The Feature

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

By Nicholas Carr for The Atlantic

Research published yesterday by a psychologist at Columbia University claims Google has changed the way our brains remember information. The discussion around Google becoming an extension of our brains has been going on for years, and this 2008 article by Nicholas Carr is a great, accessible starting point.

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

The Boy Who Lived Forever

By Lev Grossman for Time

The Year of Wonders

By Alex Shakar for The Millions

The Subject Talks Back

By Deborah Baker for The Paris Review

Here are 3 good recent reads from the book publishing world. In “The Boy Who Lived Forever,” Lev Grossman traces the history of fan-fiction, which saw a massive boost in exposure with the advent of the web but has a thorny legal standing. (Via Longreads)

Right now fan fiction is still the cultural equivalent of dark matter: it’s largely invisible to the mainstream, but at the same time, it’s unbelievably massive. Fan fiction predates the Internet, but the Web has made it exponentially easier to talk and be heard, and it holds hundreds of millions of words of fan fiction. There’s fan fiction based on books, movies, TV shows, video games, plays, musicals, rock bands and board games. There’s fan fiction based on the Bible. In most cases, the quantity of fan fiction generated by a given work is volumetrically larger than the work itself; in some cases, the quality is higher than that of the original too.

“The Year of Wonders” sees Alex Shakar secure an extravagant advance for a book, only to fall on exceptionally bad luck.

It was midday on a Monday in early August of the year 2000 and the bidding on my first novel had reached six figures, then paused for people to track down more cash. I was 32. I’d never made over $12,000 in a year.

In “The Subject Talks Back” Deborah Baker talks about the tricky relationship between biographer and subject.

My first book was a biography of an obscure American poet born in 1901. When I approached her in 1989, she was living as a recluse in a Florida citrus grove. Fifty years before, she had not merely renounced her own poetry but everybody else’s as well. Through an intermediary, she conveyed to me that I should write a sample chapter (she assigned the topic). If it met with her approval, we would work together on her biography. She could use a secretary, she said.

But before I could reply, she fell ill. When she heard I had proceeded without her, she wrote me angrily, calling me “sluttish.” Her minions sent me lengthy poison-pen missives, dissecting my character. She never read a word of what I’d written. The day after I sent the final manuscript to the publisher, she had a heart attack, as if my book and her life were paired like Siamese twins and I had killed her by finishing it. This is the kind of magical thinking that binds the biographer to her subject.

The Age of Mechanical Reproduction

By Paul Ford for The Morning News

Paul Ford with a moving essay for The Morning News on his experience with IVF. It feels painfully beside the point to say so, but this was the best writing I read all week.

When it comes to IVF, in-vitro fertilization, nothing is normal. Your world is upside-down. Your doctor compliments your wife on her monkeys. Then, when every dollar and exertion has gone toward a single hour of hope, it begins to snow

Bad Decisions

By Chuck Klosterman for Grantland

The Dark Art of ‘Breaking Bad’

By David Segal for New York Times

Two great essays about Breaking Bad in recent weeks. In the first, Chuck Klosterman makes a case for Breaking Bad being better television than Mad Men, The Sopranos, and The Wire.

So what we see in Breaking Bad is a person who started as one type of human and decides to become something different. And because this is television — because we were introduced to this man in a way that made him impossible to dislike, and because we experience TV through whichever character we understand the most — the audience is placed in the curious position of continuing to root for an individual who’s no longer good. And this is not a case like J.R. Ewing or Al Swearengen, where a character’s over-the-top evilness immediately defined his charm; this is a series in which the main character has actively become evil, but we still want him to succeed.

David Segal in the New York Times goes into more detail on the roles of good and evil in the show.

But it was soon clear that “Breaking Bad” was something much more satisfying and complex: a revolutionary take on the serial drama. What sets the show apart from its small-screen peers is a subtle metaphysical layer all its own. As Walter inches toward damnation, Gilligan and his writers have posed some large questions about good and evil, questions with implications for every kind of malefactor you can imagine, from Ponzi schemers to terrorists. Questions like: Do we live in a world where terrible people go unpunished for their misdeeds? Or do the wicked ultimately suffer for their sins?

The Persecution of Daniel Lee

By Joshua Davis for Stanford Magazine

An odd story about a Korean popstar that finds his career ruined by an irrational and hateful online vigilante mob.

In May 2010, a group of Internet users created an online forum titled “We Request the Truth from Tablo,” better known by its Korean acronym TaJinYo. The group didn’t buy Lee’s story. They started referring to him as “God-blo” because only God could have accomplished as much as Lee. The members of the group participated anonymously and attacked Lee from behind user names such as Whatbecomes and Spongebobo.

Speed matters: how Ethernet went from 3Mbps to 100Gbps… and beyond

By Iljitsch van Beijnum for Ars Technica

Ars Technica has a great, in-depth look at Ethernet’s evolution. One for the geeks.

Ethernet was invented by Bob Metcalfe and others at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in the mid-1970s. PARC’s experimental Ethernet ran at 3Mbps, a “convenient data transfer rate […] well below that of the computer’s path to main memory,” so packets wouldn’t have to be buffered in Ethernet interfaces. The name comes from the luminiferous ether that was at one point thought to be the medium through which electromagnetic waves propagate, like sound waves propagate through air.