It’s fashionable to hate on TED all of a sudden. In the span of a month, we’ve got this piece by Nathan Jurgenson in The New Inquiry, this one by Benjamin Wallace in New York Magazine, and this one by Megan Garber in The Atlantic.
TED is Dead
Poker Buddies BOMB
BOMB Magazine has a conversation between poker buddies Nam Le and Charles D’Ambrosio.
Pathological Point-Making
Recommended Reading: Vinson Cunningham at The New Yorker on what makes an essay “American.”
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Covering Lolita
Disappointed by how few of the dozens of official book cover designs of Nabokov’s Lolita “correspond thematically to the novel,” blog Venus febriculosa is holding a book cover design contest (pdf) to create a new cover for Lolita and is awarding a $350 prize. (Thx, John)
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Grappling with Language
“Aposiopesis: To cut short a trash-talking opponent mid-taunt by suplexing him. Can also be used in political debates.” Matt Seidel walks readers through a glossary of rhetorical wrestling terms.
Visual Stories
If you haven’t seen Knopf art director Chip Kidd’s humorous TED Talk yet, you should really get right on that. He makes a good “visual first impression,” discusses the role of a book designer, the smell of an iPad, and does it all while wearing a “skanky mic.”
Nice song
As these glamorati yap and network their way from conference to conference, getting off on their personal branding, I don’t see the world becoming a noticeably better place from all the hot air being expelled. Years ago, Thomas Merton wrote of the danger of becoming associated with, and therefore the representative and inevitable defender of, any particular set of ideas; he felt that it could only limit him as a thinker. Before the concept of personal branding was branded, he was wholeheartedly against it. And that is one reason why Merton is a profound, unpinnable thinker (just as Freud is not a Freudian, and Marx is not a Marxist), while Richard Saul Wurman, Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, and David Brooks, for all their occasional virtues, are not. Rather, they are mainly pseudo-intellectual opportunists for whom the conference world (along with the obligatory appearances on Charlie Rose, etc.) is just another way of growing their bottom line.