Pride and Prejudice

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In this morning’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd recasts our presidential race in classic chick lit terms:Frontispiece illustration from the 1903 American edition of Pride and Prejudice

Like the leading man of Jane Austen and Bridget Jones, Obama can, as Austen wrote, draw “the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien. …he was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud, to be above his company, and above being pleased.”

While she does no great service to addressing really pressing issues of this campaign, it’s a nice distillation of questions concerning Mr. Obama’s character, and of ours as a nation of suitors.

 

Sarcasm Isolated

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Magnetic resonance scan of sarcasm angel.

Perhaps there’s something to the idea that designers are more prone to sarcasm than the average person. According to Katherine P. Rankin’s new study of Alzheimer’s patients, the part of the brain we use to appreciate sarcasm is not  in the left brain where most of us process our primary language, but in the right hemisphere. As explained in the New York Times:

…the magnetic resonance scans revealed that the part of the brain lost among those who failed to perceive sarcasm was not in the left hemisphere of the brain, which specializes in language and social interactions, but in a part of the right hemisphere previously identified as important only to detecting contextual background changes in visual tests.

Articles back online…

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Well, for those very few of you paying attention, the articles on this site have been restored. Photo banners will be back shortly as well.  Banners are back now too. But my HTML validation is completely whacked. Ah well. 

The Principles of Uncertainty (now free of charge)

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I must have missed the memo. To my great pleasure, I discovered today that the New York Times has recently made access to their archives free of charge. In addition they’ve abolished their irritating Times Select experiment, where certain columnists and content was offered for a fee. I hope that this change proves to be a profitable one for them. I think it will. I think that institutions like the Times must learn to deliver their service free of tiered corrals of “premium” content. My intuition is that the more obscure that information becomes, the less commercial value it will retain over time. Of course not all information is like this. But particularly for art and opinion, the value comes in sharing the experience.A perfect example is the guest blog by Maira Kalman called The Principles of Uncertainty, which was previously only available to Times Select subscribers. Enjoy it now for free online. Or wait a few weeks and buy the book.

Watch out for that diamond sign

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diamond signDonald E. Knuth, Professor Emeritus of The Art of Computer Programming at Stanford University, maintains one of the homelier homepages on the web. But he has a refined eye for design. I’m fascinated by his photographic collection of diamond road signs. Knuth is known for attention to minutia. He invented TeX a system for typesetting and Metafont a format for creating and encoding typefaces on computers. Perhaps it’s his eye for typographical detail that drew his eye to the distinctiveness to be found in common road signs.