{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1", "title": "ideas on Stephen Schenkenberg", "icon": "https://avatars.micro.blog/avatars/2025/10/4351.jpg", "home_page_url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/", "feed_url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/feed.json", "items": [ { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2026/01/31/love-this-snappy-opening-to.html", "content_html": "

Showing how a lede can feel both snappy and learned, here’s Peter Brannen opening his searching and entertaining Scientific American article, “Can a time capsule outlast geology? A ridiculous but instructive thought experiment involving deep time, plate tectonics, erosion and the slow death of the sun”:

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Stuff is old where I live, in greater Boston. Clapboard houses that list with age bear plaques touting the former residence of the town cordwainer or victualler. The gravestones, worn rough by New England winters, also stand crooked, bearing similarly outmoded biblical names—a Lemuel here, an Ephraim there. Old, too, are the local churches where many of these souls were commended to the great hereafter.

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As for the building material that makes up these churches, well, that’s a little bit older still. Roxbury puddingstone, the mottled rock quarried nearby and used for much of the old church masonry in Boston, formed 600 million years ago in violent submarine landslides off the coast of a barren volcanic microcontinent that had been rifted off Africa. This upheaval happened so long ago in the course of the perpetual wandering of continents that the whole thing took place somewhere near the South Pole. The sediments hardened to rock, then hitched a ride across a bygone ocean as part of a traveling tectonic plate before being sutured onto the rest of equatorial North America some 140 million years before the first dinosaur evolved.

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This rock now pokes out from underneath fallen leaves and the edges of Dunkin’ parking lots in the Boston area. Very little else here has survived the intervening half-billion-year eon, save a superficial veneer of glacial till from the extremely recent last ice age—one that is surely doomed in the next few dozen millennia or so. Had somebody hoped to leave a time capsule for today’s Bostonians 250 million years ago in the Triassic period, or even four million years ago in the Pliocene epoch, they would have been completely, utterly screwed. The same is true for anyone aspiring today to send such an envoy into the geological deep future. Ephraim and Lemuel’s mortal remains, much less the local Dunkin’, will not survive into geological time. “Can any mountains, any continent, withstand such waste?” Charles Darwin wrote in his 1839 book The Voyage of the Beagle, referring to the defacing forces of erosion.

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\n", "date_published": "2026-01-31T13:29:22-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2026/01/31/love-this-snappy-opening-to.html", "tags": ["ideas"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/11/28/the-velvet-worm-a-squishy.html", "content_html": "
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The velvet worm, a squishy little predator that looks like the stretch-limo version of a caterpillar, has a whimsical MO: it administers death by Silly String.

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That’s how you write a lede. From Elizabeth Anne Brown’s “Slime Attack,” a short front-of-book piece for Scientific American.

\n", "date_published": "2025-11-28T10:01:54-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/11/28/the-velvet-worm-a-squishy.html", "tags": ["ideas","writing"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/10/23/from-ai-models-get-brain.html", "content_html": "

From a new piece at Wired, “AI Models Get Brain Rot, Too“:

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A new study from the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M, and Purdue University shows that large language models fed a diet of popular but low-quality social media content experience a kind of “brain rot” that may be familiar to anyone who has spent too long doomscrolling on X or TikTok.

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After describing the test:

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The models fed junk text experienced a kind of AI brain rot—with cognitive decline including reduced reasoning abilities and degraded memory. The models also became less ethically aligned and more psychopathic according to two measures.

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\n", "date_published": "2025-10-23T07:59:43-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/10/23/from-ai-models-get-brain.html", "tags": ["technology","ideas"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/08/30/american-culture-was-shifting-siward.html", "title": "“American culture was shifting Si-ward”", "content_html": "

Just finished “Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America” by Michael M. Grynbaum. Lots of juice for the magazine junkies among us. And written with sharpness and style. Here’s the author early on, setting a scene of Si Newhouse finally feeling free to break from the influence of his father, Sam:

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Now, as he sat in the gilded sanctum of Emanu-El, the encomia to his father emanating from the lectern, Si gazed at the dark wooden coffin, festooned with roses, that would be Sam’s final resting place. He was a few months shy of his fifty-second birthday, and this was the first time that the specter of his father’s disapproval, a looming presence in his life since childhood, had fully lifted. Sam Newhouse had never fully respected the magazines that Si had chosen as his life’s work; in his mind, Condé Nast was a minnow in the Newhouse sea, an unserious realm best left to his unserious son. No longer. Si had ambitions of his own, which over the next decade would vastly expand the Newhouse empire. On the day of Sam’s funeral, Advance Publications was valued at roughly $2 billion. By 1988, it would be worth $7 billion, a 250 percent increase. It would control the esteemed New Yorker, a revived smash-hit version of Vanity Fair, and the gastronomic bible Gourmet. Its dowdier titles would be revamped to appeal to an ascendant and free-spending aspirational class. Sam had been too set in his ways to detect the coming trend, but American culture was shifting Si-ward. The idealism of the I960s was yielding to the materialism of the 1980s, a new preoccupation with the navel-gazing, ego-stroking life. Si, who at Condé Nast had surrounded himself with the masters of the zeitgeist, was prepared, and he had already put something into motion that marked the true start of Condé’s inexorable eighties rise, a magazine whose prescient title managed to dovetail with both the spirit of the era and Si’s own newfound sense of liberation: Self.

