Stoopers, Reality TV and Christmas: things I’m reading
The Atlantic offers short stories for $3.99 a pop on Kindle. That’s less than some movies on-demand, so maybe it’s the right price. But short stories typically don’t sell well in collection form. Will they sell as singles? We’ll see how this experiment goes (poorly, if the Atlantic continues to make them hard to find).
A fun list of the next little things. I pitched one of these to a magazine back in January, before it was public. The magazine ignored me ignored me ignored me and then punted on the idea. Such is the freelance life.
Future Treasury secretaries? They can live without credit cards, an experience we need. I bet they pay their taxes, too. One of them walked away from his debt, a hardline approach that probably rules him out.
The super stooper. I’m not sure $45k a year would be enough for me to stand in front of a machine 10 hours a day. But I liked reading about this guy.
How reality TV is destroying our society. A fun read, if not exactly an original idea. I will continue to avoid reality TV, the Biggest Loser excepted.
2010 will be a long year for Tigers fans. Sigh. Jill Lepore’s concise look at the century-long effort to create a public health insurance program in the U.S., Preexisting condition, was an excellent reminder that failed healthcare plans are something of a time-honored tradition in this country. One odd note: she says Irving Fisher is best-remembered for helping to found econometrics. That’s what he’d be remembered for in an ideal world. In truth, we remember him for saying, in 1929, stocks had reached a “permanently high plateau.” The US has been a sound-bite nation for a long, long time. Auden’s ode to Christmas in consumerist times, For the Time Being.
…the time is noon:
When the Spirit must practice his scales of rejoicing
Without even a hostile audience, and the Soul endure
A silence that is neither for nor against her faith
That God’s Will will be done, That, in spite of her prayers,
God will cheat no one, not even the world of its triumph.