Category: Journal

Dear Life,

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Thank you very much for the gift last week of a flat tire, broken water heater, and the possibility of major dental work. I was especially heartened to see that you left me no time for myself. Don’t worry about the money–it’s not like I was going to spend it on something else anyway.

Matt.

update: apple

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Quick update to the Mike Daisey/Foxconn/Apple story I wrote about last week: The New York Times has written a long article about conditions in the factory and about Apple’s efforts to reduce labor violations in their supply chain. Two things that I thought were particularly noteworthy:

First, I thought it was very interesting that the article chose as its central human figure one of the relatively high-paid, skilled workers in the plant. The fact that this worker had high wages and extra perks relative to most of the other workers in the plant highlights the failure to protect workers from hazardous conditions as well as the callous way that large manufacturers treat the lives of their workers.

Also deeply fascinating was this selection of reader comments on the article from Caixin, a Chinese business magazine that the Grey Lady partnered with to publish the article in China. Granted, these comments come from people that both have internet access and are on a business magazine side, but they show the same range of opinions on the labor abuses that you would find in the US, from

Even though Apple should be ethically condemned, the key point is: whether the working conditions inside the factories are supervised by law. This (supervision) is the duty of judicial officers and labor unions. Now everything is driven only by G.D.P., so which government official would dare supervise those companies? They (the governments) have long reduced themselves to the servant of the giant enterprises.

to 

 By the way, construction workers and farmers are also living a harsh life in China, shall we also boycott housing and grains?

The This American Life episode struggled with this ambivalence; it’s true that China’s mass manufacturing industry has raised more people out of poverty than any other endeavor/period in history, but its also true that this has come at a staggering human cost. The queasy discomfort that we feel at buying these products is also felt by the countries that sell them.

remainder of the ixday

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Found art: moss growing in sidewalk. Clinton Street, Southeast Portland, Oregon.

Updates to previous items:

  • Just when I sneer that most thinking fans of Downton Abbey are not simply blinded by the pageantry of the prewar landed gentry, Roger Ebert comes out with this saccharine love-letter to “the way things were” when “people knew their place.” Vom. And, for the record, I think P.G. Wodehouse sucks as well.
  • In an interesting twist to that Caitlin Flanagan quasi-hit-piece on Joan Didion I linked to last week, New York Magazine has published an essay by Meghan O’Rourke that’s… kind of a hit piece on Caitlin Flanagan. In a tidy bit of parallelism, O’Rourke accuses Flanagan of being old and out of touch with the demographic she’s writing on. I generally believe that anything from NYMag should be taken with a grain of salt, but passages like this are pretty damning:

 The book [Girl Land] is supposed to be about “the great and unchanging questions of Girl Land, as they are asked and answered in the ever-shifting landscape of today’s youth culture.” Rather than face up to that challenging subject, she withdraws into the fifties, sixties, and seventies, when she grew up—so mired in Judy Blume and Patty Hearst that she neglects to fully explore social media, Twilight, Lady Gaga, or, really, anything about how girls live today.

and

And it’s this, as much as their new sexual vulnerability, that girls struggle with: They are endowed with powerful desire that is rarely acknowledged outside their own inner lives—or is viewed as frightening. We’ve traded a coercive system of sexual repression for a faux-permissive one that encourages and channels sexual expression but also cries out against it. No wonder some girls are the sexual equivalents of binge eaters, turning on one another, making themselves too readily available as a way of pretending that they are in control. This is a problem, but asking girls to turn back into Sandra Dee is not the solution.

Interesting items from the blogosphere:

  • Interesting New York Times article on staying mentally sharp throughout life. Sometimes it does stray very close to truism (““We have shown that those with less education may be able to compensate and look more like those who have higher education by adopting some of the common practices of the highly educated,” Dr. Lachman says.”) but some of the other research it summarizes was new to me: “In another study, Dr. Lachman showed that adults, particularly men, with low levels of education could also improve mental function by using a computer. Although researchers are not sure why, they speculate that computers required users to switch mental gears more frequently or process information in a new way, which quickened reaction time.”
  • Longtime readers of the blog will know that I have a special place in my heart for Seattle-area pastor Mark Driscoll. Careful longtime readers will remember that it is a place of loathing. Driscoll and his wife have a new book out, Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together which is so misogynistic and just plain icky that it’s making other evangelicals uncomfortable. Driscoll is a perfect distillation of religious intolerance and secular douchebaggery, and it makes both perfect and no sense that he made it in the Pacific Northwest. I’m always curious about what has happened in a man or woman’s life such that they get comfort in Driscoll’s message.

mea culpa

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

My bad for the dearth of content this last week, especially after the kind words from mr. rafrenzy (who, formatted like that, sounds like maybe a clarinet teacher). All I can say is that time for blogging has never been more at a premium, and I don’t really have access to the internet at work (sometime once I’ve quit my job I’ll have some things to say about how my job is the first world version of the jobs in the piece rafrenzy highlighted).

Posting may always be a little light, but I try and fit it in when I can.

Instead of apologizing, I’ll just direct you to Cory Arcangel’s found HTML piece, “Sorry I Haven’t Posted.”