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\n", "date_published": "2025-08-30T14:02:30-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/08/30/american-culture-was-shifting-siward.html", "tags": ["media","ideas","books"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/05/17/strategy-at-the-getty-not.html", "title": "Strategy at the Getty: Not Just Our Art, but All Art", "content_html": "\n

Love this passage from Richard Rumelt‘s “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.”

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In 1983, Harold Williams — who had once been dean of the UCLA management school — became chairman of the $1.4B Getty Trust. Rumelt explains that Williams grew the Getty “from a small elite collection to a major force in the art world.” The two spoke in 2000, three years after Williams retired. Williams explained his strategy this way:

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The Getty Trust was a very large amount of money, and we had to spend a considerable amount each year. Our mandate was art, but I had to decide how to actually spend the funds. We could have simply built a great collection—that would have been the obvious thing to do. Buy art. But I wasn’t comfortable with that as a direction. All we would really accomplish would be to drive up the price of art and move some of it from New York and Paris to Los Angeles.

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It took some time, but I began to develop the idea that art could be, indeed, should be, a more serious subject than it was. Art is not just pretty objects; it is a vital part of human activity. In a university, people spend a great deal of effort studying languages and histories. We know all about marriage contracts in remote tribes and the histories of many peoples. But art has been treated as a sideshow. I decided that the Getty could change this. Instead of spending our income on buying art, we could transform the subject. The Getty would begin to build a complete digital catalog of all art, including dance, song, and textiles. It would develop programs to educate art teachers and host advanced research on art and society. The Getty would host the best conversation talent in the world and develop new methods of conserving and restoration. In this way, I decided, we would have an impact far beyond simply putting art on display.

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Rumelt provides this coda:

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With $65 million to spend each year, Williams could have simply bought art or given money to schools and universities for their arts programs. But by aiming to transform the study of art, Williams designed an objective that was novel and nicely scaled to the resources at his disposal. Put simply, he invested where his resources would make a large and more visible difference. This is the power of concentration—of choosing an objective that can be decisively affected by the resources at hand. There is no way to know whether Williams’s strategy created greater good than a simpler strategy of giving away more money, but it did make a bigger bang and, thereby, attracted more energy and support from employees and outside organizations.

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\n", "date_published": "2025-05-17T09:04:56-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/05/17/strategy-at-the-getty-not.html", "tags": ["ideas","work","books","visual arts"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/02/02/just-finished-assembly-by-natasha.html", "content_html": "\n

Just finished Assembly by Natasha Brown. A sharp, slim, piercing novel narrated by a young Black British woman, working in finance, preparing to attend a garden party at her boyfriend’s family estate. Here’s an evening work scene, from the opening:

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After the Digestif, He Gets Going

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She understood the anger of a man who himself understood in his flesh and bones and blood and skin that he was meant to be at the head of a great, hulking giant upon whom the sun never set. Because it was night, now, and he was drunk. He felt very small, perhaps only a mouth. A lip or a tooth or a rough, inflamed bud on a dry white tongue slick with phlegm at the back, near the throat. The throat of a man with a sagging gut and thinning hair cropped so short. So , when that mouth opened up and coughed its vitriol at her, making some at the table a little uncomfortable, she understood the source of its anger, despite being the target. She waited for the buzz of her phone to excuse her and — in the meantime — quietly, politely, she understood him.

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\n", "date_published": "2025-02-02T11:15:29-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/02/02/just-finished-assembly-by-natasha.html", "tags": ["ideas","books"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/01/16/orlando-whitfield-the-feel-of.html", "title": "Orlando Whitfield: The Feel of Wealth", "content_html": "

From the author’s terrific memoir “All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art”:

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There is a rootlessness to the very wealthy in the twenty-first century, a floating ease in both place and time that is mirrored, or perhaps emboldened, by a certain kind of space. Oases devoid of responsibility or obligation allow one an escape from reality that is almost womb-like in its comfort. In the Connaught Bar, if you can bag a table (it was named ‘Best Bar in the World’ by a panel of so-called experts in 2020, the year in which, as I recall it, everyone had to stay home in order to get a load on), you will be surrounded by an international array of players united by one thing only: money.

