George Bernard Shaw, writing a month after the Titanic sank, wondered about the “effects of a sensational catastrophe on a modern nation”. Rather than weeping, prayer or sympathy for the bereaved, the result was “an explosion of outrageous romantic lying”. The typical British shipwreck, Shaw wrote, had three “romantic demands” in particular: that the cry “Women and children first” should be heard, that all men aboard (“except the foreigners”) should be heroes, and the captain a superhero, and that “everybody should face death without a tremor”.

Shaw traced the origins of these expectations to the wreck of the Birkenhead, a troopship (and one of the Royal Navy’s earliest steamships) that had hit a rock and foundered off the coast of South Africa in 1852.

While the few women and children on board were being loaded into the boats, the troops held ranks at attention on deck, even though the ship was breaking up beneath them. Hundreds died, including all the senior naval officers. A story of self-sacrifice and stoicism set a pattern for behaviour in Britain’s merchant and military navies that enhanced, and sometimes confused, a captain’s traditional responsibilities for the welfare of his ship and crew. The “Birkenhead drill” meant a seafarer stared death in the eye while the weaker sex was rowed to safety. In the 18th century, a captain could be both a patriarch and a tyrant, a drinker and flogger. Now, as he took his seat among his passengers at that new Victorian social arrangement, the captain’s table, he became a kindlier and nobler father figure. Still a patriarch, but one who would place your needs and life above his own even to the ultimate sacrifice; or so the story went.

–Ian Jack, here

Jobs didn’t just use pseudo-asceticism for marketing. He wielded purist fanaticism so as to have power in the world of nerds. This is how it came to be that Jobs is so often remembered as an “inventor,” though he rarely was one. His genius was not technical, but he was a genius at manipulating technical minds.

An example is Jobs’ obsession with engineering beautiful fonts into personal computers. While plenty of people wanted this (Don Knuth comes to mind), it wasn’t easy to make such a luxury into a high-priority item in the engineering culture that drove early PC companies. But Jobs often mentioned his pride at having done it.

…Jobs traded one form of obsessive, principled nerdiness against another. It was useless for a typical designer or marketing person to plead with engineers during the early years of personal computers. Engineers had airtight criteria and data, and that trumped mere opinions and intuitions. But Jobs didn’t plead. He declared even more rigid and exacting criteria.

—Jaron Lanier

As well as being read or written, books could, of course, be used as fuel. “We warm ourselves,” wrote Fridenberg, “by burning memoirs and floorboards. Prose, it turns out, provides more heat than poetry. History boils the kettle to make our tea.” Boldyrev sorted his books, like his furniture, into three categories–”keep, sell, and burn.” One by one Likhachev dismembered and fed into his burzhuika the records of the proceedings of the pre-revolutionary Duma, saving only the volume covering its last session, a rarity. Olga Grechina burned her dead uncle’s books of Roman law–nineteenth-century paper, she discovered, gave out more heat than the flimsy Soviet sort. Another family started with reference works and technical manuals, moved on to bound sets of journals, then to the German classics, then to Shakespeare, and finally to their blue and gold-bound editions of Pushkin and Tolstoy.

—Anna Reid, Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II, 1941-1944, p.245

This is a very good book, and one of the saddest works of non-fiction I’ve read in some time.

Interesting piece on collaboration:

Decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” wrote the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

…And I’m not suggesting that we abolish teamwork. Indeed, recent studies suggest that influential academic work is increasingly conducted by teams rather than by individuals. (Although teams whose members collaborate remotely, from separate universities, appear to be the most influential of all.) The problems we face in science, economics and many other fields are more complex than ever before, and we’ll need to stand on one another’s shoulders if we can possibly hope to solve them.

But even if the problems are different, human nature remains the same. And most humans have two contradictory impulses: we love and need one another, yet we crave privacy and autonomy.

