Pamela Paul's memories of reading are less about words and more about the experience. "I almost always remember where I was and I remember the book itself. I remember the physical object," says Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, who reads, it is fair to say, a lot of books. "I remember the edition; I remember the cover; I usually remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me. What I don't remember — and it's terrible — is everything else."
For example, Paul told me she recently finished reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Benjamin Franklin. "While I read that book, I knew not everything there was to know about Ben Franklin, but much of it, and I knew the general timeline of the American revolution," she says. "Right now, two days later, I probably could not give you the timeline of the American revolution."
[. . .]
It's true that people often shove more into their brains than they can possibly hold. Last year, Horvath and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne found that those who binge-watched TV shows forgot the content of them much more quickly than people who watched one episode a week. Right after finishing the show, the binge-watchers scored the highest on a quiz about it, but after 140 days, they scored lower than the weekly viewers. They also reported enjoying the show less than did people who watched it once a day, or weekly.
[. . .]
The lesson from his binge-watching study is that if you want to remember the things you watch and read, space them out. I used to get irritated in school when an English-class syllabus would have us read only three chapters a week, but there was a good reason for that. Memories get reinforced the more you recall them, Horvath says. If you read a book all in one stretch—on an airplane, say — you're just holding the story in your working memory that whole time. "You're never actually reaccessing it," he says.
Sana says that often when we read, there's a false "feeling of fluency." The information is flowing in, we're understanding it, it seems like it is smoothly collating itself into a binder to be slotted onto the shelves of our brains. "But it actually doesn't stick unless you put effort into it and concentrate and engage in certain strategies that will help you remember."
Incidentally, I saw this commercial for the 800,001st time just the other night and thought to google them; this place, as you may or may not expect from its ubiquitous TV presence, is supergoddamn expensive, like $60,000 a month expensive.
If I were to write a novel, I'd be very tempted to add a character named "eHow," who embodied attributes including but not limited to earnestness, obviousness, guilelessness and hustle.
I would like to believe that I would do the decent thing and take my children camping for the first time if only to use these blasted sound puzzles for kindling, but I fear I will stoop to continuing the cycle of violence by passing along these crazy-making nightmares to unsuspecting future parents.
Top Google rankings for subscription-only content is fucking bullshit. I'm looking at you, America's Fucking Test Kitchen.
Seriously, you shouldn't get Googletonic top SEO fuckery for subscription-only content. I don't care how wonderful your "foolproof baked fried chicken shortcut" is, or whatever it was I was looking up. Fuck the internet.
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June 8, 2015
$2000 in damage to a hotel room is child's play. If you're not ruining carpet, destroying electrical, you might as well sleep in the van.
Often heard in connection with attempts to apologize for matters of race, class and gender before launching into an opinion about said topic, e.g., "It's fucking ridiculous that here I am, a goddamn white man, talking about the meaning of [X], but . . ."
It causes my serotonin levels to crash, and makes me feel generally gloomy, like I'm missing out on something truly wonderful happening to a large, boisterous crowd somewhere who is better dressed, better paid and better buzzed than I am.
Hi, I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.
Before the record industry destroyed internet radio there was (if I recall correctly) a weird site called "Spank Radio" or some such that had a single playlist that streamed the same songs in the same order. This song was on there somewhere and has been stuck in my head for fifteen years and it wasn't until this exact moment when I heard it again. I still had those pleated pants until fairly recently. Here's a funny article from the last millennium: "A website isn't worth its bandwidth these days if it doesn't offer some sort of RealAudio, Liquid Audio, Windows Media Player, Winamp, or MP3 option."
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June 25, 2015
The Washington State Major League Baseball Stadium Public Facilities District owns "http://t.co/uMamAxPqTr." URL more valuable than the Ms?
Seriously, "ballpark.org" is great — has to be worth something, right? Like a mortgage company looking to attract first-time home buyers or, I don't know what.
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June 28, 2015
Alternate realty wherein Don Draper stays at the retreat and Sally becomes fuckin' badass cop. Thus, "Buy the World a Coke" is disappeared.
I'm pretty sure Rachel McAdams' dad on True Detective was at the same yoga retreat Don Draper spent the early 1970s at. It sure looked that way. [Factcheck: yup.]