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As you walk in you will be greeted by a server in a school-uniform grey dress, black-patent-leather-belted primly at the waist. You’ll note the way piped music seeps into the room like an odorless gas, and the way the lighting, which manages somehow to maintain a crime scene luster whatever the weather outside, pools between the tables and chairs and glances off the glass table tops and brass fittings and the painted silver paneling. Think air travel in the 1960s with a touch of netherworld glamour. You’ve seen it in a movie. Have you got a reservation? We’re rather full tonight.

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The guests are ensconced in cashmere and softly shrugging leather; crisp, dark denim in stark juxtaposition to the falsetto glint of diamonds and the low-energy glow of rose gold. Their torpor is somehow moribund, Bourne of the ennui that will always affect those for whom any kind of satisfaction is gratuitously imminent. The room shimmers non-Don status – the financial equivalent of diplomatic immunity — and they talk of elsewhere, always elsewhere, as if the present moment were fraught with some kind of difficulty.

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\n", "date_published": "2025-01-16T21:36:55-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2025/01/16/orlando-whitfield-the-feel-of.html", "tags": ["ideas","books"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2024/10/26/from-tanehisi-coatess.html", "content_html": "\n

From Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Message,” which I just finished:

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Great canons angle toward great power, and the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it.

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\n", "date_published": "2024-10-26T18:16:07-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2024/10/26/from-tanehisi-coatess.html", "tags": ["ideas","books"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2024/10/20/the-zone-of.html", "content_html": "

“The Zone of Interest” was an astonishing film. How it shows what it chooses to show; the sounds we hear of what it chooses not to show — it’s just an incredible work of art made with deep sensitivity by everyone involved. If you’ve already seen it, I recommend this Vanity Fair interview with writer/director Jonathan Glazer and director of photography Łukasz Żal. It’s streaming on MAX. Plan to rewatch soon.

\n", "date_published": "2024-10-20T18:17:10-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2024/10/20/the-zone-of.html", "tags": ["ideas","film"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2024/09/15/toni-morrison-in.html", "content_html": "\n

Toni Morrison, in a 1975 lecture, quoted by Ketanji Brown Jackson in her new memoir, “Lovely One”, which I’m reading now:

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The function, the very serious function of racism … is distraction. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped property so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms, and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

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\n", "date_published": "2024-09-15T09:29:24-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2024/09/15/toni-morrison-in.html", "tags": ["affairs","ideas","books"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2024/06/02/tina-brown-america.html", "title": "Tina Brown: “America needs editing.” ", "content_html": "\n

What pure pleasure this book was to read: The Vanity Fair Dairies: 1983 - 1992 by Tina Brown. I love on-the-job memoirs/journals, especially anything rooted in the editorial world. The entries are zippy, yet considered — a decade of moments jotted down after whirlwind days. Brown’s a sharp observer and summarizer, and a deft workplace strategist.

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A few passages, all from the mid-1980s:

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I went for a drink at the Algonquin with Wallace Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker’s son, who I have been told wants to write. I loved his creaky voice and twinkly, creased-up eyes. He’s like a small, anxious hippo, so full of quotable insights. “America has no memory,” he explained. “Nothing LEADS to anything in New York.”

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Had a terrific drink tonight with Tom Wolfe, who is tall and thin like a candle in his white suit, with a dryness suddenly illuminated by shafts of pure malice.

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A drink with Martin, who is passing through, made me realize how much I miss Englishness. I had a sudden pang for Oxford days when we lay in the little single bed in my St. Anne’s room in the Woodstock Road, doting on Larkin’s sentences in “The Whitsun Weddings.” I thought of London spread out in the sun / Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat. My ideal place to live would be Transatlantica, an island that combined English irony, country lanes in summer, the National Theatre, and a real pot of tea they never seem to be able to make here, with American openness, lack of class barriers, willingness to give away money to good causes, and the view of Manhattan from the Rainbow Room at the top of Rockefeller Center. I miss the pleasing streak of delinquency in the English character.

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The change of the seasons from brutal cold to sudden heat made me think of the sweet decorum of our London patio in the spring, the rhododendron bushes drowsy with raindrops. I long for the English countryside in ways I never did when I lived there. I suddenly see the great country houses that gave us so much irreverent copy at Tatler as a rich national resource, custodians of passing time. Here, time is to be spent, like money; time is to be killed, time is to be forgotten. Everything is a race against time. Trying to beat it is the pressure at your throat. I dream of London’s manageable scale, its compactness, its conversation. America is too big, too rich, too driven. America needs editing.

