How to Make Coffee at Home

In an interview with Salon, Michaele Weissman, author of the new book God in a Cup, explains how to make coffee at home:

Percolator — never.

Mr. Coffee — throw it out immediately. Most standard automated coffee pots don’t heat the water hot enough or consistently enough. The water needs to be around 205 degrees F. as it pours over the grounds. Otherwise the grounds will be over-extracted and bitter or under-extracted and tasteless.

French press — this plunger system makes very nice coffee but requires a certain deftness of hand and it produces slightly gritty coffee that some people like and others don’t.

I prefer old-fashioned, inexpensive drip pots that use brown paper filters, such as the Chemex where you pour nearly boiling water over freshly ground coffee.

Oh, and always use filtered water.

The most important piece of home equipment: A burr grinder. Those little blade grinders most people use basically beat the crap out of the coffee. Not good.

Good to know.

6.29.2008 New York Times Digest

1. “The Spy Who Wouldn’t Love Me”

“Taking over another author’s creation four decades after his death is tricky under any circumstances. And Bond is not just any character. He is suave and witty, a master seducer, drinker and gambler who always wins — and has a license to kill. When he first appeared in Casino Royale in 1953, Bond was a one-man tonic for an England reeling from its post-World War II loss of power and influence.”

2. “As Gas Prices Rise, Teenagers’ Cruising Declines”

“Perhaps the summer’s most visible change is occurring in the downtown strips of small towns where, for decades, cruising on Friday and Saturday nights has been a teenage rite of passage. It is a peculiarly American phenomenon — driving around in a big loop, listening to music, waving at one another and wasting gasoline.

“‘We’re not cruising around anymore, with gas costing $4.50 a gallon,’ said Ewelina Smosna, a recent graduate of Taft High School in Chicago, as she hung out the other night at the Streets of Woodfield, an outdoor mall in Schaumburg. ‘We just park the car and walk around.’”

3. “Obama Supporters Take His Name as Their Own”

“Jeff Strabone of Brooklyn now signs credit card receipts with his newly assumed middle name, while Dan O’Maley of Washington, D.C., jiggered his e-mail account so his name would appear as ‘D. Hussein O’Maley.’ Alex Enderle made the switch online along with several other Obama volunteers from Columbus, Ohio, and now friends greet him that way in person, too.”

4. “101 Secrets (and 9 Lives) of a Magazine Star”

“‘She has what every marketing person dreams of, which is an ability to take complex concepts and boil them down to a six-word sentence,’ Mr. Dolce says. ‘In an overcommunicated world, that is an excellent editorial skill to have.’”

5.”Windows Could Use a Rush of Fresh Air”

“In April, Michael A. Silver and Neil MacDonald, analysts at Gartner, the research firm, presented a talk titled ‘Windows Is Collapsing.’ Their argument isn’t that Windows will cease to function but that the accumulated complexity, as Microsoft tries to support 20 years of legacies, prevents timely delivery of advances.”

6. “Summer and Smoke, an American Cauldron”

“Time and again, in the years to come, summer would prove the crucible of the constantly forming American identity.”

7. “Free to Follow His Heart Right Back to Star Wars”

“His next film could be anything from a sweeping epic to one of the intimate personal narratives he has often said he would like to make. Instead his next two ventures will be Star Wars projects.”

8. “Seeing the Light”

“Zizek is simply misinformed. It’s leftist propaganda meant to legitimize China’s aggression in Tibet.”

Trains: The Future of Travel?

Kottke says: 

Train travel, particularly high-speed train travel, should be *the* way to get anywhere on the East Coast, mid-to-southern California/Vegas, and between moderately large cities clustered together (Chicago, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Detroit; Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Houston; Florida; Kansas City, St. Louis, Omaha, Tulsa; Portland, Seattle, Vancouver; etc.)

I couldn’t agree more.

6.22.2008 New York Times Digest

1. “Pixar Gambles on a Robot in Love”

“Andrew Stanton, who wrote and directed the film, doesn’t care if the kiddies want to hug Wall-E or not when the movie comes out on Friday. ‘I never think about the audience,” he said. “If someone gives me a marketing report, I throw it away.’”

2. “The New Trophy Home, Small and Ecological”

“LEED — an acronym for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is the hot designer label, and platinum is the badge of honor — the top classification given by the U.S. Green Building Council. ‘There’s kind of a green pride, like driving a Prius,’ said Brenden McEneaney, a green building adviser to the city of Santa Monica, adding, “It’s spreading all over the place.’”

