text,updated_at,metaphor,created_at,context,theme,reviewed_on,dictionary,comments,provenance,id,work_id
"Deisseroth seems never to be on tilt. He attributes this partly to his psychiatric training: ""Those nights on call where there are five emergencies, you've got a patient in restraints in the E.R., where they need you immediately, patients up on the psychiatry floor, where someone punched a nurse--you develop a little bit of a 'just get through it one thing at a time.' "" His unusual calm has allowed him to compartmentalize competing demands (fatherhood, marriage, neuroscience, literary endeavors, clinical psychiatry, speaking appearances at dozens of conferences a year), so that he can think through complex problems. He told me that, while many people find that walking or jogging shakes ideas loose from the subconscious, he needs to quell all physical activity. ""Otherwise, I get this disruption from the motor cortex,"" he said. ""I have to be totally still."" Ideas come floating up ""like a bubble in liquid."" At that point, he goes into an excitable motor state, pacing or scribbling down ideas.
(p. 78)",2015-06-13 20:22:40 UTC,"""'I have to be totally still.' Ideas come floating up 'like a bubble in liquid.' At that point, he goes into an excitable motor state, pacing or scribbling down ideas.""",2015-06-13 20:22:40 UTC,"","",,"","",Reading,24573,8066
"Before moving on to the larger issues, it's important to note that the local authorities, and the local citizenry, want no part of this noisy claque of armed meatheads. It is popular among these people who apparently have brains wired like short-wave radios broadcasting from upper Michigan to say that the real constitutional authority in this country resides in its local sheriffs. Well, the local sheriff in this case would like it very much if this particular invasive species would abandon his jurisdiction and go back to freeloading on federal lands in Nevada.",2016-01-04 05:35:34 UTC,"""It is popular among these people who apparently have brains wired like short-wave radios broadcasting from upper Michigan to say that the real constitutional authority in this country resides in its local sheriffs.""",2016-01-04 05:35:34 UTC,"","",,"","",Reading,24755,8113
"Then there's the risible campaign commercial in which the Tailgunner dresses up in camo and face paint and hangs out in the blind with the Duck Dynasty crew, looking like a G.I. Joe who's lost his kung-fu grip on his senses. Or like a Raiders fan. I haven't made up my mind.",2016-01-16 18:00:19 UTC,"""Then there's the risible campaign commercial in which the Tailgunner dresses up in camo and face paint and hangs out in the blind with the Duck Dynasty crew, looking like a G.I. Joe who's lost his kung-fu grip on his senses.""",2016-01-16 18:00:19 UTC,"","",,"","",Reading,24797,8123
"Something happens to a novel as it ages, but what? It doesn't ripen or deepen in the manner of cheese and wine, and it doesn't fall apart, at least not figuratively. Fiction has no half-life. We age alongside the novels we've read, and only one of us is actively deteriorating. Which is to say that a novel is perishable only by virtue of being stored in such a leaky cask: our heads. With just a few years' passage, a novel can thus seem ""dated"" or ""irrelevant"" or (God help us) ""problematic."" When a novel survives this strange process, and gets reissued in a handsome 20th-anniversary edition, it's tempting to hold it up and say, ""It withstood the test of time."" Most would intend such a statement as praise, but is a 20-year-old novel successful merely because it seems cleverly predictive or contains scenarios that feel ""relevant"" to later audiences? If that were the mark of enduring fiction, Philip K. Dick would be the greatest novelist of all time.
(p. 16)",2016-02-10 14:31:48 UTC,"""Which is to say that a novel is perishable only by virtue of being stored in such a leaky cask: our heads.""",2016-02-10 14:28:03 UTC,"","",,"","",Reading,24800,8126
"How is it, then, that ""Infinite Jest"" still feels so transcendentally, electrically alive? Theory 1: As a novel about an ""entertainment"" weaponized to enslave and destroy all who look upon it, ""Infinite Jest"" is the first great Internet novel. Yes, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson may have gotten there first with ""Neuromancer"" and ""Snow Crash,"" whose Matrix and Metaverse, respectively, more accurately surmised what the Internet would look and feel like. (Wallace, among other things, failed to anticipate the break from cartridge- and disc-based entertainment.) But ""Infinite Jest"" warned against the insidious virality of popular entertainment long before anyone but the most Delphic philosophers of technology. Sharing videos, binge-watching Netflix, the resultant neuro-pudding at the end of an epic gaming marathon, the perverse seduction of recording and devouring our most ordinary human thoughts on Facebook and Instagram -- Wallace somehow knew all this was coming, and (as the man himself might have put it) it gave him the howling fantods.
