5IT, 11/11
1. When work is sending email, more efficiency means more work for everybody.
"Wajcman cites a study of Blackberry use among 'corporate lawyers, venture capitalists, and investment bankers' who said, in interviews, that mobile email 'enhance[d] their flexibility, control, and competence as professional workers.' But the seeming increase in personal autonomy canceled itself out through 'the unintended consequences of collective use.' In other words, the advantage to an individual of being able to work and communicate whenever and wherever it was possible or convenient 'also heightens expectations of availability and responsiveness' from colleagues, who also have continuous connectivity, thereby 'reducing [one’s] personal downtime and increasing stress' by 'escalating engagement with work at all hours of day and night.'"
2. What an AK-47 could mean to a child soldier.
"When I was there, it meant a lot in my life. It was like my mother. It became a part of me, and me a part of it. It was my identity, like my passport. Like, they ask you at the airport for your passport—at that time, if they had asked me who I was, I would have shown them my gun. It became my mother, it was my friend, my protector, and yet I still felt fear every day [as a child soldier]... You got so frightened. You had to take care of it. You dream and you think you don’t have the gun. If I woke up and the gun wasn’t there, we would become crazy because we knew we would be punished. In Europe now, when the girls go out, or when a woman goes out, most of the time they make sure not to forget their purse. And so, it was to us like that. You could forget to wear clothes but you could not forget your gun."
3. Finally, a novel about the inventor of the theremin. And apparently it is very good.
"Lev Termen is imprisoned on a ship steaming its way from New York City to the Soviet Union. He is writing a letter to his 'one true love,' Clara Rockmore, the finest theremin player in the world. From there we learn Termen's story: his early days as a scientist in Leningrad, and the acclaim he received as the inventor of the theremin, eventually coming to New York under the aegis of the Russian state. There he stays, teaching eager music students, making his name, and swiftly falling in love with Clara. But it isn't long until he has fallen in with Russian spooks, slipping through the shadows of a budding Cold War, with cold-blooded results. The novel builds to a crescendo as Termen returns to Russia, where he is imprisoned in a Siberian gulag and later brought to Moscow, tasked with eavesdropping on Stalin himself."
4. There was something glorious about 1970s sci-fi.
"The 70s began with a wave of dystopian sci-fi and culminated with Star Wars and the birth of the modern blockbuster. These are some of the decade’s most stunning poster designs."
5. The mechanics and meaning of the MP3.
"GL: Jonathan, can you describe for us, in detail, what happens when we create an MP3 file? Whatever computer we use there is still a delay, there is some digitization happening, some compression, but what exactly is going on?
JS: First, thank you for asking all these great and difficult questions. And to readers, thanks for plowing through what’s about to be a lot of prose. Brevity in print is not one of my strong points..."
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
consume means to devour, waste, destroy, spend, &c., completely. Hence it should not be accompanied by totally, completely, utterly, all of which it already implies.
The Credits: 1. insidehighered.edu / @zeynep 2. designandviolence.moma.org 3. usconductors.byseanmichaels.com/ @kathrynschulz 4. bfi.org.uk 5. computationalculture.net / @marathonpacks
It Was My Identity, Like My Passport