3. “When the Comedy Is Lost in Translation”

“The worse news for Hollywood is that the new movies may be feeding a non-American tendency in once-dependable foreign markets like France and South Korea. ‘Pop culture used to be American pop culture,’ said Roger Smith, the executive editor and a motion picture analyst at Global Media Intelligence, a research company. ‘But the rest of the world is figuring out how to make pop culture of its own.’”

4. “Nothing Sells Like Celebrity”

“These days, it’s nearly impossible to surf the Internet, open a newspaper or magazine, or watch television without seeing a celebrity selling something, whether it’s umbrellas, soda, cars, phones, medications, cosmetics, jewelry, clothing or even mutual funds.”

5. “Waistlines Expand Into a Workplace Issue”

“Corporate leaders often speak out on issues that cost them tens of billions of dollars annually. Numerous executives have called for a plan for providing health insurance to the uninsured, for example. So why aren’t they making more noise about obesity?”

6. “The Carla Effect”

“‘Preceded by a sulfurous reputation,’ Le Journal du Dimanche reported, ‘Carla Bruni has improbably succeeded in a country so traditionally attached to conventions: in less than six months, the third wife of Sarko has conquered, after that of the President, the heart of the French: 68 percent of them, according to our JDD poll, appreciate their new first lady.’

7. “Tinkerer’s Toy”

“The Chumby is a fairly innocent-looking object resembling a clock radio, with a small touch screen and a leather-covered, padded exterior that feels like a beanbag. It costs $180, and it turns out that ‘alpha geeks,’ as Stephen Tomlin, the chief executive and founder of Chumby Industries, puts it, have been the primary target audience so far. What a Chumby does, basically, is display widgets — and your reaction to that shorthand explanation will situate you on the geek continuum. (‘What’s a widget?’ scores pretty low, for instance, but the answer is just two paragraphs away.)”

8. “Smoking, Drinking, Writing, Womanizing, Smoking, Drinking …”

“He smiled. ‘The big blunder was that Joan quoted Marshall McLuhan. He had a bunch of books out in 1960, but not the one where he said, “The medium is the message.” Unless she was in his class in Canada, she wouldn’t have known. He was probably using it already, but it was not in print.’”

9. “Does 8th-Grade Pomp Fit the Circumstance?”

“While some educators are grateful that notice is still being paid to academic achievement, others deride the festivities as overpraising what should be routine accomplishment. Some principals, school superintendents and legislators are trying to scale back the grandeur.”

10. “He’s Pregnant. You’re Speechless.”

“‘When there’s a lot of fascination around a figure like Thomas Beatie,’ said Judith Halberstam, a professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California, ‘it points to other changes already happening elsewhere in the culture.’”

Academics Who Dress Well

Gary Cooper as Professor Bertram Potts in Ball of Fire (1941)

 

Loved this aside from Russell Jacoby’s recent profile of Paul Piccone:

Another leftist Italian-American of working-class origins coincidentally chaired my department at Rochester. Eugene Genovese, the historian of American slavery, also dressed to the nines. He once addressed us motley graduate students, mainly from New York City and its suburbs, as we clomped about in work boots, blue jeans, and work shirts: “You think the workers like what you are wearing?” he sneered. “They despise it and you.” He fingered his own fine threads. “This is what they like. This is what they would wear if they could.”

The point is that academics need not dress in a slovenly manner; indeed, many academics dress very well, or at least they used to. This is something of a hobbyhorse of mine. 

James Bond as Archetype

When asked “If you could be any character in literature, who would you choose?” critic Michael Dirda admits he’d want to be James Bond. And why not? Indeed, as Dirda explains,

The first words we think of when we describe James Bond — at least the 007 of the films — are suave, debonair, cosmopolitan. All those are shorthand for Bond’s supreme personal characteristic, what Renaissance courtiers always aspired to exemplify: sprezzatura. That is the ability to perform even the most difficult task with flair, grace, and nonchalance, without getting a wrinkle in your clothes or working up a sweat. Bond not only is cool, he always looks cool, at ease in his skin, at home in the world. Whatever his surroundings, he’s the best-dressed guy in the room.

There are other reasons, ahem, why someone would want to be James Bond, and Dirda mentions most of them. I gotta say: I find Dirda’s honesty refreshing. My guess is that most men with PhDs in Comparative Literature publicly renounce Bond, while secretly, as they saying goes, wishing they were him.

