Oh, and iPhone users have more sex:

Here’s the conclusion of the post:

[T]he data strongly suggest that if you’re single, you (or someone you know) should learn a little bit about photography. Technique can make or break your photograph, and the right decisions can get you more dates.

It’s actually not that hard. Use a decent camera. Go easy on the flash. Own the foreground. Take your picture in the afternoon. Then visit the nearest Apple store. Done.

The interesting thing to note here is that all of this information and advice relies solely on people dating online. There’s no need to know any photography in order to market yourself better to get someone you meet in person to ask you out—they will have made their own judgments right then and there with their own eyes and idiosyncratic tastes and drives. Yet another way that technology (and your knowledge of it, or lack thereof) can affect your life.

You see, nobody shops at vintage stores except for people who want to look “hip”. The fact of the matter is, the whole myth of people being homeless and not having enough money to shop at higher-end retailers is just that—a myth. They don’t exist. And there are especially no broke hipsters. At least not in a country like America, where everyone is wealthy. Therefore, the appearance of frugality is clearly a fashion statement. Also, there’s no actual thrill in finding something awesome that’s only $1.50. The only thrill is in being able to tell your friends that you got that old dress or cardigan for $1.50, and revel in the knowledge that you got the only one available.

You know what’s really cool? Being emaciated. It’s true. Eating disorders are in this season. There aren’t any hipsters that wish they could gain weight either, that aren’t happy that they don’t seem to put on any weight no matter how much they eat. Not one. And so they get thinner and thinner so they can fit into ever tighter pants. Fun fact: wearing black pants was highly unfashionable until hipsters decided it was cool. It’s true! Ask your parents!

Most people don’t know this, but the Smurfs and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been around for decades. Why don’t most people know this, you ask? They weren’t popular! You probably didn’t even know about them until you read this article. Both shows only became well known when companies like Urban Outfitters started putting them on tee shirts. It was only then that childrens’ cartoon shows from the 1980s gained any kind of following because, after all, today’s hipsters were more concerned with looking cool when they were kids and generally found the other kids that watched cartoons to be philistines.

You’d think belts would be a great way to accessorize, but you’d be wrong. Mainly belts act as another way for hipsters to gain attention and admiration from their peer group. The more flashy the belt, the more adoration the hipster garners. Also, I’ll bet you thought that spiked belts were worn by goths and that rhinestone belts were for middle school girls. Nope! Those were the hipsters. You must not have been cool enough to notice.

Converse Chuck Taylor All-Star sneakers were first produced in 1917. However, very few people purchased the shoes and Converse went largely unnoticed for three-quarters of a century, until the year 1994. That year marked the first year that a hipster wore a pair of Chuck Taylors. Due to a resultant explosion in the sneakers’ popularity and despite absolutely no connection with any kind of organized sport, Nike purchased Converse in 2003.

There you have it. Now you know exactly why you should be dressing like a hipster: because if you do, some pretentious asshole may just write a vague article or start a stupid meme blog about you.

Does it, in other words, deny gays and lesbians “equal protection under the laws,” as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment? And does it violate the Due Process Clause by impinging on a “fundamental right” without granting due process under the laws?

And the defense? The Mercury News is on the case:

“A stay is essential to averting the harms that would flow from another purported window of same-sex marriage in California,” [lawyers for the Proposition 8 defense team] wrote.

The defense has yet to comment on exactly what those “harms” are. In a related story, officials are still investigating the simultaneous disappearance of everyone’s common sense and humanity.¹

1. EDIT: I take that back… for now: Judge rules California’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional.

The blog can be used to [sic] disseminating content, expressing opinions, keeping up-to-date and remembering, writing, interacting, and creating relationships.

Blogs can be treacherously unedited,¹ but there are similarities nonetheless:

But often the readers do not interact at all. The perceived readership is highlighted by Yardi, et al. (2009) as an important factor for blogging, and the actual amount of readership can be hard to determine. One of the researchers points out that he thinks that the interaction in blogs is exaggerated and that he experiences that blogging is more of one-way communication than a dialogue.²

You’d think that the advantage of digital media over print media is the collaborative or communicative aspect of it that print doesn’t generally have—real-time comments are possible on blogs in a way that is not when reading a book. But it seems that comments don’t necessarily make blogs that much more collaborative than books are.³ In fact, some view them as a hindrance to the conversation. Take Gruber’s Daring Fireball for recent example:

What I tend to get instead aren’t queries or complaints about the lack of comments, but rather demands that I add them—demands from entitled people who see that I’ve built something very nice that draws much attention, and who believe they have a right to share in it.

They don’t.

He goes on.

Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches.

It is yet to be seen if the rise of blogs will have the same sort of impact as Gutenberg’s printing press, as any educational or informational effects blogs may have could be offset by their seemingly more popular use as a method of disseminating YouTube videos of cats on a mass scale.

1. The one you’re currently reading, my own, is a useful example of this.
2. As such, I guess I shouldn’t feel so bad about never receiving any comments on the majority of my posts.
3. That is to say, conversations occur between blogs, rather than on a single blog.

Earlier this afternoon I signed up for Flavors.me, to which I feel a need to give a shout-out. I’d heard about it when it first launched, but I don’t know why I didn’t sign up until just now.

If you have an Internet presence that spans a handful of websites, as I do, Flavors.me is a useful, design-y little app that allows you to customize a single page to act as a hub that you can send folks to so they can check out your websites, blogs, or your work. You can even set it up to display your blog’s posts, Twitter feed, and photos (and more) right there on the page. I don’t have it set up to do that, but I could definitely see myself linking to my job’s website (when I become so gainfully employed), my résumé, and my portfolio once I have a more significant body of work.

If you check out their directory, all of the different pages that people have created use the space so uniquely and creatively. It’s as much a human study as it is a design study. It also gave me a great excuse to use a new self-portrait that I took this morning. It’s win-win.