The sun!

Sat in the sun at the Christian Science Plaza on Saturday (designed by I.M. Pei, who in my Googling I discovered also designed the Hancock tower and the MFA extension and the Media Lab and studied at MIT and Harvard and was a professor at Harvard, and so, in other words, left his mark here).

Bought Rolling Stone on a whim, the 35th anniversary issue about American Icons. Marilyn Manson rips apart reality television, John Updike praises Andy Warhol, corporate logos are explained.

Crap, I'm using capital letters again! we'll put a stop to that.

got my first sunburn of the summer today while watching the red sox blow a 4-0 lead against the twins. so sad.

considering running a half marathon in virginia, one of the country's 25 best. i'm not sure i could actually pull it off, but it would be fun to try. there is an amusing disparity between this training schedule and this one. the boston half-marathon covers a lot of ground i already run, which sounds a little boring, though last year they got to run around the field at fenway.

the play erik was in got a good review, wish i'd gotten down to see it.

A long weekend

all sorts of stuff happened this weekend. among them, a decision to forego capitalization. i finished reading the long walk, somehow fitting given this week's marathon and reality television and horrible tragedy. supposedly there is a japanese movie adaptation of it, but i haven't been able to find anything about it. speaking of movies, i saw a mighty wind, which was quite funny. stood in the rain at earthfest and got free samples of stuff and saw an incredible performance by sheryl crow. also went to a driving range for the veryfirsttime. and ate lots of good meals.

Self-interest, modernity?

I just saw Better Luck Tomorrow and Confidence, both of which prominently feature people double-crossing people. I have no faith left in humanity. (They are good movies, though, if a little implausible toward their ends.)

Also, I ran across a review of the new DeLillo book, which does a good job of dissecting everything I dislike about this modern style-over-substance tendency.

While looking for a review of the DeLillo book, I also read a review of Brill's new book. Sadly, the only person ever to give me a D didn't get panned. The Times thought it did a good job of showing how self-interest and public interest were intertwined, which is about all you can hope for if we're all as self-serving and dehumanized and divided as all this pop culture is making me believe.

Two Interesting Surveys

I love surveys, and I recently ran across two interesting ones.

In Wired, 54 percent of respondents thought that "Earth is as it appears and not some alternate plane, or fifth-dimension fantasy, or projection of a higher power" (i.e. it's not an experience machine).

The second is a survey being done at Harvard of how people around the country use language differently. Oddly enough, one of the questions is whether people say NEW Haven or New HAVEN.

More about men, women, careers

With uncanny timing (given my recently revisiting the Maurren Dowd fiasco), I heard this story on NPR explaining:

Putting off marriage and babies until later in life significantly increases women's wages: It's an increasingly common dilemma for working women who want to have children: Do they have babies early on or wait until they can provide a better income for their family? Well, analysis by researchers at the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank says that waiting has its benefits. Income dips less than one percent for women 28 and older after childbirth; it falls 4 percent for those women who have babies before then. While many women today are choosing to put off having a family until they're established in careers, the reality is they only have a 50 percent chance of getting pregnant when they’re 40.


Also, the press release says:

Studies have shown that men who have been married earn more than men who've never been married, a phenomenon known as the "male marriage wage premium." St. Louis Fed researcher Abbigail J. Chiodo and economist Michael T. Owyang first described the relationship between marriage and men's wages a year ago. They describe how, in contrast, marriage has little or no effect on women's wages, after taking into account individual characteristics such as education and experience. Indirect forces, however, such as children and household responsibilities do tend to affect a woman's lifetime earnings.


Here's the actual study.

I'm not particularly obssessed with this topic, just attuned to coincidence.

Bosses around

My old boss Jeff Pulver was recently featured in BusinessWeek, which is kind of neat. I was also a bit surprised to run into a picture of Steve Lawrence, who I worked with this summer, at the web site for the book I'm auding (I'm getting tired of deciding between listening and reading for audio books) (apparently this is a real word - "the process of hearing, recognizing, and interpreting spoken language" - but that won't stop me from co-opting it), Linked. (The book is very heavy on the intellectual history/storytelling. I was really excited to read Six Degrees, which looked more sciencey, but had to return it to the library before I had a chance to read it.)

Partykausa

Shawn sent me the URL of his latest artistic endeavor, Parykausa, and I figured I'd link to it here. Not quite sure what to say about it, though. It's par-for-the-course-ishly intriguing.