Letters to the Editor

One of my proudest moments as a teenager was having a letter to the editor published by the San Diego Union-Tribune. If I remember correctly, it was a redistributionist response to an Arianna Huffington op-ed about taxation (this was before her drift leftward, and long before the Huffington Post). In college, I started each day by scanning the letters section of the Brown Daily Herald, and I submitted more than a few myself. These days, I relish reading the letters to the editor published in the London Review of Books and the Honolulu Weekly, where they are featured prominently in the opening pages.

What all of the publications above have in common is that I read, or read, them primarily in print. Though I browse the New York Times and Honolulu Advertiser nearly every day, exclusively online, I don't think I've ever read their letters to the editor, and I doubt that I'm alone in that regard (in fact, in writing this, I had to check to confirm that those dailies actually do publish letters online). One of the regrettable aspects of the rise of blogs, and the migration of print publications to the web -- to be considered, of course, alongside the many salutary effects -- is that the letter to the editor has been replaced by the comment.

The comment is immediate, anonymous (or at least pseudonymous), and populist; the letter to the editor is considered, signed, and carefully selected. Most comments on online articles and political blogs -- when they are not spam -- are, to put it mildly, pointless and ill-informed; even constructive comments usually feel rushed and unfiltered. (Comments on personal blogs are a separate issue -- I'm concerned here with widely read cultural and political argument.) Letters to the editor can take many forms -- and they are indeed often mean-spirited, sentimental, or silly -- yet they are by and large worth reading, for the simple reason that there are several layers of effort and mediation necessary for the letter to see publication.

The internet has forever altered the way we publish and share news and ideas, mostly for the better. But so far, the changes in the way that we publicly respond to those ideas haven't been as positive. I think we would do well to move away from the unfiltered populism of the comment to something more like the letter to the editor.

Comment away!

Goodreads

I know that a lot of people aren't crazy about Goodreads, but I love it, not least because it helps allay my fears about ever-more-intense cultural fragmentation. I find it genuinely comforting to know that a book I've read has been read by people I know, particularly since I live in a place where discussion of reading is exceedingly rare. Based on a quick survey of the site, I came up with this list of all the books that have a) been published in the last decade or so and b) have been been read by me and marked as "read" or "to-read" by at least four of my Goodread friends. Of the 16 books, 13 are novels, which is unsurprising. Of the three nonfiction books, one is about Iraq, and the other two are all or in part about food (and The Omnivore's Dilemma doesn't even appear here because I haven't read it yet). What will historians say about our preoccupation with the politics of food during wartime?

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (13 people, including myself)
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (8)
Nicole Krauss, The History of Love (8)
Joseph O'Neill, Netherland (7)
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (7)
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (6)
Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (6)
Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire (6)
J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (6)
Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (6)
Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation (6)
Keith Gessen, All the Sad Young Literary Men (5)
Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants (5)
Arthur Phillips, Prague (5)
Thomas Ricks, Fiasco (5)
Richard Russo, Straight Man (5)

Some Boxes

People sometimes ask what I "am." Now I can just refer them to this blog post.



Green = Native Hawaiian
Red = Chinese (some combination of Han and Hakka)
Blue = Some combination of English and Scottish
Grey = German

Biography

I'm not a huge fan of biography, and in fact I've only read six (or rather, six and a half) biographies in the past decade. But recently, a friend's enthusiasm about Isaac Deutscher's Trotsky trilogy has got me thinking about the genre, and about what my sparse biographical reading list suggests about me:

Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul (read in 2009)

Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (2009)

Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921 (2006)

Lewis Dabney, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (2006)

Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: A Life (2004)

Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power (2001, never finished)

Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (2000)

India is Really Big

I've been reading a lot about India in preparation for an upcoming trip. Even though I know, like everyone else, that the nation's total population is about 1.3 billion, I'm still astounded every time I read about how many people live in a given state. Inspired by this map, which replaces the US states with the flags of countries of equal population, I created the map above. As in the United States map, each state or territory is represented by the flag of the country whose population is roughly equivalent to that of the state. I took a few liberties, such as omitting the smaller union territories and leaving out the boundaries that are disputed by India and its neighbors.

Here are a few unexpected things that showed up in the map:

- The state of Gujarat is closest in population to South Africa. Gandhi, who was born in Gujarat, spent over two decades in South Africa before returning to India.

- Because Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh are represented by the UK and Australian flags, respectively, they appear at first glance to be connected. In fact, Chhattisgarh split off from Madhya Pradesh in 2000 to become its own state, so the connection is appropriate.

- The flags of Swaziland, Botswana, and Namibia, real-life neighbors in southern Africa, here represent the adjacent northeastern states of Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, and Manipur (though it can be hard to tell because the northeast's already-crazy jumble is made more confusing by multicolored flags).

- The state of Haryana, here represented by the flag of Syria, is shaped a lot like Iraq, whose flag looks a lot like that of Syria.

Gmoticons

I don't use GChat as much as I used to, because the IT department at my current job monitors employee internet usage. However, I've recently discovered (or rediscovered, in the case of the monkey) the following "hidden" commands within the program. Though they are secret only in the sense that "animal style" at In-N-Out Burger is secret, these functions surely deserve greater acclaim and usage:

:(|)

V.v.V

[:|]

Street Names

Amazing streets in whose vicinity I have resided:

Melville Street. Probably named around the turn of the century, before the resurgence of Melville's literary reputation. In West Philadelphia Melville St. is a tiny north-south street tucked between wider, numbered streets.

Sigel Street. Apparently Beanie Sigel's name is derived from the South Philadelphia street (though he lived on the west side of Broad Street).

Keanu Street. I would like to believe that the actor, who is part Hawaiian, was named after the street. I find parking on this street to be oddly satisfying.