This semester, I had the insane privilege of being taught by professor Clay Shirky, who just scored a new gig at NYU as a full-time faculty member. Shirky is the author of two books on the transformative power of the internet in changing our society and culture, and is generally thought of as one of the thought leaders in the field of social media.

This semester, he taught a class entitled “New Media and Public Action” at the Kennedy School of Government, a fascinating exploration of how new media tools can alter the course of history. We explored the sociological and technological mechanisms through which these alterations work. For my final paper, I wrote about the outrage surrounding the new TSA procedures, viewed through the lens of the our class.

You can read the paper below, or go here to download a copy. Any comments? Feel free to leave them below or e-mail them to me (especially if it’s before tomorrow, since that’s when I’m handing this thing in!). Enjoy!

[Note: Unfortunately, it looks like the hyperlinks I inserted into the text of my paper were not retained by Scribd. I will fix this later, but in the meantime, trust that all the blue underlined text links to extremely relevant and interesting content]

David Chen Dpi-680 Final Paper – Final Draft

 A fascinating blog entry at a sea of lead, a sky of slate (via reddit), which answers the question: what happens to all the people who die while attempting to climb Mount Everest? The short answer is that they’re left there, frozen, forever. The conditions up there are absolutely inhospitable to rescue, and those that have tried to bring down the dead have often paid for it with their own lives:

Media term it “summit fever”, the apparent callousness that drives mountaineers to disregard ethics on their Everest ascents, sometimes literally climbing over dead bodies to reach their goals. But whatever the preparation and outlandish cost, perhaps it’s not simply ruthless determination that makes someone abandon their team mates, and yet still have the energy to summit. In such alien conditions, utterly hostile to human life, climbers might face their own mortality. Under the spectre of pure, unadulterated fear, they must realize that they are beyond help as well as beyond helping anyone else.

I’ve said it before and I’m bound to say it many more times: the combination of Kindle and Instapaper has changed my life.

Not too long ago, I read Nicholas Carr’s article for The Atlantic, “Is Google Making us Stupid?” In it, Carr argues that the proliferation of online writing may have had profound effects on the way we read and process information:

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

I remember when I was a student at Amherst College, I’d be assigned roughly 80 pages of reading per night per class. Such reading encompassed all kinds of material, including Asian-American writing, Psychology case studies, Shakespeare, Russian poetry, etc. And while I can’t say I did every page of reading assigned to me, I remember sitting in my dorm’s beanbag chair for hours on end, consuming vast quantities of text on a weekly basis.

As I started writing online and reading dozens of 200-300 word blog posts per day, I felt my attention span begin to wane. I couldn’t focus as much as I did back during my college days. Books and even magazines seemed easier to put down. The effect was genuinely frightening to me. Would I ever be able to regain my old levels of attentiveness back?

Enter the Kindle + Instapaper combo.

With this combination, I bookmark articles to my Kindle, curl up on the couch, and read for an hour or two straight, taking in one or two 10,000 word pieces with ease. The Kindle is light, it’s convenient, it’s easy to hold and read, and most importantly, reading is the only thing it’s designed for. My iPad is heavy and unwieldy and I often get distracted by my gaming apps, by Twitter, or by e-mail. But my Kindle lets me focus and take in huge volumes of non-fiction feature writing. Not only am I keeping up with world events, I feel my mind getting sharper. Air smells sweeter. Food tastes better. And so on.

Several wonderful websites have sprung up that feed into this universal desire to learn via reading on a Kindle/iPad/iPhone. Longreads was the first one I discovered, but I’ve also since begun enjoying Give Me Something to Read.

In the spirit of spreading the wealth, the Longreads twitter account has begun sharing various people’s favorite longreads of 2010. I thought I’d pitch in with my own contribution. The only rules for this list? It has to be a long read, and it has to have been published in 2010 (although I might not have necessarily got it from the site longreads.com):

5) Warning: Your Cell Phone May Be Hazardous To Your Health – Months before Devra Davis’s Disconnect was published, Christopher Ketcham unleashed this monster of an article at GQ, which presents a pretty damning case for why cell phones may be killing us after all. Very few articles change the way I go about my daily existence, but this was one of them. After I read this, I was a lot more reluctant to let my phone rest on my lap during car rides.

4) The Disadvantages of an Elite Education – William Deresiewicz writes about what an elite education takes away from you, and brings up ideas I never explicitly considered but, in the back of my mind, always knew were true (following emphasis mine):

If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?

Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.

As a student currently getting a degree in Education, and who was always driven to attend the most elite schools by my parents, this was particularly poignant to me.