–here

Rick Bookstaber:

Our jobs are being outsourced to us. The jobs are moving from the producer to the consumer side of the ledger. And some of that work comes as the guise of entertainment. How much of your work is being done as you do your e-mails and surf the web, keep yourselves busy with your apps as you commute to work? So it is not only that computers are replacing workers, they are turning consumers into unpaid workers. . . .

But although a bifurcation is occurring in jobs, the opposite is occurring in consumption. Granted those on the lower rungs spend more of their income on the consumption of real goods than do those on the top rungs. And the share of income on goods that by nature are in limited supply, like land, wine and art, even social status, is obviously greater for the top rungs than for the lower. But for both, consumption is increasingly oriented toward virtual goods – consuming YouTube videos, tweets and social networks, games and reality TV shows. These take little in terms of labor – or for that matter, capital – to produce. And the labor that is required is largely supplied by us as the consumers. Another instance of outsourcing.

And one notable area of consumption that by definition differentiates the classes, that of conspicuous consumption, is going by the wayside.

Two things:

One, the work necessary to produce something has dropped dramatically since 2005. The social web is becoming less–not more–production-oriented.

Social media has been trending away from production toward consumption for awhile. Remember Geocities? Next came blogs, which were easier to set up and usually didn’t require HTML skills, but still required thought-out posts. After blogs, Facebook and Twitter, which only required an answer to a simple question: “What’s on your mind?” and a few friends or followers to share it with. Now, Pinterest. Next, a service like Path, which makes even Pinterest look complicated by comparison.

It’s clear that the social web is easier to produce than ever. Even for the pieces of social work that still require production, only a fraction of the users do the heavy producing. For example, only a small number of YouTube users create videos to the large number of users who consume them. Most of the people doing the consuming aren’t doing the producing.

The second issue: this line of thinking fails to appreciate the existence of production-oriented forms of pre-internet entertainment. Entertainment requiring production didn’t appear for the first time with the rise of the social web. True, consumers can’t consume Facebook unless they’re also producing. But the same could be said for karaoke, dancing, scrapbooking, improv comedy, zumba, board games, and lots of other forms of pre-internet entertainment. There’s a correlation between the production required and the benefits of consumption. This started long before Facebook. (Not all pre-internet forms of entertainment were akin to watching TV, which has two clearly-defined roles: 1) the producer making the content, and 2) the person passively watching it.)

The key difference between these pre-internet forms of entertainment where the consumer was also the producer and the social-web-as-entertainment is that there’s no third party taking a cut. When you play Settlers of Catan, you’re doing the work, but you’re also reaping all the benefits. But when you spend a half hour on Facebook, you’re doing the work and reaping only some of the benefits. Facebook is reaping the rest–you’re entertaining yourself on Facebook’s terms, and for Facebook’s proft.

The difference between being entertained on Facebook and being entertained by a board game is that with the board game, you’re only the producer and the consumer. With Facebook, you’re the producer, the consumer, and the product.

Philip Tallon:

The problem isn’t primarily with Evangelical art, it’s with Evangelical theology. More specifically, it’s with the crummy theology of creativity and creation most Evangelicals have inherited, which sees all media as neutral vehicles for communication. The pulpit, the radio, the book, the movie, the rock anthem – all identical. Valuing these things only for their instrumental, rather than including their intrinsic, value voids artistic media of any real interest, literally shuts off the ability to sense them as art. All human creativity, all matter, all texture, all sound, all smell, all metaphor is reduced to being a sermon illustration…

…read the rest.

Nothing is more educative for man in his totality than the liturgy. The Bible is certainly a marvelous teacher of prayer, of the sense of God and of the adult convictions of conscience. Used alone, the Bible might produce a Christian of the Puritan tradition, an individualist and even a visionary. The liturgy, however, is the ‘authentic method instituted by the Church to unite souls to Jesus.’ The sort of Christian produced by an enlightened and docile participation in the liturgy is a man of peace and unified in every fibre of his human nature by the secret and powerful penetration of faith and love in his life, throughout a period of prayer and worship, during which he learned, at his mother’s knee and without effort, the Church’s language: her language of faith, love, hope, and fidelity. There is no better way of acquiring ‘the mind of the Church’ in the widest and most interior interpretation of this expression.

