That Sort of Book

From today's NYT, a review of "A Week at the Airport" by Alain de Botton:

There’s a funny, revealing moment in Alain de Botton’s new book, “A Week at the Airport,” when he discovers that the largest bookstore at Heathrow Airport, in London, does not stock his books. He decides to have a conversation with Manishankar, the shop’s manager, about what else might be available.

“I explained,” Mr. de Botton writes, “that I was looking for the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange.”

Manishankar, confused, wonders if Mr. de Botton might want a magazine instead.

If pressed, I would admit that I have no idea who Alian de Botton is and that I probably don't read That Sort of Book anyway. But if the book holds up to the first three paragraphs of the review, I'm in.

Control-Alt-Delete for your Telly

So on the way in to work this morning I read the following bit in Stephen Seow's book "Designing and Engineering Time" (page 28), discussing users' perceptions of reliability and stability of products:

A television set, for example, does not come with a reset or refresh button for the end user because it is regarded as an appliance that just works.

That's from 2008; well and good. But then not six hours later, over lunch, I read in the NY Times that Google is partnering up with makers of television sets so that

Devices running Google TV will also be able to run applications written for Android phones, and will feature Google's Chrome web browser, which would allow consumers to surf the web from their television sets.

Yup.

A nickel says your next telly will indeed be sporting a reset button.

Yet one more NYT piece on the New Economy

From the NYT, natch:

As we all know, lax writing practices earlier this decade led to irresponsible writing and irresponsible reading. This simply put too many families into books they could not finish. We are seeing the impact on readers and neighborhoods, with five million Americans now behind on their reading. Some are just walking away from novels they should never have been reading in the first place. What began as a subprime reading problem has spread to other, less-risky readers and contributed to excess inventories.

What the election really meant

From today's NYT op-ed pages, Gail Collins on the meaning of Tuesday's election:

"Now American children are going to grow up unaware that there’s anything novel in an African-American president or a woman running for the White House."

I like that.

Nonstandard economic meta-indicators

From a piece by David Leonhardt in the NYT:

Nonetheless, a significant portion of the finance boom also seems to have been unrelated to economic performance and thus unsustainable. Benjamin M. Friedman, author of “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth,” recalled that when he worked at Morgan Stanley in the early 1970s, the firm’s annual reports were filled with photographs of factories and other tangible businesses. More recently, Wall Street’s annual reports tend to highlight not the businesses that firms were advising so much as finance for the sake of finance, showing upward-sloping graphs and photographs of traders.

“I have the sense that in many of these firms,” Mr. Friedman said, “the activity has become further and further divorced from actual economic activity.”

(Emphasis mine.)

Ring ring

"Hell is other people's ringtones."

(quoted from Wired)