Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman does an interview at Vox with Ezra Klein. Krugman does not get too wonky, so that we mere mortals can understand what he is saying here, and we will take a few snippets of that.

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The Lathe of Heaven

I was all excited this morning about ordering "The Lathe Of Heaven" - just one click to buy and I would be off on another splendid reading vacation - until I got the notice two seconds later on my laptop that my order has been delivered and I saw nothing showing up on my Kindle. There was poor Swift's old, neglected "Gulliver's Travels" still sitting on top. What the fuck! I desperately perused Amazon's order information and quickly spotted the problem . My "Lathe of Heaven" was sent to something called Kindle Fire 2, and I recalled Pop's Christmas gift to someone, either Jack or Lorie, or maybe somebody else altogether, made on his account, the account I use. I looked back on Amazon's page for the novel and saw that Kindle Fire 2 is indeed the default device. I ordered another copy for me and chewed out Pop a little and made it clear that I am only paying for one copy. It helps that it was only a seven-dollar item - a lesson learned not too expensively.

Poor Pop. He just wants to play Daddy Big Bucks, and I am too egocentric to appreciate that I am not the only person in his life. Indeed, when it comes to the cold economics of personal relationships - what one pays into it and what one gets out of it - I have to be the absolutely worst investment. I sometimes complain, usually in reference to Jack, that Pop does not give due preference to the fact that I am his only true son, but I must be wrong about that. I have been running such mountainous debts, and I cannot see how I will ever even begin to repay them. I really have been loved, even if it is not exactly the kind of love that I have been horny for.

Orwell

They are erecting a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC. Robert Butler gives us an article marveling over Orwell's iconic fame. In this excerpt, he discusses the interesting possibility that "1984" might not be nearly as popular today if it were not for the title.

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One reason was the countdown. There would have been no surge of interest 35 years after publication if Orwell had gone for the other title he liked: “The Last Man in Europe”. Nor would the appeal have been as global. I doubt “1984” would have become as big as it has in Brazil—where, along with “Animal Farm”, it is now on the government’s school syllabus—if “Europe” had been in the title.

-- Robert Butler, "Orwell's World" in Intelligent Life Magazine

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Sugar

Somewhere in the middle of December I said I was going to wait until January 7 before I check on Sugar's Twitter again. Looking at her tweets this evening, the wait has proven rather anti-climactic. There were no quick flashes of wit or insight, nor any lead to a trending outrage for our Social Justice Warriors, nor any sweet pictures of her in a wee dress. The plan is to check her out once a month. For a long time I had fallen back to obsessively reading her feed multiple times throughout the day. I needed to break that habit, for it is a dispiriting exercise to follow one who dropped you for dead a long time ago. Although she is indeed a little charismatic and witty, good enough to be a minor local celebrity of sorts, a big part of my problem was my lack of e-life in general. I am dead to a lot of people, I guess. I hunger for even the ghost of a personal connection. If Gabe, Christie, Jena or others I knew fondly are still blogging, I have no idea where on the Internet they are gossiping and sharing their barbs of wit along with their personal lives, apparently not needing me at all to help keep their conversations lively. They did a good and thorough job of covering their trail from me. Sugar, on the other hand, was never one to hide on the Internet. If it were feasible, she might take out billboard ads inviting people to her webpages. How could lonely, shunned me resist?

As for following Sugar's trail of tweets, there have been a number of occasions over the years when I have limited my shy stalking. Once I even quit cold turkey for many months, maybe over a year. One time I limited myself to checking her out once a season - once in the feverish spring, once in the overheated summer, once in the fade of autumn, and once in the dead of winter. The problem with such limits is that, when I do go check her feed, I will read something that re-enchants me, so that it would strike me as silly not to read her. I read Andrew Sullivan without ever getting anything back from him, right? So why not read her? It then becomes a hard habit again, but she is not Andrew Sullivan, and I have feelings for her that are not returned or even received, and ... that dispiriting thing sets in, bleeding my soul slowly. So, as I said, I will treat myself to her tweets only once a month, maybe graduating to once a season again, and then we will see what's what.