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\n", "date_published": "2024-06-02T10:03:43-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2024/06/02/tina-brown-america.html", "tags": ["ideas","books"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/12/30/year-in-review.html", "title": "Year in Review: 2023", "content_html": "

Continuing a 23-year tradition of rounding up cultural highlights from the past 12 months, here’s a recap for 2023:

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15 Books I Especially Loved This Year\n\"\"\n

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An Additional Batch I Enjoyed\n\"\"

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(That first hard-to-ID book is “Pentagram: Living By Design," which I had to scramble to procure before it sold out. The brown one in the middle column is “Scaling People”, a terrific book about team- and company-building. The full list of what I read in 2023 is here.)

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TV
\nEspecially grateful for “Succession” (a perfect close), “Patriot” (committed to its singular vision), “Reservation Dogs” (often profound and goofy within the same shot), and “Slow Horses.” Enjoyed “Jury Duty,” “Fleishman Is in Trouble," and “Vienna Blood.” “The Diplomat” was fun in parts.

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Movies
\nEach year it’s a fresh bummer to have seen so few new movies, considering how many my wife and I used to see pre-kids. In terms of what I saw: I loved every minute of “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb,” and also really liked “The Banshees of Inisherein” and “A Quiet Passion.” Two good docs: “Beckham,” “Navalny.” “The Killer” was well-made, but I wondered why I was spending time on that subject. Enjoyed rewatching “Tár” and “After Yang” and “Karate Kid” (Leo screening). Couldn’t get excited about “Mission: Impossible,” except for that last extended escape-the-train scene. Wish I liked more: “Asteroid City." “Air" was entertaining, but didn’t quite seem like a full movie.

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Music
\nEnjoyed new albums from Joanna Sternberg, Youth Lagoon, boygenius, Mitski, Killer Mike, and Veeze (a discovery for me).

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Podcasts
\nNew-to-me this year: “Heavyweight” (so late to this; now cancelled : / ), “The CITY Voice,” “After Hours,” “The Power of Teamwork” (it was fun to have pitched this to Adobe; congrats to my former colleagues on S2) and “Dissect”’s deep dive into Radiohead’s “In Rainbows.”

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Articles & Essays
\nA few highlights from The New Yorker: “Words Fail," by Rachel Aviv; “The Fugitive Princesses of Dubai," by Heidi Blake; “The Greatest Showman," by Alex Ross. A few standouts from The Atlantic, which gets better every year: “We’re Already in the Metaverse," by Megan Garber; “The Moral Case Against Equity Language," by George Packer; “The Resilience Gap," by Jill Filipvic; and “Black Success, White Backlash” by Elijah Anderson.

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Visual Art
\nNot a lot of museum-going this year (or travel, which often leads to it). But it’s always such a pleasure to see my wife Tamara open a show at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. Pictured: Opening night at “Faye HeavyShield: Confluences," with our kids vying for the spotlight.
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A Song That Struck Me
\nIn many of these year-end posts I include an especially memorable songwriter discovery (Weyes Blood, Haley Heynderickx). This year in his Substack newsletter, Jeff Tweedy mentioned that the band keeps a Spotify playlist where they share music they’ve been enjoying. While streaming that mix in the background, a song called “Life According to Raechel” by Madison Cunningham stopped me cold. Many repeat listens that day, and days after. Here’s a solo version to share with you, followed by one with an ensemble:

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Happy New Year, and best wishes for an enjoyable 2024.

\n", "date_published": "2023-12-30T14:26:59-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/12/30/year-in-review.html", "tags": ["music","ideas","books","film","year in review"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/06/01/i-feel-completely.html", "content_html": "\"\"\n

I feel behind not having heard of the Gartner Hype Cycle, which charts the rise, fall, and settling-in adoption of emerging technologies. One of the hosts of the “People vs. Algorithms” podcast referred to it in a recent conversation about ChatGPT. Seems apt. We might be getting closer to the trough of disillusionment.

\n", "date_published": "2023-06-01T20:01:10-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/06/01/i-feel-completely.html", "tags": ["technology","ideas"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/05/07/a-meaty-thoughtprovoking.html", "content_html": "

Thought-provoking piece by Ted Chiang: “Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?”

\n", "date_published": "2023-05-07T19:51:35-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/05/07/a-meaty-thoughtprovoking.html", "tags": ["technology","ideas"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/05/07/we-modernday-humans.html", "content_html": "\n
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We modern-day humans tend to exaggerate our differences. The results of such exaggerations are often catastrophic.

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— From “The Dawn of Everything,” by David Graeber and David Wengrow

\n", "date_published": "2023-05-07T15:16:20-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/05/07/we-modernday-humans.html", "tags": ["ideas","books"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/01/02/a-tweet-before.html", "content_html": "

“A Tweet Before Dying”: Paul Ford, perceptive and funny and deep yet again, writing in Wired. Here he is on stepping away from his social stream to dive into curious PDFs unearthed from decades past:

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But the seeking is important, too; people should explore, not simply feed.