Academic Conferences

“The conferences are oppressive bourgeois forms that enforce a style of affected patter and smarmy whimsy in the speaker and polite chuckles and iron-butt torpor in the audience. Success at the conferences requires a certain kind of physically inert personality, superficially cordial but emotionally dissociated. It’s the genteel high Protestant style of the country clubs and corporate boardrooms, with their financial reports and marketing presentations.” —Camille Paglia

6.15.2008 New York Times Digest

1. “When Dads Were Models for All of Us”

“There were, then as now, endless varieties of fatherhood, and it’s not as if they were all saints then and we’re all distant Hummer-driving power dads now. But on Tanners Road, there did seem to be more time, more grace, more of a center, more very visible models of the way to do it right than most kids, urban or suburban, grow up with today. People moved less often, they didn’t have P.D.A.’s to check on weekends, they had less fancy jobs but perhaps richer lives. You can postulate reasons, but Google can’t tell you exactly why.”

2. “Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic”

“The idea is that people who use the network more heavily should pay more, the way they do for water, electricity, or, in many cases, cellphone minutes.”

3. “Agent of Reinvention (Sorry About That, Chief)”

“For every Mission: Impossible there is more than one Bewitched. In fact the list of small- screen wonders that failed to blossom into healthy 35-foot versions suitable for the movie house is long enough to program a network. People of a certain age have fond memories of series like The Avengers, The Mod Squad and The Honeymooners, but their cinematic offspring? Well, let’s just say they missed by far more than that much.”

4. “Kathy Griffin Just Can’t Shut Up”

“‘Not that it doesn’t occur to me that I’m burning bridges,’ Ms. Griffin said. ‘I do know I shouldn’t say this stuff, and I do have voices in my head, and I do have my mom, the angel on my shoulder, telling me to stop, but I just can’t. I can’t shut up. And obviously I’ve paid the price.’”

5. “The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller”

“For all his creative energy, Fuller’s legacy is slippery. By conventional measures he accomplished little. The efforts to mass-produce his houses, though written about widely, failed. His project to develop his efficient three-wheeled autos collapsed after an accident killed the driver of one. His soaring geodesic domes, built with a distinctive pattern of triangles, have been used — memorably for the United States pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal — but never for the large-scale projects he envisioned, like the dome he hoped would cover most of Manhattan.”

6. “That Bag Is Suddenly $15 Heavier”

“Fifteen dollars is one thing. But among the still-unknown costs associated with the fees are the amount of confusion and delays at the ticket counter, the gate and even in the cabin, because more passengers are likely to avoid checking bags and instead cram more stuff into their carry-ons.”

7. “Starting to Think Outside the Jar”

“Today, glassmaking faces a technological upheaval that offers a reminder that ‘it is a mistake to assume that older technologies are less dynamic than new ones,’ says David Edgerton, a historian at Imperial College in London and the author of The Shock of the Old, a history of the evolution of pre-electronic technologies in the 20th century.”

8. “In the E-Mail Relay, Not Every Handoff Is Smooth”

“Before the advent of a federal postal system, letters passed through the hands of many volunteer carriers on the way to their destinations. William Merrill Decker explains in Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America Before Telecommunications (1998) that letter writers were willing to ‘consent to write five letters on the chance that one might reach the addressee.’ When a letter was lost or delayed, it was said to be ‘miscarried.’”

9. “Malthus Redux: Is Doomsday Upon Us, Again?”

“While Americans grumble about gasoline prices, food riots have seared Bangladesh, Egypt and African countries. In Haiti, they cost the prime minister his job. Rice-bowl countries like China, India and Indonesia have restricted exports and rice is shipped under armed guard.

“And again, Thomas Malthus, a British economist and demographer at the turn of the 19th century, is being recalled to duty. His basic theory was that populations, which grow geometrically, will inevitably outpace food production, which grows arithmetically. Famine would result. The thought has underlain doomsday scenarios both real and imagined, from the Great Irish Famine of 1845 to the Population Bomb of 1968.”

10. “Tapped Out”

“So why did Americans spend nearly $11 billion on bottled water in 2006, when we could have guzzled tap water at up to about one ten-thousandth the cost? The facile answer is marketing, marketing and more marketing….”

