Apparently Swiss-born British philosopher and “writer of essayistic books” Alain de Botton knows me personally: “Work finally begins,” he says, “when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.”
Apparently Swiss-born British philosopher and “writer of essayistic books” Alain de Botton knows me personally: “Work finally begins,” he says, “when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.”
The 2017 annual report for Hecla Mining Company marks our 30th edition.
It was the summer of 1988 when we first received word that we were chosen to design the report – the same year our firm was founded. And since we’re celebrating helvetica’s 30th anniversary (all year long), it seems appropriate that an animation of all 30 annual report covers is in order.
This, folks, is how you hook a reader:
Start with Noam Chomsky, Deepak Chopra, and a robot that loves you no matter what. Add a knighted British physicist, a renowned French neuroscientist, and a prominent Australian philosopher/occasional blues singer. Toss in a bunch of psychologists, mathematicians, anesthesiologists, artists, meditators, a computer programmer or two, and several busloads of amateur theorists waving self-published manuscripts and touting grand unified solutions. Send them all to a swanky resort in the desert for a week, supply them with lots of free coffee and beer, and ask them to unpack a riddle so confounding that it’s unclear how to make progress or where you’d even begin.
Then just, like, see what happens.
I mean really—how can you not want to continue? Read the rest of Tom Bartlett’s “Has Consciousness Lost Its Mind?” over at the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Today on the blog, a Benedictine Beatnik and his concrete poetry, and a newly discovered 1963 recording of the John Coltrane Quartet—”an epochal band in its prime”—is about to be released for the first time.
By the way, I have a birthday coming up, so if you’re wondering what to get me, well…let’s just say that the deluxe version (with the seven alternate takes) of Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album is currently at the top of my list. And if you really want to curry favor with me, you’ll include one of these. Just saying.
After the first two waves of Operation Steinbock, the Nazi’s final bomber offensive of WWII, “nearly 100 Londoners were wounded or dead. It was just the beginning of a deadly four-month air onslaught against Great Britain the likes of which the country hadn’t seen since the war’s grim early days.”
The novelist George Beardmore, who had been declared medically unfit for military service, was spending the war documenting its effects on his fellow Londoners. In a journal entry dated June 12, 1944—two weeks after Operation Steinbock ended and seventy-four years ago today—Beardmore reminds us of the totality of the devastation:
Other side-effects of bombs are the stripping of leaves from wayside trees, the deaths by blast of sparrows, chaffinches, etc., and the awful things that happen to cats and dogs. We had a man complain that thirty of his forty-odd small birds in a backyard aviary had been killed by blast, half a mile or so away from where the bomb had landed.
Let’s talk about compounds and hyphenation.
Y’all know what a compound is, right? Two or more words, put together, that form a new meaning—like, say, railroad (rail + road = new mode of transportation) or skateboard (skate + board = juvenile delinquents hanging out in empty swimming pools).
Both of these are what are called “closed” compounds; an example of the “open” form is high school. And when an open compound is used to modify another word, that’s when we need to start thinking about hyphenation.
Here’s what I mean:
I met a high school student on my way to work this morning.
High school is an open compound modifying student. Or, at least, that’s one way of reading it. The other way is to treat high school not as a compound, but as two distinct words—which changes the meaning dramatically: Either we’re talking about (a) a student who’s attending a high school (high school + student), or (b) one who has recently partaken of the Devil’s lettuce (high + school student). It’s what we like to call “ambiguity,” and it’s a bad thing in writing.
The good news? A hyphen solves the problem!
I met a high-school student on my way to work this morning.
See how that works? By connecting the two parts of an open compound with that little dash, we’re telling the reader that they belong together, thus eliminating any possibility of ambiguity.
Which brings us to open compounds in which the first word is an adverb ending in -ly.
“I want to up my fashion game,” said Skooch, “but I don’t know where to start.”
“You should pay attention to that Aaron guy,” said Courtney. “He’s one smartly dressed dude.”
In this case, while smartly dressed is indeed a compound modifying dude, there’s no risk of ambiguity here—smartly is already modifying dressed.
I know, I know, it seems complicated at first. But it’s actually pretty simple when you remember that clarity is the goal of all punctuation. When your reader is spending less time trying to decipher a particularly knotty passage, they’re ultimately getting more out of your writing.
On a day in which we mourn the passing of the inimitable Anthony Bourdain and learn that Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer has just weeks to live, we’re also reminded, via the cesspool that is Twitter, that there exist on this Earth an inordinate number of assholes—people who revel in the misfortune of anyone they disagree with politically.
If you’re tempted to go down that path, maybe take just a moment to read Ian Marcus Corbin today. “Politics,” he writes, “may be a necessary evil—but talking incessantly about politics and viewing your countrymen solely through a political lens is an evil that we’re actively choosing, day by day. We should stop.”
Okay. Last politics post for a while, folks. Pinky swear.
“Writers think I’m out to destroy their prose,” says Atlantic senior copy editor Karen Ostergren. “Laypeople think I’m a human version of spellcheck. Neither is right.”
