I learn by going where I have to go

Recursos Humanos

As I prepared to leave Princeton, I stacked my John McPhee books on the passenger seat of my car, and there were so many of them that the car thought it was a person and frantically beeped at me to buckle the seatbelt. Before McPhee said goodbye, he started to give me driving directions. Then he remembered about my phone. This reminded him of my trip down. How, he wondered, had I gotten to Princeton? What route did I take? What roads did I drive? He was curious to know how my phone had solved the problem of orientation, how its machine directions had differed from his human directions.

Unfortunately, I told him, I had no idea. I had hardly been paying attention. I just trusted the computer, followed its instructions turn by turn and spent my time daydreaming about this and that.

This answer did not satisfy John McPhee. He wanted to know the roads I took. Didn’t I remember anything?

I told him I remembered passing a water tower. At some point, there was maybe a reservoir. I searched my memory. There had been a sign that said “Fog Area,” after which everything got foggy immediately, as if the sign had summoned the fog. I remembered, on the radio, a D.J. named Clay Pigeon saying that scientists had successfully encoded a 19th-century film of a running horse into a living cell. At some point I hit traffic, and my phone rerouted me onto back roads. I remembered a very old stone house, the Johnson & Johnson headquarters, a park called “Sourland.”

Based on those scraps of information, McPhee was able to reverse-engineer my route.

“Very interesting,” he said. “That’s not the way I would have told you to go.”

Sam Anderson, The Mind of John McPhee.

Alguns dados curiosos acerca das laranjas

McPhee has built a career on such small detonations of knowledge. [...] Literature has always sought transcendence in purportedly trivial subjects — “a world in a grain of sand,” as Blake put it — but few have ever pushed the impulse further than McPhee. He once wrote an entire book about oranges, called, simply, “Oranges” [...]

Sam Anderson, The Mind of John McPhee.

Domingo no mundo (36)

Ingrid Bergman e George Sanders ao sol durante Viaggio in Italia de Roberto Rosselini, 1954.

Didion's point

Over time Didion realized that the myth of the West was Janus-faced. On one side was the heroic pioneer, capable of bending the landscape to his will. On the other was the lonesome wanderer, who could appreciate her insignificance on a geological scale. In a review of Norman Mailer’s The Executioners Song, Didion applauded Mailer for capturing “that vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience, a nihilism antithetical not only to literature but to most other forms of human endeavor, a dread so close to zero that human voices fade out, trail off, like skywriting.” But those voices don’t disappear immediately. As she read Mailer’s novel, Didion also “remembered that the tracks made by the wagon wheels are still visible form the air over Utah, like the footprints made on the moon.” Even if the traveler couldn’t control the world, she could leave a lasting record of her solitary passage through it. 

Didion received this half of the Western mythos, like its more heroic elements, from her mother, who first gave her a notebook and told her to write down what she saw and felt. The purpose was to “remember what it was to be me: that was always the point.” Fierce loyalty to her own experience entailed being at odds with what others said it ought to be, but it also laid the foundation of her aesthetic vision. Didion admires the modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe because O’Keeffe is “simply hard, a straight shooter, a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees.” When critics offered their own interpretations of O’Keeffe’s paintings of flowers, she rebuked them: “I made you take time to look at what I saw … and you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see—and I don’t.”

Paul Gleason, The Picture in Her Mind. 

O tresmalho dos vagões

Quando eram comboios de mercadorias competia-lhe ainda assegurar-se de que o último vagão levava a placa da cauda, garantia de que nenhum veículo tinha ficado pelo caminho.

Carlos Cipriano, Guardas de passagem de nível.

Domingo no mundo (35)

Thomas D. MacAvoy, Saturday morning with Françoise Sagan, 1956.