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\n", "date_published": "2023-01-02T22:18:13-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2023/01/02/a-tweet-before.html", "tags": ["technology","ideas"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2020/03/06/toni-morrisons-exquisite.html", "title": "Toni Morrison's Exquisite Nonfiction", "content_html": "

I just finished Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (2019), and every few pages or so, I thought to myself: it’s rare I’m taking in prose this rhythmically perfect, this deeply intelligent.

From “Peril” (2008):

How bleak, unlivable, insufferable existence becomes when we are deprived of artwork. That the life and work of writers facing peril must be protected is urgent, but along with that urgency we should remind ourselves that their absence, the choking off of a writer’s work, its cruel amputation, is of equal peril to us. The rescue we extend to them is a generosity to ourselves….

Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorry into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.

From Morrison’s 1998 Sarah Lawrence Commencement Address:

If I spend my life despising you because of your race, or class, or religion, I become your slave. If you spend yours hating me for similar reasons, it is because you are my slave. I own your energy, your fear, your intellect. I determine where you live, how you live, what your work is, your definition of excellence, and I set limits to your ability to love. I will have shaped your life. That is the gift of your hatred; you are mine….

We are already live-chosen by ourselves. Humans, and as far as we know there are no others. We are the moral inhabitants of the galaxy. Why trash that magnificent obligation after working so hard in the womb to assume it? You will be in positions that matter. Positions in which you can decide the nature and quality of other people’s lives. Your errors may be irrevocable. So when you enter those places of trust, or power, dream a little before you think, so your thoughts, your solutions, your directions, your choices about who lives and who doesn’t, about who flourishes and who doesn’t will be worth the very sacred life you have chosen to live. You are not helpless. You are not heartless. And you have time.

Lastly, here is the oft-quoted passage from Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Lecture in Literature:

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

\n", "date_published": "2020-03-06T21:51:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2020/03/06/toni-morrisons-exquisite.html", "tags": ["ideas","books","literature"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2019/05/13/george-packer-on.html", "title": "George Packer on Richard Holbrooke", "content_html": "

Packer’s recent cover story for The Atlantic — “Elegy for the American Century” — is an exceptional piece of longform reporting and vivid narration. Excerpted from his new book, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century.

\n", "date_published": "2019-05-13T21:43:57-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2019/05/13/george-packer-on.html", "tags": ["affairs","ideas"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2019/03/31/teju-cole-on.html", "title": "Teju Cole on Embedding Hesitation", "content_html": "

Really enjoyed this substantive recent conversation on Krista Tippett’s “On Being” podcast. At one point, Tippett quotes Cole’s Blind Spot, one of my favorite books from the last few years: “To look is to see only a fraction of what one is looking at. Even in the most vigilant eye, there is a blind spot. What is missing?” She tells Cole, “I find that useful language.” The ruminative Cole responds:

Well, thank you. I find it very fortifying as an idea, to think about what is not evident, what’s not apparent. I have a real struggle, especially when I’m writing for the Times. I have a very sympathetic, understanding, and encouraging editor, who lets me get away with all kinds of things, but I’m always trying to lower the volume of my essays. Very often, I’m trying to write and not say more than can justly be said. I want to reduce the number of sparks. I want to embed hesitation and lack of certainty in it.

\n", "date_published": "2019-03-31T08:58:49-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2019/03/31/teju-cole-on.html", "tags": ["ideas","books"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2018/10/03/a-mans-work.html", "content_html": "

“A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”

Hadn’t seen this Camus quote before. (It appropriately closed a new profile on Sam Mendes in TNY.)

\n", "date_published": "2018-10-03T20:53:16-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2018/10/03/a-mans-work.html", "tags": ["ideas","film"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2018/04/01/aleksandar-hemon-on.html", "content_html": "

Aleksandar Hemon on “Katastrofa”: A superb and insightful essay on language and family. 

\n", "date_published": "2018-04-01T14:58:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2018/04/01/aleksandar-hemon-on.html", "tags": ["ideas","family"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2016/12/29/how-to-be.html", "content_html": "

Enjoyed this short essay by Elif Batuman: “How to Be a Stoic."

\n", "date_published": "2016-12-29T14:05:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2016/12/29/how-to-be.html", "tags": ["ideas"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2016/12/28/alan-burdick-on.html", "title": "Alan Burdick on Time", "content_html": "

From \"The Secret Life of Time,\" published in The New Yorker:

Years ago, long before I had children or was even married, a friend with children said, “The thing about having kids is that after a while you forget what it was like before you had them.” The idea was shocking. Busy enough with my own life, I couldn’t envisage a future self whose comings and goings were circumscribed, apparently happily, by the wants and needs of people half my size. But that’s what happened. As I grew into the role of parent, I sometimes felt as if I were taking apart a ship and using the planks to build a ship for someone else. I was building a ship across time, out of my time.