–Cardinal Yves Congar, O.P., 1963 (quoted by Geoffrey Hull in The Banished Heart, 2010), via Peter L. Edman

From “Between the Lines”, an excellent essay on the true cost of parking:

Shoup is 73 years old. He drives a 1994 Infiniti but for the last three decades has steered a 1975 Raleigh bike two miles uphill daily in fair weather, from his home near the Mormon temple to the wooded highlands of UCLA’s north campus. He was born near one shore (Long Beach), grew up on a far shore (Hawaii), and resembles a 19th-century figure sketched by Melville. He has a mildly hectic complexion, a halo of silver hair that breaks over his small ears into a white froth of a beard, and brimstone eyes. This year Shoup’s 765-page book, The High Cost of Free Parking, was rereleased to zero acclaim outside of the transportation monthlies, parking blogs, and corridor beyond his office door in UCLA’s School of Public Affairs building. He wasn’t surprised—“There’s not even a name for what I do,” he says. Shoup, however, does not lack for acolytes. His followers call themselves Shoupistas, like Sandinistas, and on a Facebook page they leave posts suggesting parking meters for prostitutes and equations that quantify the contradiction between time spent cruising for free parking versus the “assumed time-value” cited to justify expanding roadways. (The hooker stuff is more interesting.)

After 36 years, Shoup’s writings—usually found in obscure journals—can be reduced to a single question: What if the free and abundant parking drivers crave is about the worst thing for the life of cities? That sounds like a prescription for having the door slammed in your face; Shoup knows this too well. Parking makes people nuts. “I truly believe that when men and women think about parking, their mental capacity reverts to the reptilian cortex of the brain,” he says. “How to get food, ritual display, territorial dominance—all these things are part of parking, and we’ve assigned it to the most primitive part of the brain that makes snap fight-or-flight decisions. Our mental capacities just bottom out when we talk about parking.”

(via Kottke)

J. Ronald Oakley writes:

The answer, given now, twenty-five years after the end of the decade, would have to be a qualified yes. The period that most of the nostalgic feelings have centered upon is the time sandwiched between the end of the Korean War in the summer of 1953 and the launching of Sputnik in October of 1957, a space of a little over four years. These were the best years of the decade, the prosperous and peaceful interlude between the strife of the McCarthy and Korean War era and the decline of American confidence and prestige after the Russians seemed to win the space race. Like the nostalgia for most periods, the nostalgia for the fifties was highly selective, emphasizing the best times and overlooking the bad ones. And for some Americans, primarily the blacks and other minorities, the poor, and many of the elderly, no part of the decade seemed to be the golden age. But for most white, middle-class Americans, and particularly white, middle-class males, the fifties was perhaps the best decade in the history of the republic.

–From God’s Country: America in the Fifties, p. 434, which is not a bad book, although, having been published in 1985, feels a little dated.

From an initial gathering with Regent students during our airport pickup to question and answer sessions and hallway conversations, there was a consistent theme: how to navigate apparent conflict between modern biblical scholarship and classic spiritual exegesis. . . . Courses in biblical studies and (usually) hermeneutics teach how to exegete the Bible using modern tools of critical scholarship, perhaps with a measure of discernment about the presuppositions involved in the history of those tools. Meanwhile courses in theology and (perhaps) pastoral ministry or spiritual life teach what classic churchly interpreters did with the Bible and suggest (to varying degrees) that we should go and do likewise. The challenge of discernment becomes much more difficult as a result: can the students embrace a modern approach centered on historical reconstruction of the human author’s intentions, simply making minor presuppositional adjustments that uphold the Bible’s historical value and theological authority? Or must students fundamentally embrace a more classic understanding of spiritual exegesis centered on pursuit of the divine Author’s intentions, simply making ad hoc use of modern historical tools when these seem helpful to churchly aims?

–Daniel Treier, here (via Alan Jacobs)