Yes, copy editors are responsible for fixing the grammar and spelling in a piece, and that in itself is an important function.…But the responsibilities don’t stop there. The Atlantic’s copy editors think of our role as standing in for the reader. Before a magazine piece gets to the copy desk, it has gone through days or weeks or months of trimming, expanding, and rewriting with its main editor. It has ideally also been read by one or more of the magazine’s top editors to address any glaring holes.
She goes on to describe her team’s copyediting routine, ending with what I think is the most important—and by far the most difficult: “Take a deep breath and learn to move on.”
We don’t normally do politics around here. But “The High Price of Stale Grievances” by Coleman Hughes is a serious, well-written analysis of the tribalism that threatens to tear us apart. It’s definitely worth your time.
Not concerned about the possibility of racial balkanization? Think the recent breakdown in civil discourse is no big deal? Convinced the pendulum is about to swing the other way?
Maybe so—but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about. A werewolf was photographed outside Elkhorn, Wisconsin.
Cumberland Clark—the “Bard of Bournemouth”—was, according to Anthony Daniels, the second-worst poet in the English language.* How bad was he? “Wonderfully, gloriously, hilariously awful.”
As evidence, Daniels points us to the beginning of Clark’s “The West Overcliff Drive”:
Do you know the West Overcliff Drive?
If you don’t, there’s no doubt that you ought to.
With interest always alive,
It’s a place everyone should be brought to.
Now, I’ve written some pretty bad poetry (who hasn’t, really?) but I don’t think it’s quite the steaming pile that that is. So let me help you get the terrible taste out of your mouth with a little something from Langston Hughes:
Advice
Folks, I’m telling you,
birthing is hard
and dying is mean—
so get yourself
a little loving
in between.
*The worst? William McGonagall, obviously.
“When you drink good seltzer,” says Kenny Gomberg, third-generation owner of the last remaining seltzer factory in New York City, “you should not be able to gulp it down. Good seltzer should hurt.”
I suppose that, since it’s just city tap water and CO2, it’s all that pressure (60 lbs., according to Gomberg, which isn’t possible with the plastic bottles you get at the supermarket) that’s made New York seltzer such an iconic beverage.
Wonder if he ships to Spokane? Guess I need to get to Brooklyn before he fills his last bottle…
So there’s this thing called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people who don’t know much about a given topic are the ones most confident that they do. (Yeah, most of us figured this out on our own back in middle school, but whatever. Social psychologists gotta eat too, you know.)
Where it really gets interesting, though, is in the realm of politics. Here’s Ian Anson, assistant professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County:
Many Americans appear to be extremely overconfident in their political knowledgeability, because they have no way of knowing how little they actually know about the world of politics (this is the so-called “double bind of incompetence”). But there’s a catch: when Republicans and Democrats engage in partisan thought processes, this effect becomes even stronger than before.
“I think,” continues Anson, in what ought to be in the running for understatement of the decade, “this has major implications for the breakdowns in political discourse we often observe in contemporary American democracy.”
So, basically, each side thinks the other side is stupid. Sounds about right.
On a morning walk in the Queen Anne area of Seattle earlier this year, my wife Linda and our daughter Haley discovered a Harold Balazs piece overlooking Puget Sound. A nearby plaque indicated that Harold was one of 11 artists represented in a tribute to a local patron. The serene setting was fitting, given that Harold had passed away three months prior.
I don’t recall the first time I actually met Harold, but I do remember taking a tour of his backyard art studio in the 80s with my father-in-law, a member of the Spokane Woodworker’s Guild at the time. Our paths crossed a few times when I helped organize an annual art event for the Mead Education Foundation, and again when we researched and designed a mid-century architecture exhibit at the MAC. Here he is, in 2011, before one of those interviews:
The Balazs home was full of creativity—including the work of several artist friends—and seeing Harold and Rosemary was always a treat. On my last visit, while sitting at their kitchen table, Harold wrote the following inscription in my copy of his recently published book The Family Album: “Remember only common things happen when common sense prevails.” His wisdom was as wonderful as his art.
The great Andrew Ferguson on today’s “futile and stupid gesture from Starbucks.”
These days, efficiency is king. So what’s with all the pointless jobs? It’s political, argues David Graeber. “A population kept busy with make-work is less likely to revolt.”
Pythagoras—you know, that guy who came up with that theorem—had a cult. And they all thought fava beans contained the souls of the dead.
There’s one word you never want to say to a narcissist. You can probably guess what it is.
For philosophers, the subject of morality can be a bit of a sticky wicket: “Where’s the consistency? Where’s the theoretical framework? Where’s the argument?”
In the May 8 issue of The New York Times Magazine, Lauren Oyler asks an important question: What do we mean when we call art “necessary”? It’s “a discursive crutch,” she writes, “for describing a work’s right-minded views, and praise that is so distinct from aesthetics it can be affixed to just about anything….”
The prospect of “necessary” art allows members of the audience to free themselves from having to make choices while offering the critic a nifty shorthand to convey the significance of her task, which may itself be one day condemned as dispensable. The effect is something like an absurd and endless syllabus, constantly updating to remind you of ways you might flunk as a moral being.
It’s a bracing read, and—dare I say it—a necessary corrective.