Tag: twitter

Digital Cryptids and Consensus Reality

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

John Martin, frontispiece to Thomas Hawkins’s The Book of the Great Sea Dragon (1840). Image courtesy of Simon Cooke, Victorian Web.

Like most Americans, I spent the summer of 2020 indoors. I had just graduated from Arizona State and moved my wife and our two daughters to Shreveport, Louisiana, but my new job as an assistant professor would not start for a few months. We settled into an Airbnb and only left to shop for groceries or to survey the city, driving from neighborhood to neighborhood to scout for real estate. With no campus office, I worked on a scientific manuscript in the garage attached to the Airbnb under the pulse of an oscillating fan. And as I refined that manuscript—the last unpublished section of my physics dissertation—I would periodically flip over to Twitter to see the latest viral news clips, which, in the summer of 2020, amounted to the most extreme daily fallout from the death of George Floyd.

By now, it’s hard to avoid political clichés about these events. The protests, it was true, were mostly peaceful, but by mid-June dozens of cities had imposed mandatory curfews. People’s private reactions differed, but in those months I noticed my opinions drifting rightward in real time, as I heard NPR discussions of police defunding by day and watched Twitter videos of looting by night.

This column is not about those events in themselves, at least not intentionally, since my reactionary opinions aren’t all that interesting. What I think is probably more fruitful to discuss is how such pieces of evidence (or “evidence”—the scare quotes are appropriate) shape personal opinion. Such videos may act like sightings of digital cryptids, like glimpses of Bigfoot disappearing into the forest. They do not function as common evidence, but they are transformative for the witnesses who had never before believed. These sightings bypass the usual stages of dispassionate parsing and give the viewer the impression of a ground truth. Their power is that they are assimilated not as news, but as personal experience.

Admittedly, in my own case, I’m thinking of one specific video. Read more »

Monday, March 1, 2021

Down the Rabbit Hole With Schubert and Hawley

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

The Machine has me in its tentacles. Some algorithm thinks I really want to buy classical sheet music, and it is not going to be discouraged. Another (or, perhaps it is the same) insists that now is the time to invest in toner cartridges, running shoes, dress shirts, and incredibly expensive real estate.

Swinging over to the relative peace and quiet of my email box, I find an extraordinary number of politicians bidding against one another for my attention. It’s a little like Christmas come early: “Now, Stringer, now, Helen, now Andrew and Adams! On, Williams on, Loree! on, Kallos and Weprin!” Every single one of them vibrates with intensity, assuring me that he or she is ready to serve me, my family, my community, and the world. Oh, and, by the way, brother, can I spare a dime?

I need my dimes right now. I’m not moving to a deluxe apartment in the sky, and I’ll buy more dress shirts when the world gets back to normal and I ditch this pandemic-related beard. So, back to Schirmer’s Selected Piano Masterpieces (Intermediate Level). I know my sin. My daughter and I were talking about the accompaniment in Schubert’s Lieder and I (foolishly, without going into a private viewing mode) did a quick search. This was more than two weeks ago, and The Machine will keep at me until it is convinced I absolutely, positively, won’t give in. Machine, if you are reading (and I know you must be), please trust me, I can’t play the piano, and I definitely can’t sing. I’d be happy to post something to YouTube to prove it. Or ask my friends to confirm—after all, you know who they are. Read more »

Monday, May 30, 2011

The Heart and the Beard: a surgical story told mainly in aphorisms (of 140 characters or less)

Posted on by Liam Heneghan

By Liam Heneghan

To Vassia, best friend and partner in matters of the heart!

Context: The young doctors who had been prodding me a day or so after an appendectomy ran alarmed from my hospital bedside to call in a senior consultant. As a consequence of the high temperature I was running, a heart murmur, presumably there since birth, sounded especially pronounced. Each beat was followed by the acoustic swish of blood plashing back into the chambers of my heart. A follow up with a cardiologist in Dublin confirmed that the aortic valve was defective (stenotic and regurgitative) and that, at some point in my life, it would need to be replaced. I doubted this. The year was 1978; I was fifteen years of age. This, coincidentally, was also the year I grew my first beard. A fine display of very fine chin-hair; I have sported aggressive facial hair since that time.

Though I doubted that my heart would ever need attention (I felt immortal in those days), nevertheless, I had my various doctors through the years examine it. In the mid 1990s a doctor in Georgia, one whose name reminded me of non heart-healthy products, told me that without immediate surgery I would die. The news was a jolt and so consternated my beloved that she got her one and only parking ticket as we ruminated upon this news in Jittery Joe’s in Athens. Follow up examination revealed that the EKG leads used in that heart test had been switched round and the doctor had been seeing my heart inverted – the ventricles seemed atrophied and my atria appeared to be perched on that malformed muscle like outsized berets . Surgery0001

At the end of last year while traveling in India with students I experienced some difficulties that retrospectively appeared to have been signs of congestive heart failure. Subsequent visits with my physician, my cardiologist and my cardio-thoracic surgeon resulted in my going in for an aortic valve replacement on May 10th 2011. Typically, I wait for years before writing about personal events; however, I had been tweeting on the topic in the weeks running up to this surgery, and had provided some commentary on the subsequent and ongoing recovery. During the week of the surgery, a relatively miserable one, I had been digitally silent; however, I jotted down some observations which I now reproduce as part of this twitobiography (“The Missing Tweets”). In reviewing this output I noticed that my beard and my heart, twinned since my teen years, had co-starring roles in this little drama.

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