Writing resources

This post exists mostly as a resource for me later on.

Comment from Amazon reviewer concerning On Writing Well:

1) The things that come to the writer easiest -- cliché, excessive detail, syrupy and vague language -- are the things that keep the reader bored/detached/passive.
2) Your main task as a writer is to distill the essence of whatever you're writing about--to find its central idea, to describe its distinctive qualities using precise images. In other words, your main task is to work excruciatingly hard.

Atlantic article distinguishing two approaches to the craft of writing: pre-determination of a novel versus letting "a character show the way" through the story.

New Yorker article describing the structure of writing:

The approach to structure in factual writing is like returning from a grocery store with materials you intend to cook for dinner. You set them out on the kitchen counter, and what’s there is what you deal with, and all you deal with. If something is red and globular, you don’t call it a tomato if it’s a bell pepper. To some extent, the structure of a composition dictates itself, and to some extent it does not. Where you have a free hand, you can make interesting choices.

And the nature of those choices determines your quality and style.

Toe the party line, or else!

So Dick Metcalf, a dude who makes his living reviewing firearms and writing pieces for gun magazines has suddenly become anathema to gun nuts everywhere. How? He dared to use the word "regulation" in a way that wasn't an accusation. He points out the obvious: that the 2nd Amendment itself says, "A well regulated militia..." He points out more obvious (something I literally learned and understood in middle school civics): that all of our rights are regulated by some extent -- that individual liberty ends when public safety / welfare begins to conflict with it.

And so those of us who have always understood that gun rights can and must be regulated, and that the argument is about specifics, not if...well, we belong in what's called "the reality-based community," while people who literally are single-issue gun rights voters (i.e., nutbags) are not.

The Angel of Death

...has a face that looks a lot more like a malignant neoplasm than a heart attack.

That's the bottom line from this article at the NYT. The top causes of death are rapidly changing even as we lower the overall mortality rate. Cancer is on the verge of overtaking heart disease. Of course each country and culture will have slightly varying percentages.

As the author astutely points out, cancer is much more complex to "cure" than many other death risk factors. Our cellular machinery has an inbuilt capacity to regenerate tissue and that will always leave the door open for malfunction.

The hunt for "pufferfish"

Time Magazine found out that Mitt's vetters unconvered some real dirt on Christie. It won't disappear if he is in the 2016 race. Of course this probably comes from either Rand Paul or Ted Cruz or the Teabag national organizations, who desperately hope to win out over the blue-state favorite.

"The vetters were stunned by the garish controversies lurking in the shadows of his record. There was a 2010 Department of Justice inspector general’s investigation of Christie’s spending patterns in his job prior to the governorship, which criticized him for being “the U.S. attorney who most often exceeded the government [travel expense] rate without adequate justification” and for offering “insufficient, inaccurate, or no justification” for stays at swank hotels like the Four Seasons. There was the fact that Christie worked as a lobbyist on behalf of the Securities Industry Association at a time when Bernie Madoff was a senior SIA official—and sought an exemption from New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act. There was Christie’s decision to steer hefty government contracts to donors and political allies like former Attorney General John Ashcroft, which sparked a congressional hearing. There was a defamation lawsuit brought against Christie arising out of his successful 1994 run to oust an incumbent in a local Garden State race. Then there was Todd Christie, the Governor’s brother, who in 2008 agreed to a settlement of civil charges by the Securities and Exchange Commission in which he acknowledged making “hundreds of trades in which customers had been systematically overcharged.” (Todd also oversaw a family foundation whose activities and purpose raised eyebrows among the vetters.) And all that was on top of a litany of glaring matters that sparked concern on Myers’ team: Christie’s other lobbying clients, his investments overseas, the YouTube clips that helped make him a star but might call into doubt his presidential temperament, and the status of his health. Ted Newton, managing Project Goldfish under Myers, had come into the vet liking Christie for his brashness and straight talk. Now, surveying the sum and substance of what the team was finding, Newton told his colleagues, If Christie had been in the nomination fight against us, we would have destroyed him—he wouldn’t be able to run for governor again. When you look below the surface, Newton said, it’s not pretty."

Read more: Double Down Excerpt: Mitt Romney Feared Chris Christie's Baggage | TIME.com http://swampland.time.com/2013/11/02/the-hunt-for-pufferfish/#ixzz2l0DrmvIh

Do NOT call the GOP racist!

As Steve Benen summarizes:

North Carolina Republicans started the week offering a spirited defense of a voter-suppression bill that will make it harder for people of color to participate in their own democracy. Then a North Carolina Republican official was forced to resign after referring to “lazy black people that wants the government to give them everything” during an interview for national broadcast. Then North Carolina’s Republican governor, Pat McCrory, decided it’d be a good idea to honor the late Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) – arguably the last proud, unrepentant racist to serve in Congress.

 

And then a Republican state senator in North Carolina thought it’d be hilarious to celebrate Birther humor.

It's all just coincidence. Or something.

Two great articles on partisanship and food stamps

Two great new opinion pieces from the NYT:

1. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/21/american-bile/
2. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/red-state-pain/

"Origins of Religious Disbelief"

This is a few months old, but I just came across it.

"The origins of religious disbelief "
Ara Norenzayan and Will M. Gervais
Trends in Cognitive Sciences January 2013, Vol. 17, No. 1
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2012.11.006

Check out a podcast by Gervais, a University of Kentucky prof, on the origins of religious disbelief here, and read the review paper on the subject here.