Vida: Modo de Usar (4)

One form of moral pride involves the belief that we’re self-made people. Moral pride can make us feel superior to others and more liable to find fault with them, because the belief that all persons are self-made implies that others’ bad traits are entirely of their own making. For the same reason, moral pride can also undermine feelings of compassion towards those who have had difficult formative histories (such as early emotional trauma), faced hard moral decisions (social pressure in Nazi Germany, for example), or had minimal help from others in the moral life (if, for example, they haven’t had good role models).

But our reflections (...) should shatter the illusion that we’re self-made people. We’re all significantly – but not entirely – shaped by luck. The recognition that we’re not wholly self-made should help us to credit others for their roles in our moral lives and perhaps most importantly to be compassionate and generous to those who are down on their luck. After all, with different luck, we might have shared their fate.

 Robert J. Hartmann, Moral luck.

Blues

O tio Arlindo, que cumpriu serviço militar em Angola, esteve em Jersey, tornou à Madeira, avançou para a Venezuela. [...] O tio João continuava na África do Sul. A tia Rosa e o tio Agostinho também. O tio Martinho foi para a Venezuela. O tio Gabriel também. Dos homens do lado da mãe, já só faltava o tio Ernesto. «Eu achava-me envergonhado. Ia à missa e já não via rapazes», conta ele. «Todos caminhavam e eu ali, armado em tonto. Um homem... Sozinho... Eu pensei: "Bem, vou caminhar também!"» E lá foi.

Ana Cristina Pereira, Movimento perpétuo: Histórias das migrações portuguesas.

Elogio do «Mas»*

If you’re confident that everything not black is white, discussions about shades and hues seem beside the point. This absolutism presumes that our only position on those with whom we don’t have complete agreement is complete disapproval, and also that agreement is simple, past which there is no nuance, strategy, possibility to explore.

Rebecca Solnit, Preaching to The Choir.

* Embora, nos seus maus momentos, seja uma ferramenta obscena de relativização do que não deve ser relativizado.

Nova Iorque p'la tardinha

Jane Freilicher, Early New York Evening, 1954.

Modern times explained

Wittgenstein was hostile to modern philosophy as he found it. He thought it the product of a culture that had come to model everything that matters about our lives on scientific explanation. In its ever-extending observance of the idea that knowledge, not wisdom, is our goal, that what matters is information rather than insight, and that we best address the problems that beset us, not with changes in our heart and spirit but with more data and better theories, our culture is pretty much exactly as Wittgenstein feared it would become. He sought to uncover the deep undercurrents of thought that had produced this attitude. He feared it would lead not to a better world but the demise of our civilization. That perhaps explains his deep unpopularity today. It is for the same reason that Ludwig Wittgenstein is the most important philosopher of modern times.

Ian Ground, The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Domingo no mundo (34)

Cuno Amiet, Blütenzeit, 1926.

Then you're hooked.

As a consultant to Silicon Valley startups, Eyal helps his clients mimic what he calls the ‘narcotic-like properties’ of sites such as Facebook and Pinterest. His goal, Eyal told Business Insider, is to get users ‘continuing through the same basic cycle. Forever and ever.’ In Hooked, he sets out to answer a simple question: ‘How is it that these companies, producing little more than bits of code displayed on a screen, can seemingly control users’ minds?’ 

The answer, he argues, is a simple four-step design model. Think of Facebook’s news feed. The first two steps are straightforward – you encounter a trigger (whatever prompts you to scroll down on the feed) and an opportunity for action (you actually scroll down). Critically, the outcome of this action shouldn’t be predictable – instead, it should offer a variable reward, such that the user is never quite sure what she’s going to get. On Facebook, that might be a rewarding cat video, or an obnoxious post from an acquaintance. 

Finally, according to Eyal, the process should give you a chance to make some kind of investment – clicking the Like button, for example, or leaving a comment. The investment should gradually ramp up, until the user feels more and more invested in the cycle of trigger, action and reward.

 Michael Schulson, User behaviour.

Solar

Henry Diltz: Joni Mitchell em Laurel Canyon, Califórnia, 1970.