More on Hitchens’s Apartment

I’ve hinted at my interest in Christopher Hitchens’s life and work before. Part of why I find him so interesting has to do with his prolificness. That is to say, how does he write as much as he does as quickly as he does? A recent New York Review of Magazines article sheds some more light on his work habits. Part of the secret, it seems, is not to watch TV:

The apartment where Hitchens lives with his wife, writer Carol Blue, and his daughter, Antonia, is cavernous but lacks much décor. Besides a grand piano in the living room, the only furnishings Hitchens seems to have acquired in two decades at this address are hundreds of books, many piles of which rest unshelved against the walls. His office in the apartment next door is equally spartan but for a pile of promotional books on the kitchen isle (the anti-liberal firebrand David Horowitz, among others, seeks a blurb from Hitchens for the back cover of his latest offering). A framed National Magazine Award rests on the back of the gas range, next to a refrigerator that houses a few bottles of water, a jar of mustard and little else.

Hitchens’ only television set is in the master bedroom. It’s a recent acquisition, Blue said, and she watches it more than he does. He hardly has time, he said, now that he’s working on a memoir.

6.8.2008 New York Times Digest

1. “Urban Digs”

“My apartment reflects my views as an architect. It is minimal, austere. The architecture doesn’t impose itself upon you. The apartment is a stage for other things to take place.”

2. “Yes, Dear. Tonight Again.”

“‘There’s a strong relationship between rating your marriage as happy and frequency of intercourse,’ said Tom W. Smith, who conducted the ‘American Sexual Behavior’ study. ‘What we can’t tell you is what the causal relationship is between the two. We don’t know whether people who are happy in their marriage have sex more, or whether people who have sex more become happy in their marriages, or a combination of those two.’”

3. “She Dresses to Win”

“Unlikely as it seems, Michelle Obama, the corporate lawyer with a big education, a bigger résumé and a history of high earnings, can sometimes appear to be tempering her own strong personality with a modernized version of another era’s ladylike clothes.”

4. “Frustration and Fury: Take It. It’s Free.”

“Mr. Reznor, 43, is an unlikely combination of recluse, showman, tortured Romantic, workaholic and tech geek — which may just be an effective personality for a musician in the digital age.”

5. “What You Read Is What He Is, Sort Of”

“Mr. Sedaris, who comes from North Carolina, moved here with Mr. Hamrick about a decade ago, intending to go back but deciding to stay. Mr. Sedaris has no cellphone; his land line does not have call waiting. (‘Nobody ever calls me,’ he said at the end of the afternoon. ‘The phone hasn’t rung once,’ which was true.) He neither has nor wants an e-mail address.

“He stays away from the Internet — ‘You’ll lose a whole year on the Internet, just in terms of looking things up,’ he warned — and was unnerved when he once idly typed in the name of the host of NPR’s ‘Fresh Air,’ Terry Gross, and a bunch of critical commentary came up. ‘I don’t even want to know what anybody thinks about Terry Gross,’ he said.”

6. “Street Moves, in the TV Room”

“It seems as if every channel worth its programming salt, from broadcast networks to TLC, Lifetime and Bravo, has trotted out a dance-based reality show. As an unexpected side effect, street dance is now being popularized through television and on the shows’ Web sites, and newer moves are being documented and codified in a way not seen before.”

7. “Buy Me Some Sushi and Baby Back Ribs”

“U.S. Cellular Field, Chicago — What to Order: Nothing. Your best bet is to bring a six-pack to the parking lot, and barter a cold one for a tailgater’s hot dog. Failing that, a box of Cracker Jack.”

8. “Playing the Odds”

“If a woman has two children and one is a girl, the chance that the other child is also female has to be 50-50, right? But it’s not. Cardano again: The possibilities are girl-girl, girl-boy and boy-girl. So the chance that both children are girls is 33 percent. Once we are told that one child is female, this extra information constrains the odds. (Even weirder, and I’m still not sure I believe this, the author demonstrates that the odds change again if we’re told that one of the girls is named Florida.)”

9. “The Other Women”

“Everyone likes a bit of gossip now and then, but Persico’s relentlessness is disconcerting. He pursues questions about when and with whom Roosevelt went to bed with the same solemnity that other historians take to the question of when and with whom he decided to go to war.”

10. “Metropolis Now”

“Metropolis is hardly the last science-fiction movie to depict the city of the future as an inferno of cruelty and dehumanization that also looks like a pretty cool place to live.”

11. “Rank and File”

“Fun Books About Chickens? Top 40 Dystopian Novels? Very Best Dragon Books? You’d better believe these are real Amazon lists — irresistible chiefly because they propose new ways of organizing book-reading.”