\n", "date_published": "2016-12-28T15:57:51-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2016/12/28/alan-burdick-on.html", "tags": ["ideas","writing","family"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2016/12/10/james-wood-lessons.html", "title": "James Wood: “Lessons From My Mother”", "content_html": "

Lovely essay.

\n", "date_published": "2016-12-10T11:06:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2016/12/10/james-wood-lessons.html", "tags": ["ideas"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2016/08/14/the-refugee-nation.html", "title": "The Refugee Nation", "content_html": "\"\"\n
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The official flag for The Refugee Nation, a team of ten refugees currently competing in the Rio Olympics, draws its colour scheme and design from lifejackets. Designed by Syrian artist and refugee Yara Said, the flag is a vivid orange with a single black stripe.

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Learn more about this beautiful effort.

\n", "date_published": "2016-08-14T21:20:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2016/08/14/the-refugee-nation.html", "tags": ["ideas"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2016/08/14/tadao-ando-the.html", "title": "Tadao Ando: The Idea of a Center", "content_html": "

From Michael Auping’s Seven Interviews with Tadao Ando:

The idea of a center is an interesting one, and one that is more of a Western concept. Roland Barthes made a comment on visiting Japan that it is a country that doesn’t seem to have a center; great depth, but no center. I think I carry that aspect of Japan with me. For me, the center of a building is always the person who is in it, experiencing the space from within it themselves. The challenge is in allowing each person to be the center, to be generous enough with the space to allow them to feel they are the center.

\n", "date_published": "2016-08-14T14:01:22-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2016/08/14/tadao-ando-the.html", "tags": ["ideas","architecture"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2016/02/06/silverblatt-knausgaard.html", "title": "Silverblatt \u0026 Knausgaard", "content_html": "

Having just finished book three of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (I enjoyed the first two more, though this volume’s still captivating), I was eager to listen to both part one and part two of the author’s interviews on Michael Silverblatt’s “Bookworm.”

It’s great listening. These insights from Silverblatt — which followed his comment that Knausgaard clearly knows his “great literature” — rang especially true for me: 

What’s daring about My Struggle is that you’re willing to put the difficulty of the literature of the century — Joyce on — aside, to recapture the human. To make it human again, or to restore it to humanness. And in doing so, you risk being wildly misunderstood…. 

These works of great literature, in some way, speak to readers. And they speak from a world of genius. And I feel that in order to restore the possibility of originality, and even grandeur, you had to enter the zone of shame and the zone of ordinary life, which is banality. And you had to ask, Can great literature be made of such things? Am I willing to try to write six volumes of daily life, when all of us are feeling that our daily lives are disappointing and dissatisfying? Can the novel of Knausgaard restore our feelings of the importance of daily life? 

I can’t think, personally, of anything more important. I’m very grateful when I read these books, because I feel like you’ve restored my interest in human beings. In going to the grocery. In feeding a child and making sure things are taken care of from one day to the next.

\n", "date_published": "2016-02-06T15:48:02-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2016/02/06/silverblatt-knausgaard.html", "tags": ["ideas","books","literature"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2015/12/04/adam-gopnik-practicing.html", "title": "Adam Gopnik: \"Practicing Doubt, Redrawing Faith\"", "content_html": "

Terrific “On Being” conversation. 

\n", "date_published": "2015-12-04T23:01:13-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2015/12/04/adam-gopnik-practicing.html", "tags": ["ideas"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2013/09/06/on-becoming-a.html", "title": "\"On Becoming a Father\"", "content_html": "

A lovely short essay by Alexis C. Madrigal. 

\n", "date_published": "2013-09-06T21:21:31-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2013/09/06/on-becoming-a.html", "tags": ["ideas","writing"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/10/14/the-selfdestruction-of.html", "title": "\"The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent\"", "content_html": "

Interesting historical perspective from Chrystia Freeland, writing in the Times:

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The story of Venice’s rise and fall is told by the scholars Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” as an illustration of their thesis that what separates successful states from failed ones is whether their governing institutions are inclusive or extractive. Extractive states are controlled by ruling elites whose objective is to extract as much wealth as they can from the rest of society. Inclusive states give everyone access to economic opportunity; often, greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity, which creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness.

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\n", "date_published": "2012-10-14T14:28:48-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/10/14/the-selfdestruction-of.html", "tags": ["affairs","ideas"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/05/13/not-his-riches.html", "title": "\"Not His Riches, But Ours\"", "content_html": "

A member of the Wallace-L listserv posted this Pascal quote this morning, commenting (insightfully) on how it brings to mind many statements DFW made about reading and indeed love:

When a natural discourse paints a passion or an effect, one feels within oneself the truth of what one reads, which was there before, although one did not know it. Hence one is inclined to love him who makes us feel it, for he has not shown us his own riches, but ours. And thus this benefit renders him pleasing to us, besides that such community of intellect as we have with him necessarily inclines the heart to love.

