December 2010
20 posts
10 tags
Brutish Geek Wears Damn Collar Forever
The Truth Wears Off by Jonah Lehrer (New Yorker): Because scientific knowledge in many areas is basically based on statistics, it is quite often subject to the decline effect; an initial study will find a large effect, but the effects will decrease over time and perhaps disappear. This happens more often than you’d suspect because of a) publication bias - journals are rarely interested in...
7 tags
Insomnia Worms Mothering Bad Sex Myth
On Insomnia by Elizabeth Gumport (This Recording): This is an excellent and quite poetic take on what it is like to have insomnia, and the different stages of insomnia that you go through, from the feeling you’re part of a somehow cooler midnight world, seeing things that others don’t, to the depths of existential despair that it drags you into.
The Worms Within by Robin Ann Smith...
3 tags
Music Dump - Top 20 Articles of 2010, Part 2 →
And here’s part 2 of my ‘best articles’ year round-up for The Vine, with articles by Chuck Klosterman, Gary Shteyngart, Nitsuh Abebe, Sean Michaels, etc. (All of the linking problems are fixed on both parts too!)
3 tags
Music Dump - Top 20 Articles of 2010, Part 1 →
I pick my favourite articles of the year. There’s no real order. I haven’t seen the table of contents of the Da Capo Best Music Writing of 2010 (I imagine there’s not much overlap, but that’s because there’s been plenty of good writing about music!) and I could have chosen an almost entirely different 20 and still be happy with it.
Edit: Jonathan Bogart says...
11 tags
Strange Eastern Conspiracy Hath Ethical Chocolate
The Quaid Conspiracy by Nancy Jo Sales (Vanity Fair): The movie star Randy Quaid, and his wife Evi, have recently fled to Canada in order to hide from ‘Hollywood Star Whackers’, who they allege had a hand in the deaths of David Carradine and Heath Ledger, and the poisoning of Jeremy Piven. You do get the impression, however, that the conspiracy theory stuff is all Evi’s, and that...
9 tags
Subconscious Children Worship Runaway Dog Words
The Runaway Doctor by Buzz Bissinger (Vanity Fair): For Mark Weinberger, his medical practice was a money-making opportunity - as TheNoseDoctor he would see a hundred patients a day, and would almost always prescribe them the same nose surgery. And because this production line was geared towards making money rather than good surgery, he ended up with a lot of malpractice suits. So he disappeared....
11 tags
Mythical IQ Amnesia Solves $300-A-Pound Penguins
Gordon Likes To Think He Is The Most Underrated Of All Mythical Heroes by Paul Hiebert (The Awl): This is a very human and slightly heartbreaking portrait of ‘Gordon’, a Canadian man with schizophrenia, which tries to see him as he is, living his life in a reasonably successful way despite his illness, and exploring how he thinks and how he uses his thoughts and how they use him - the...
2 tags
Top Things of 2010 →
Marcus who edits the Vine invited people to do best of year things, and it was up to us what we wanted to focus on. When I was trying to figure out what to do, Tom Ewing’s column about little moments popped into my head, and that made intuitive sense. So I went for my ten favourite moments in music for the year: the bits that, for me, changed a song from great to sublime.
8 tags
Music Dump - Bono Hates Short Stack's Bubblegum... →
Let’s face it, you were listening to Live, Bush, & Alanis in 1995 – how do they hold up now?; Nitsuh Abebe’s primer on how to hate the Beatles for fun and profit; a review of Short Stack’s This Is Bat Country; Kim Cooper on the joys of discovering obscure bands like the Sex Clark Five; in defense of Simply Red; give me more more more of that bubblegum music; the digital...
9 tags
Political Animal Fails Streetlight Therapy Woman
Meet The Woman Without Fear by Ed Yong (Not Exactly Rocket Science): A woman from Kentucky, as a result of a brain disease, feels no fear. None. She lives in a poor area, and when she was held up at knifepoint, she said brightly to her assailant that God’s angels would protect her, and he was freaked out and ran away. Of course, the same lack of fear means she gets into the kind of dangerous...
