Thought Park

newyorker:

David Denby on “The Great Gatsby”: “Luhrmann’s vulgarity is designed to win over the young audience, and it suggests that he’s less a filmmaker than a music-video director with endless resources and a stunning absence of taste.” http://nyr.kr/1414CXu

I love “The Great Gatsby” but nothing I’ve seen or heard about the film adaptation excites me.

“I try to understand, I have to understand…sort of”

—Michael Gambon on playing Dumbledore in Harry Potter

Love the part about lying during interviews. Actually, the whole clip is full of laughs. And he got decent lap record!

People Believe Something on Twitter for Some Reason : The New Yorker

Interesting point but why does the headline suck so much? It’s like being allowed to write “thingies” and “stuff” in any formal piece of writing.

The New Yorker

"A common complaint then among Time writers who found themselves stuck on a story was “this story just won’t write”—as if the story had a will of its own and was using it to resist being shaped into a coherent narrative. I may have used the phrase from time to time myself. The problem was mostly space. There on my desk was the raw material for one of the three or four stories in my section: a fifteen-page file from the main reporter on the story, a five-page file from the Washington bureau on the federal angle, three books that the researcher thought I might find useful, a fistful of previous Time files, and, of course, some clippings from the Times. From this, I was to produce a seventy-line piece that had the arc of a story rather than the “inverted pyramid” structure that was then the template for newspaper articles. (Since the news sometimes failed to conform to Time’s printing schedule, the paragraph containing the denouement of the story often began “At week’s end.”) Given the density of the seventy lines and the imperative to keep the story moving, there often seemed to be at least one highly relevant fact that simply didn’t fit. I pictured that left-out fact darting around to find an opening and being rebuffed by every paragraph it tried to squeeze into—like someone trying door after door in a desperate effort to board a thoroughly stuffed rush-hour subway. Sometimes, if I had until the next day to turn the story in, I’d head home, finding that the knot in the narrative came loose with the rhythmic clacking of the subway train."

Calvin Trillin reflects on his experience working as a floater at TIME magazine in the early 1960s: http://nyr.kr/WIA50k (via newyorker)

“When you’re with someone in the end of her days, something that passes through your mind is immortality,” he says. “And to me immortality isn’t measured by living forever, but by influence.” Because his mother’s cells continue to act inside him, contributing to how his body—and perhaps even mind—work, his mother has achieved a sort of “perpetual cellular influence,” he says—a modest sort of immortality.

Remarkable stories and explanations of chimerism.

The whole gene immortality concept reminded me a bit of Assassin’s Creed. Heh.

Amazing story…

"Jamieson is frustrated that our culture has such a negative view of stress: “When people say, ‘I’m stressed out,’ it means, ‘I’m not doing well.’ It doesn’t mean, ‘I’m excited — I have increased oxygenated blood going to my brain. "

NYTIMES: Why Can Some Kids Handle Pressure While Others Fall Apart?

Fascinating read, great narrative and reporting.

Especially interesting to read the part about pilots and experienced “worriers.”