\n", "date_published": "2012-05-13T08:30:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/05/13/not-his-riches.html", "tags": ["ideas","books"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/04/08/skepticism-in-montaignes.html", "title": "Skepticism in Montaigne's Day", "content_html": "

A surprising and interesting passage from Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question  and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, which I’m reading now:

There was only one exception to [Montaigne’s] “question everything” rule: he was careful to state that he considered his religious faith beyond doubt. He adhered to the received dogma of the Catholic Church, and that was that.

This can come as a surprise to modern readers. Today, Skepticism and organized religion are usually thought to occupy opposite sides of a divide, with the latter representing faith and authority while the former allies itself with science and reason. In Montaigne’s day, the lines were drawn differently. Science in the modern sense did not yet exist and human reason was only rarely considered something that could stand alone, unsupported by God. The idea that the human mind could find things out for itself was the very thing Skeptics were likely to be most skeptical about. And the Church currently favored faith over “rational theology,” so it naturally saw Pyrrhonism as an ally. Attacking human arrogance as it did, Pyrrhonian Skepticism was especially useful against the “innovation” of Protestantism, which prioritized private reasoning and conscience rather than dogmas.

\n", "date_published": "2012-04-08T20:27:19-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/04/08/skepticism-in-montaignes.html", "tags": ["ideas"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/03/08/tony-judt-a.html", "title": "\"Tony Judt: A Final Victory\"", "content_html": "

By Jennifer Homans, Judt’s widow, and published in The New York Review of Books. Lovely and sad.

\n", "date_published": "2012-03-08T23:25:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/03/08/tony-judt-a.html", "tags": ["ideas","work"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/02/23/aleksander-hemon-national.html", "title": "Aleksander Hemon: \"National Subjects\"", "content_html": "

Another very good (and very dispiriting) non-fiction piece from the Bosnian-American writer, published in Guernica’s January 2012 issue.

\n", "date_published": "2012-02-23T09:44:08-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/02/23/aleksander-hemon-national.html", "tags": ["ideas"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/02/11/the-germans-dive.html", "title": "\"The Germans Dive Deeper\"", "content_html": "

Peter Watson's The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century is an extraordinary 1,000-page book. It is immensely ambitious, rich in ideas and evidence of the German-speaking peoples’ world-changing achievements in music, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, biology, geology, bioethics, archeology, art history, and on and on. (On music, to take just one subject: “The standard ‘backbone’ of classical music consists today of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms — all German.”)

Watson, an intellectual historian and former journalist, is a confident, resourceful, learned guide. He succeeds not just in illustrating how Germany was the leading force in the world of ideas until 1933, but also in helping the reader consider the country since it was ever-changed by the Führer and the Nazi Party (“Hitler still makes history but he also distorts it”). As a writer and historian, Watson is sharp and entertaining, as evidenced by these well-drawn, memorable sketches and assessments of just some of the book’s key figures:

Brahms:

Prickly, oversensitive, cynical, and bad-tempered, he was as much feared and disliked as Hans von Bülow, who was notorious for his tempers and antagonisms. At one party in Vienna, it is said, Brahms left in a huff, grumbling, “If there is anyone here I have not insulted, I apologize.”

Strauss:

Paradoxically, Strauss was himself a solid bourgeois, with a sober — even staid — private life. Alma Mahler was at the rehearsal of Feuersnot in 1901 and confided to her diary: “Strauss thought of nothing but money. The whole time he had a pencil in hand and was calculating the profits to the last penny.” His wife, Pauline, was a grasping woman, once a singer, who would scream at her husband, when he was relaxing at cards, “Richard, go compose!” Their house at Garmisch had three separate doormats, on each of which Pauline insisted that the composer wipe his feet.“

Schoenberg:

Richard Strauss was ambivalent about Arnold Schoenberg. He thought he would be better off \"shoveling show” [!] than composing, yet recommended him for a Liszt scholarship.“ … A small, wiry man, \"easily unimpressed,” who went bald early on, Schoenberg was strikingly inventive — he carved his own chessmen, bound his own books, painted (Wassily Kandinsky was a fan), and built a typewriter for music.

Mann:

When war broke out, Thomas Mann — as we have seen — was as nationalistic as many others. He was not yet one of the giants of European literature but he did have a growing reputation. He volunteered for the Landsturm, or reserve army, but the doctor who examined him was familiar with his work and, reasoning that he would make a greater contribution to the war effort as a writer rather than as a soldier, failed him physically for active service.