3) The High is Always the Pain and the Pain is Always the High – A fantastic piece by Jay Caspian Kang about the trials and the joys of being a gambling addict. I’ve spent time in Vegas casinos before but not like Kang. And while I never want to reach the levels that he reached in this piece, I was glad to be able to experience it vicariously through his addictive writing.

2) No Angel, No Devil – This is an absolutely riveting and expansive piece on Gaile Owens, the only woman to be on Tennessee’s death row in almost 200 years. The story of her imprisonment and the subsequent travesty of justice that befell her sounds like it came from an episode of Law & Order: SVU, but Brantley Hargrove’s prose gives it a life and momentum all its own.

1) The Tortured Life of Eric Show – You may be a talented musician. You may have a beautiful wife. You may be good enough to play major league baseball. But that doesn’t mean that a series of unfortunate events can’t completely destroy your life. A tragic story, and a chilling reminder that none of us are safe from the whims of fate.

[Honorable mention: No Time for Love, Dr. Jones! – It turns out the Korean version of Jersey Shore might not be an abomination after all. A heartfelt piece, earnest piece about Asians in the media by Mike Le.]

And at the risk of self-promotion, it goes without saying that Stephen Tobolowsky’s two pieces for the Awl were magnificent and worthy of your time.

I’ll be looking forward to a fantastic new year of in-depth reading and learning!

Steven Zeitchik has a comparison between Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan and Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine. Both films feature oral sex scenes that are comparable in explicitness, but whereas Swan was rated R, Valentine has been given the dreaded NC-17 rating.

The “Blue Valentine” rating is the latest in a string of controversial decisions by the MPAA and its Classification and Ratings Administration board that have raised the anger of filmmakers and moviegoers. Critics of the system say that the raters take a much harsher line on sex, language and drug use than they do on violence and that the panel’s standards are murky and inconsistent.

“I don’t have an answer for why that movie [“Black Swan”] would be OK and ours wouldn’t,” said “Blue Valentine” director Derek Cianfrance, who called the NC-17 rating “a form of censorship.” “There’s not an ounce of skin, and it’s not gratuitous in any way. I’m confused and baffled.”

The Weinstein Company are gearing up for a potential legal battle over the rating, but my hope is that their forthcoming appeal is approved. Blue Valentine is a great film that deserves to be seen.

For more on this subject, see my editorial about why the MPAA should be ashamed of itself.

Lisa Miller at Newsweek has written a great summary of all the food/class/obesity issues that our government should be paying more attention to these days. But what blew my mind about this piece was the following passage:

Claude Fischler, a French sociologist, believes that Americans can fight both obesity and food insecurity by being more, well, like the French. Americans take an approach to food and eating that is unlike any other people in history. For one thing, we regard food primarily as (good or bad) nutrition. When asked “What is eating well?” Americans generally answer in the language of daily allowances: they talk about calories and carbs, fats, and sugars. They don’t see eating as a social activity, and they don’t see food—as it has been seen for millennia—as a shared resource, like a loaf of bread passed around the table. When asked “What is eating well?” the French inevitably answer in terms of “conviviality”: togetherness, intimacy, and good tastes unfolding in a predictable way.

Even more idiosyncratic than our obsession with nutrition, says Fischler, is that Americans see food choice as a matter of personal freedom, an inalienable right. Americans want to eat what they want: morels or Big Macs. They want to eat where they want, in the car or alfresco. And they want to eat when they want. With the exception of Thanksgiving, when most of us dine off the same turkey menu, we are food libertarians. In surveys, Fischler has found no single time of day (or night) when Americans predictably sit together and eat. By contrast, 54 percent of the French dine at 12:30 each day. Only 9.5 percent of the French are obese.

Whoa! Prior to reading this article, I literally had never conceived of an answer to “What is eating well?” that didn’t involve some kind of measurement of nutritional value. That’s how ingrained into my psyche American food culture is. May we all make it a point to enjoy each other’s company more than we do during our meals together. It’s apparently more important than we think.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri, on Amazon’s cutthroat business tactics, and how they’ve been systematically gutting the publishing industry:

Cheap books are easy on our wallets, but behind the scenes publishers large and small have been deeply undercut by the rise of large retailers and predatory pricing schemes. Unless publishers push back, Amazon will take the logic of the chains to its conclusion. Then publishers and readers will finally know what happens when you sell a book like it’s a can of soup.

Truly a troubling piece. Reminds me of my days in college when my English prof used to say, “When you buy books at Barnes & Noble/Borders, you’re paying to have fewer choices in the long run.” We are now seeing that phenomenon again, only Amazon has isn’t as sympathetic to publishers as those major bookstores.

An incredible time lapse video of a child from birth until she was 10 years old. One photo for every day (roughly):

(via Maria Popova)