3 tags
Number Ones: Bruno Mars' 'Grenade' →
A review of Bruno Mars’ second #1 single here in Australia, ‘Grenade’ for the Vine. Within I argue that ‘Grenade’ is weird and maudlin, and is transparently more or less a Michael Jackson tribute, but is a very well-constructed song.
My favourite line in the piece: “(May I point out that, if the whole world – all seven billion of them - stopped and stared at...
8 tags
Prairie Cravings Create Improvisational Santana...
The Improvisational Brain by Amanda Rose Martinez (Seed): As someone who has played in the kind of band that can stretch a song out to 20-30 minutes depending on our mood (and who invariably improvises solos), Martinez is on the money here: improvising does seem to just ‘come out’, but it only does so after you’ve done the more boring task of learning riffs and scales and rhythms...
8 tags
Master Enchantress Dropping Groupie Volunteer...
Master Of Play by Nick Paumgarten (New Yorker): Shigeru Miyamoto seems to have invented putting a story into video games, and is the man who more or less invented Donkey Kong, Mario, Zelda, and who was a big part of the development of the Wii (and who is still happily a salaryman at Nintendo after 30 years). The way he thinks about games is quite fascinating, and Paumgarten makes interesting...
7 tags
Mysterious Stupid Lying Slut Wife Illusion
Do I Love My Wife? An Investigative Report by A.J. Jacobs (Esquire): Intrepid reporter goes and gets an fMRI scan of the parts of his brain that are to do with love in the brain, to see whether he can prove that he loves his wife. Jacobs doesn’t take it too seriously, but overall, this is actually quite a touching look at the nature of the love.
Does The Slut Gene Exist? by Casey Schwartz...
10 tags
Uncertainty Whales Touch Loudest Published Spark
Blue Whales Can Eat Half A Million Calories In A Single Mouthful by Ed Yong (Not Exactly Rocket Science): Blue whales eat krill (which are tiny crustaceans). And there’s a lot of krill in the ocean. Blue whales are very big - their tongues are elephant-sized. And yes, the title says it all really.
Loudest Voice = Majority Opinion by Jeremy Dean (PSYblog): The default assumption that we...
12 tags
Music Dump - Godspeed, You Hucknall Kesha Kanye... →
Nitsuh Abebe on how Katy Perry & Ke$ha are two sides of the same miserable American dime; dancehall music is all well and good until you listen to the lyrics that seriously advocate killing homosexuals; Steven Hyden of the AV Club on 1994, the year that Cobain died and Soundgarden rose to prominence; the making of Kanye’s Beautiful Twisted Fantasy; Tony Martin on Mick Hucknall’s...
8 tags
Colombian Conspiracy Evolved Sleeper Man Fault
The Top Ten Daily Consequences Of Having Evolved by Rob Dunn (Smithsonian): To some extent, evolution seems pretty divorced from our everyday lives - it’s something that happened millions of years ago to animals! But some of our everyday complaints are a consequence of evolution. Need to remove your wisdom teeth? Blame your big brain! Have back aches? Blame your mammal ancestors who...
10 tags
Pseudoscience Cheaters Bully Oxytocin Artist Kings
A Bully Finds A Pulpit On The Web by David Segal (New York Times): Google puts your website higher in their search index if lots of people link to your site. However (at least until this article came out) this meant that all publicity was good publicity - if people link to your site complaining about it, up you go in the search index. Meet Tony Russo, who deliberately harasses customers in the...
8 tags
Renegade Aliens Interview Fat Molly Bottleneck
Mono Lake Bacteria Build Their DNA Using Arsenic (And No, This Isn’t About Aliens) by Ed Yong (Not Exactly Rocket Science): Well, this is pretty big, but is not quite what the hype says. It’s not a *new* form of life, it’s not completely unrelated to any other form of life on Earth - the bacteria in question is related to plenty of other bacteria in the world. It’s just...
Music Dump - Ke$ha's Avalanches Destroy Epic Kanye... →
The debaucherous genius of Ke$ha; electronic dance music is starting to succumb to retro; Bruce Springsteen and the struggle between the promise and the reality of modern life; the strange resurgence of 60s soulman Syl Johnson; on making top 10 lists of the year; on the strange parallels between Kanye West’s new album and John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band; Craig Mathieson thinks that...