Kafka:

Kafka is best known for three works of fiction … But he also kept a diary for fourteen years and wrote copious letters. These reveal him to have been a deeply paradoxical and enigmatic man. He was engaged to the same woman for five years, yet saw her fewer than a dozen times in that period; he wrote ninety letters to one woman in the two months after he met her, including several between twenty and thirty pages, and to another he wrote 130 letters in five months. He wrote a famous forty-five-page typed letter to his father when he was thirty-six, explaining why he was still afraid of him.

Marx:

Along with his fellow German-speaker, Adolf Hitler, Karl Marx probably had a more direct effect on the recently completed twentieth century, and the shape of the contemporary world, than any other single individual. Without him there would have been no Lenin, no Stalin, no Mao Zedong, and few if any of the other dictators who disfigured those times. Without him there would have been no Russian Revolution, and without World War II (or Max Planck and Albert Einstein), would there — could there — have been a Cold War, a divided Germany? Would decolonization have occurred in the way that it did, would there have been an Israel where it is, the Middle East problem that there is? Would there have been a 9/11? Ideas don’t come any more consequential than Marxism.

Freud:

Sigmund Freud’s influence was less catastrophic than Marx’s, but no less consequential…. Alfred Kazin, the American critic, maintained in an essay he published in 1956 to mark the one hundredth anniversary of Freud’s birth that “Freud has influenced even people who have never heard of him.” Kazin thought that, at mid-century in America, “to those who have no belief, Freudianism sometimes serves as a philosophy of life.” He thought that at “every hour of every day now,” people could not forget a name, feel depressed, or end a marriage without wondering what the “Freudian” reason might be. He thought that the novel and painting (Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Expressionism, Surrealism, Abstraction) had been reinvigorated by the Freudian knowledge that “personal passion is a stronger force in people’s lives that socially accepted morality” and that the “most beautiful effect” of Freudianism was the increasing awareness of childhood “as the most important single influence on personal development.” He thought the insistence on personal happiness — the goal of psychoanalytic therapy — was the most revolutionary force in modern times, a modern form of self-realization.

Nietzsche:

Nietzsche’s most well-known — some might say notorious — aphorism is “God is dead.” One of his most important achievements, along with Max Weber, was to think through and confront the implications of that sentiment, to work out in what he saw as terrifying detail the consequences of modernity, a world of vast populous cities, mass transport, and mass communications, in which the old certainties had been dissolved, where the comforts and consolations of religion had disappeared for many people, and in which science had acquired an authority that was, in his view, as arid and empty as it was impersonal and impressive. It is in this sense that Martin Heidegger called Nietzsche the “culmination” of modernity — i.e., Nietzsche felt the loss of whatever had gone before more keenly than anyone else, and he described that loss in more vivid hues.

Beuys:

All this was overshadowed by the advent of Joseph Beuys, who stands apart (and, for many people, above) all else in German postwar art. Beuys, born in Krefeld in 1921, never deviated from his conviction that his artistic aim was to find a new visual language that would come to terms with the war and at the same time find a way forward that did not ignore all that had happened.

The work of art, Beuys believed, exists in “eternal time, historical time, and personal time.” Having himself been shot down over Russia as a Luftwaffe pilot in the Second Wold War, he was treated for frostbite by his Russian captors, who used felt and fat, which became the materials Beuys used in (some of) his art, fused with other, less personal substances. He felt the spectator should be aware of what these materials meant to the artist, adding a level of consciousness to the aesthetic experience (as a boy he used a tram stop near an important monument), with the national past, featuring railway lines to remind the viewer what railways were used for in Nazi Germany. But, his lines were slightly curved, to hint at progress, a way forward, and up. In experiencing the present-day beauty of his sculptures, Beuys is saying, we must relive past events — this is his dialogue with time.

Congrats to Watson for completing such a tremendous volume of history. I recommend it highly.

\n", "date_published": "2012-02-11T15:55:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/02/11/the-germans-dive.html", "tags": ["music","ideas","books","visual arts"] }, { "id": "http://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/02/05/evgeny-morozov-the.html", "title": "Evgeny Morozov: \"The Death of the Cyberflâneur\"", "content_html": "

An interesting piece published in today’s NYT:

As the popular technology blogger Robert Scoble explained in a recent post defending frictionless sharing, “The new world is you just open up Facebook and everything you care about will be streaming down the screen.”

This is the very stance that is killing cyberflânerie: the whole point of the flâneur’s wanderings is that he does not know what he cares about. 

Reminded me a bit of the “serendipity” exchanges from 2006. 

\n", "date_published": "2012-02-05T12:47:00-05:00", "url": "https://schenkenberg.micro.blog/2012/02/05/evgeny-morozov-the.html", "tags": ["technology","ideas"] } ] }