The Shallows

Started reading Nicholas Carr's The Shallows on a flight out to San Francisco last week, and was pretty drawn to his argument.  He claims that using the Internet is actually changing our brains, making us respond to short-form broadband stimulation rather than long-form contemplative "deep reading" (his term; a good one).

It gibes with a lot I'm seeing. First of all, he observes at the beginning that he and his friends have seemingly lost the ability to read books, or at least have had the ability diminished.  True here.  I wallow in "short-form" reading all day, but it's almost not reading anymore, it's flitting from link to link in order to form a quick "gist" of things.  It's a new form of intellectual interaction, well-suited to the Web.  All arguments Carr makes.

I had noticed the atomization of content on the web.  As bits industries are disintermediated (see my post on that here) the length of the information artifact gets smaller.  Albums get replaced by songs get replaced by ring tones.  Features get replaced by stories get replaced by blog postings.  Movies get replaced by episodes get replaced by snack videos.  This atomization of course supports Carr's thesis: it's optimized for info-grazing.

What'll happen to the world of long-form thought?  I argue that "Morlocks" -- the scientific, technical, and clerical managers who actually run stuff -- will still have to read and write and think "long form", because complex technical and other systems need extended thinking to work properly.  But maybe I'm just trying to salvage a bit of the Enlightenment.  Maybe it can all be done with some kind of intellectual MapReduce: simple operations performed in parallel over a huge set.  Maybe that's the wave of the future.

What do you think?

What's Hot in a Flat World

I gave a talk by this title to a terrific audience in Atlanta yesterday.  Sharp, relevant questions, laughed when they should have and didn't laugh when they shouldn't have.  Not that a bunch of slides speak for themselves, but happy to send you the pdf of the slides if you ping me.  Also, @jacquichew was very diligent (and kind) in tweeting regularly during the talk, so catch her on Twitter (sorry, still learning how to link to Twitter in a post like this) if you're curious.

Audience is King

It's been growing on me slowly, but in the last couple of months I've a "duh" (or maybe a "doh") moment: it's not content that's king online, it's audience.

Property after property succeeds -- either as a business or an exit -- because it draws and keeps an audience.

Content is one way to do that, but there are others.  Facebook doesn't draw an audience because it's social, but because it does something very compelling with the social medium that draws and keeps an audience.  MySpace drew an audience, but didn't stay compelling and didn't keep them.

Fads can draw an audience.  I think of Twitter more as a "flash-fad" generator than a social medium.  Something outrageous -- Charlie Sheen, Osama's death, whatever -- draws a crowd of bystanders who goggle at it and magnify the effect.  Flash fads.

What would make Twitter enduring if if they have a reliable repeatable way to generate flash fad after flash fad.  It seems that's what they're on to, and, if they succeed, they will do well.

Whatever builds an enduring audience is king.  Your thoughts?

Chard Cakes with Sorrel Sauce

Debbie saw this recipe in the New York Times and talked the Crummy One into making it last night.  I have to admit the title of the food wasn’t very appealing.

It doesn’t look too bad in their picture.  But things were more challenged chez moi.

The core problem was structural integrity.  You’re supposed to make the chard, pine nuts, cheese, bread crumbs, and egg into patties, but mine wouldn’t hold together; they didn’t even pretend to hold together.  I put in an extra egg.  I put in more panko (we were using panko instead of dry white bread crumbs, which possibly caused the problem…).  All to no avail.

I ended up frying heaps of chard cake batter in the pan.

Tasted pretty good, as it happened.  The sorrel sauce, as promised, was something you might want to put on a bunch of things.  Debbie approved.

We’ll try again some time with new approaches to the binding.

Slow-cooked lamb stew

Yesterday I expected Debbie home about 8 pm (it turned out to be more like 10, thanks to those lovely weather systems we’re getting more and more of nowadays).

Plus I had the yen to slow cook something.  We have a crockpot from the dawn of time (I think we got it as a wedding present in 1982), and the idea that I’m a crock-pot cook or a slow cook or whatever is deeply appealing to me.

In any case, I had seen a recipe in a magazine I picked up in Whole Foods for slow-cooked lamb shanks, but you had to cook them three different ways in the recipe (brown them, then bake them, then broil them) with various manipulations in between.

The heck with that.  But it fixated me on lamb.  I started looking around in our cookbooks for slow-cooked lamb recipes, and came up with a relatively simple “Neapolitan Lamb Stew” in a book on slow cooking from Ten Speed Press.

Harry, my guest blogger, business partner, and friend, tells me that “Neapolitan” is a code word for “tomato sauce”, and, indeed, this recipe had 2 lbs of tomatoes in there.  But also red wine, rosemary, and boatloads of lamb stew meat.

Recipe ordinaire, I was fretting, but 8 hours of slow cooking in the crockpot turned it into what Joy of Cooking or somebody called a “Heavenly slumgullion” after a while.  It was really good. All the gnarly bits were rendered out of the lamb chunks, the sauce came together, and it was A-1.

Soft-shelled Crabs

On Friday night I did soft-shelled crabs, which I love.  Once Black Salt Fish Market cleaned the crabs (which, the guy told me, was “easy” if you had a scissors) they were pretty easy to prep.  I dipped them in milk, dredged them in panko, and fried them in a mix of butter and oil.  One of the two came out just about perfect, the other was not well-done enough: it would have squeamed out Debbbie but I was able to eat it fine, it wasn’t like raw or anything.

Sorry, no pix.

Miso Stew

I was alone most of this week (Debbie in CA again, business and family), so cooking away.

On Wednesday night I was inspired by a couple of huge cans of miso we have in the fridge.  What can we make?

From Epicurious comes the Miso Stew recipe.  It’s essentially a very hearty miso soup with oodles of “sea vegetables” (aka seaweed), tofu, and, surprise of surprises, quinoa (I’m sure that’s not too authentic).

Here’s their version of it.

And here’s mine:

Aside from irrational exuberance with the asune flakes, it doesn’t look too shabby.

Tasted good, but not remarkable.  I guess there isn’t a remarkable miso soup unless you count “perfection of small things”.