(p. 16)",2016-02-10 14:31:17 UTC,"""Sharing videos, binge-watching Netflix, the resultant neuro-pudding at the end of an epic gaming marathon, the perverse seduction of recording and devouring our most ordinary human thoughts on Facebook and Instagram -- Wallace somehow knew all this was coming, and (as the man himself might have put it) it gave him the howling fantods.""",2016-02-10 14:31:17 UTC,"","",,"","",Reading,24801,8126
"s I read ""Infinite Jest"" in the dark early mornings before my Uzbek language class, I could hear my host mother talking to the chickens in the barn on the other side of my bedroom wall as she flung scatters of feed before them. I could hear the cows stirring, and then their deep monstrous mooing, along with the compound's approximately 10,000 wild cats moving in the crawl space directly above my bed. What I am trying to say is that it should have been difficult to focus on the doings of Hal Incandenza, Don Gately, Rémy Marathe and Madame Psychosis. But it wasn't. I read for hours that way, morning after morning, my mind awhirl. For the first few hundred pages of my initial reading, I will confess that I greatly disliked ""Infinite Jest."" Why? Jealousy, frustration, impatience. It's hard to remember exactly why. It wasn't until I was writing letters to my girlfriend, and describing to her my fellow Peace Corps volunteers and host-family members and long walks home through old Soviet collectivized farmland in what I would categorize as yellow-belt Wallaceian prose, that I realized how completely the book had rewired me. Here is one of the great Wallace innovations: the revelatory power of freakishly thorough noticing, of corralling and controlling detail. Most great prose writers make the real world seem realer -- it's why we read great prose writers. But Wallace does something weirder, something more astounding: Even when you're not reading him, he trains you to study the real world through the lens of his prose. Several writers' names have become adjectivized -- Kafkaesque, Orwellian, Dickensian -- but these are designators of mood, of situation, of civic decay. The Wallaceian is not a description of something external; it describes something that happens ecstatically within, a state of apprehension (in both senses) and understanding. He didn't name a condition, in other words. He created one.
(p. 17)",2016-02-10 14:36:00 UTC,"""I read for hours that way, morning after morning, my mind awhirl.""",2016-02-10 14:36:00 UTC,"","",,"","",Reading,24802,8126
"Even on the campaign trail, he seems to exist in emotional isolation, viewing voters less as people than interchangeable pawns. One-on-one, he responds to voters' heartfelt expressions of concern about their lives not by answering in kind, but by reciting right-wing boilerplate from his stump speeches. There is something deeply disturbing in his disassociation, a lack of empathy which suggests a barren inner landscape.",2016-02-10 15:27:58 UTC,"""There is something deeply disturbing in his [Ted Cruz's] disassociation, a lack of empathy which suggests a barren inner landscape.""",2016-02-10 15:27:58 UTC,"","",,"","",Reading,24803,8127
"Binge-watching is a night out, even when you spend the whole day in. It's a way of being. We begin to esteem this way of being at its true worth when we realize that the creators of the brain food that we're wolfing down are at least as involved in it, at the level of imagination, as we are. From Homer until now, and onward to wherever the creaking fleet of ""Battlestar Galactica"" may go in the future, there never was, and never will be, a successful entertainment fuelled by pure cynicism. And, when we click on Play All and settle back to watch every season of ""The Wire"" all over again, we should try to find a moment, in the midst of such complete absorption, to reflect that the imagined world being revealed to us for our delight really is an astounding achievement, even though we will always feel that we need an excuse for doing nothing else except watch it.",2016-04-22 14:27:45 UTC,"""We begin to esteem this way of being at its true worth when we realize that the creators of the brain food that we're wolfing down are at least as involved in it, at the level of imagination, as we are.""",2016-04-22 14:27:45 UTC,"","",,"","",Reading,24897,8139
"A TV habit on this scale starts to permeate every corner of your mind. The new mythology gets into the old mythology, as if classic literature had faded into the mind's background and images encountered on the screen had become one's first frame of cultural reference. In view of this possibility, it becomes a positive likelihood that for the next generation they will be the only frame of reference. It's a new, pervasive, and irresistible vocabulary of the imagination. Familiar with it, one gets caught up in conversations in which properties of screen stories have the common currency once held by stories from the page. In Renaissance times, the bright young people knew what they were talking about when they made glancing references to Ovid's Metamorphoses. Now the bright young people, although they are perhaps already turning into bright early-middle-aged people, know what they are talking about when they say that two of their friends are like Josh Lyman and Donna Moss, or that another friend is a Zoe Barnes in the making, and could end up getting pushed under a train.",2016-04-22 14:29:41 UTC,"""A TV habit on this scale starts to permeate every corner of your mind.""",2016-04-22 14:28:51 UTC,"","",,"","",Reading,24898,8139
"A TV habit on this scale starts to permeate every corner of your mind. The new mythology gets into the old mythology, as if classic literature had faded into the mind's background and images encountered on the screen had become one's first frame of cultural reference. In view of this possibility, it becomes a positive likelihood that for the next generation they will be the only frame of reference. It's a new, pervasive, and irresistible vocabulary of the imagination. Familiar with it, one gets caught up in conversations in which properties of screen stories have the common currency once held by stories from the page. In Renaissance times, the bright young people knew what they were talking about when they made glancing references to Ovid's Metamorphoses. Now the bright young people, although they are perhaps already turning into bright early-middle-aged people, know what they are talking about when they say that two of their friends are like Josh Lyman and Donna Moss, or that another friend is a Zoe Barnes in the making, and could end up getting pushed under a train.",2016-04-22 14:30:35 UTC,"""The new mythology gets into the old mythology, as if classic literature had faded into the mind's background and images encountered on the screen had become one's first frame of cultural reference.""",2016-04-22 14:30:35 UTC,"","",,"","",Reading,24899,8139