“I’m shocked by anyone who doesn’t consider Los Angeles to be anything less than a bozo-saturated hellhole. It is pretty much without question the worst city in America. The reason “Walking in L.A.” by Missing Persons was the most accidentally prescient single of 1982 was because of its unfathomable (but wholly accurate) specificity: Los Angeles is the only city in the world where the process of walking on the sidewalk could somehow be a) political and b) humiliating. It is the only community I’ve ever visited where absolutely everything cliche proved to be completely accurate.

I don’t care if 85% of Los Angeles is stupid. I can deal with stupid. My problem is that every stupid person in Los Angeles is also a) unyieldingly narcissistic and b) unyieldingly nice. They have somehow managed to combine raging megalomania with genuine friendliness.”

-Chuck Klosterman

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (via mikeanderson)

(Source: mikeanderson)

Yes, I’m biased but it’s a great song, a solid video, and easily my favorite of their records. Check out Mine is Yours here.

The only people who can ever put ideas into context are people who don’t care; the unbiased and apathetic are usually the wisest dudes in the room. If you want to totally misunderstand why something is supposedly important, find the biggest fan of that particular thing and ask him for an explanation. He will tell you everything that doesn’t matter to anyone who isn’t him. He will describe paradoxical details and share deeply personal anecdotes, and it will all be autobiography; he will simply be explaining who he is by discussing something completely unrelated to his life.

-Chuck Klosterman

My friend Nate humorously, and accurately, describes people like this as ‘crowd surfers’.

Report on the Effects of Multi-tasking on Our Brains

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

There’s growing concern among scientists that indulging in these ceaseless disruptions isn’t good for our brains, in much the way that excessive sugar or fat - other things we evolved to crave when they were in shorter supply - isn’t good for our bodies.

A team at UCSF published a study last week that found further evidence that multitasking impedes short-term memory, especially among older adults. Researchers there previously found that distractions of the sort that smart phones and social networks present can hinder long-term memory and mental performance.

A 2009 study at Stanford University found that, surprisingly, persistent multitaskers perform worse than infrequent ones on tests that require them to jump from task to task. It seems they were more easily distracted by irrelevant information thrown up during the evaluations.

I believe it was McLuhan who said that two of the effects of adding new technologies to a culture are 1) numbness and 2) that the culture doesn’t become the old culture + the new technology but a new culture. I think he was on to something.

I use Twitter and Square but had never heard Jack’s story. It was really interesting to hear the connection between his childhood obsession with maps and Twitter. He also had some helpful things to say about being an entrepreneur. Definitely worth a watch.

Celebrity Culture as Religion in Disguise

Stephen Marche is a pop culture critic for Esquire and The National Post.  He also writes for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and for the past year or so has become one of my favorite cultural critics.

“Celebrity culture is religion in disguise. It pretends to be junk while giving us the sustenance that we need. Celebrities live like gods; they act like gods. They dwell in the dark recesses of our souls where we crave the images of gods. In the aisles of the supermarkets they stare down at us like the saints and gargoyles that once crowded the cornices of medieval cathedrals with the iconography of suffering, or like sculptures in Hindu temples that celebrate birth, sex, death, rebirth. The latest American Religious Identification Survey shows that the fastest growing religious choice in the United States is “none,” now larger than every other group except Baptists and Catholics. Pop culture is rushing in to fill that space, an unacknowledged religion of consumerism, guiding the major transitions of life: birth, adolescence, marriage, sin and redemption, death and life after death. “

Read the rest over at Lapham’s Quarterly.