Uma vida eterna

"Uma vida eterna talvez fosse suficiente para resolver o fogo, as brasas e as cinzas da efemeridade terrena. Ou talvez não. Talvez nos fôssemos envolvendo em novos fogos ao longo da eternidade. Quão eterna pode ser a eternidade? E duas eternidades?!" Ri-me com os meus botões. "Duas eternidades!" Deixei escapar uma curta gargalhada. Continuava especulando sozinha, evadindo-me comigo, com as minhas conversas. "O meu cérebro não para. Máquina maldita! Para, Maria Luísa, para! Vive isto, agora. Vive só isto. Mais nada." E obrigo-me a respirar. A focar-me nos sentidos e só neles. As flores e o seu odor. A luz ainda mansa que não me fere os olhos.

Isabela Figueiredo, A Gorda.

O amor

Havia momentos em que o papá ficava a olhar para a mamã e se ria da sua cara sempre composta e séria.
"Qual é a graça?", perguntava ela.
O papá não respondia e continuava a rir.
"Parece que és parvo."
Ele levantava-se, abraçava-a e dava-lhe um beijo com força.
O amor talvez seja ficarmos a rir olhando para o rosto da pessoa amada, não nos importarmos que ela nos chame de parvos, depois levantarmo-nos, abraçá-la e beijá-la. E mais nada.

 Isabela Figueiredo, A Gorda.

A compreensão é um castigo

Houve uma altura, quando a prisão que a minha vida constituía se tornou demasiado clara e crua, em que comecei a ver cada vez pior. À medida que aumentava a minha visão interior, piorava a exterior. A oftalmologista teve de me aumentar as dioptrias afirmando ser coisa incompreensível, porque a miopia tinha tendência a estabilizar na adultícia, não existindo outras doenças, mas em mim cavalgava sem razão. Acordava com dificuldade e escrevia para me aguentar, dia após dia, mesmo que nada tivesse a dizer. Escrevia "estou só aqui à espera". A compreensão é um castigo. Nunca mais se consegue ignorar a jaula nem o jugo.

Isabela Figueiredo, A Gorda.

O caminho das árvores

Gustave Caillebotte, Yerres, 1871-1878.

Jean Pierre, faire attention, tu va tomber!

The idea of the attention economy is not new. “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients,” Herbert Simon, a noted economist, wrote in 1971. A “wealth of information,” he added, “creates a poverty of attention.”
[...]
Interface designers, app-makers and social-media firms employ armies of designers to keep people coming back, according to Tristan Harris, another ex-Googler and co-founder of an advocacy group called “Time Well Spent”. Notifications signalling new followers or new e-mails beg to be tapped on. The now ubiquitous “pull-to-refresh” feature, which lets users check for new content, has turned smartphones into slot machines.
[...]
The population of America farts about 3m times a minute. It likes things on Facebook about 4m times a minute.

How the world was trolled — na Economist desta semana.

Domingo no mundo (33)

Paul Gaugin, Bonjour, Monsieur Gaugin, 1889.

A lâmina

A senhora Sen trouxera a lâmina da Índia, onde, aparentemente, havia pelo menos uma em cada lar. "Sempre que haja um casamento na família", disse ela a Eliot, "ou uma grande festa para celebrar qualquer ocasião, a minha mãe manda recado pela noitinha a todas as mulheres da vizinhança para que tragam lâminas como esta; depois, elas sentam-se em círculo, um círculo de um diâmetro imenso, no terraço da nossa casa, e durante toda a noite, rindo e contando mil e uma coscuvilhices, acabam por cortar mais de cinquenta quilos de vegetais." O perfil dela pairava protectoramente sobre o trabalho, uma miscelânea colorida de pepino, beringela, e casca de cebola rodeava-a. "Era impossível poder dormir nessas noites, por causa do barulho de tantas vozes."

Jhumpa Lahiri, intérprete de enfermidades.