The original piece, to which my little print does scant justice, first mesmerised me in a passageway at Tate Modern. It was hard to imagine any order emerging from the chaos in the scene, despite the fact it showed people at work, performing a job; and this sense was enhanced by the fact that it was literally bigger than me and everyone else gazing at it – it was about two and a half metres wide and almost as tall. It was, in the real sense of the word, awesome. (I’ve argued elsewhere about my hatred of the word ‘awesome’, but here it’s justified.) It was probably bigger than the wall in my flat on which my print hangs. I felt dwarfed by a massive picture of hundreds of little people, and I loved it.

A few years later I was at Tate Modern again to see Rachel Whiteread’s Embankment exhibition. It comprised 14,000 white boxes, stacked in seemingly random configurations, all over the Turbine Hall. It was weird, and I wasn’t sure if it felt like art to me. But it was big, and overwhelming, and the kind of thing you don’t see everyday. Again, I liked it because it made me feel small.

Being made to feel small, for many, probably has negative connotations. It’s a common lyrical trope in pop music, and it’s come to have more of an emotional than physical resonance. But I think the physical sensation of feeling small, whether in the face of nature, or art, or architecture, is one of the most inspirational things a human being can experience. Like magic, or technology, it gives a sense of wonder. I might feel differently if King Kong or Godzilla came thundering down the street towards me, but thankfully that’s unlikely to happen.

Why do I like to feel small? Maybe because it’s stirring to be exposed to big (unthreatening) things over which you have no control, which you can’t fathom. Things that overwhelm you physically, but not emotionally.

Everyday life requires you exert control. You have to get up at a certain time, get to work, actually do work, remember to eat, look after kids, pay bills… Maybe it’s a perspective thing. Sometimes you just want to be wowed and remember that there are bigger things than remembering to take out the rubbish. Although landfills can be quite a spectacle, too.

There’s an appealing madness in man-made big stuff, too. What kind of lunatic would create The Eiffel Tower? 19th Century Paris had its fair share of pressing issues – here are ten of them, for example. And yet, for some, a gargantuan metal phallus to mark the 1889 World’s Fair took precedence.

I’m a sucker for big art, in a pretty ignorant way. I’m not sure I even have any other criteria by which to judge big art, except for that I like its bigness. Take The Writer by Giancarlo Neri, which was exhibited on London’s Hampstead Heath a few years ago. This was, simply, a massive table and chair.

Photo by BabyDinosaur on Flickr

Photo by DLNY on Flickr

It got a lot of people riled up. Was it art? Was it an eyesore? I went to see it and thought it was great, mainly because – well, when else are you going to see a bloody massive table and chair in the middle of a field? It was ridiculous, and something I’ll probably never forget. Lots of other people evidently felt the same, since there were plenty staring at it in wonder/confusion. I also found it interesting that one of my first thoughts on seeing it was, “I wonder if I could climb that?” (I couldn’t, but I hear others did.) I like to feel small, but maybe I feel urged to challenge the things that make me feel that way, as they have to really earn it.

“To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.” —  E. M. Forster

I like this quote. But what about small women who like really tall men?

I always feel small when I’m about to fly somewhere. It’s still a shock to round a corner into a departure gate and see a hulking great metal bird sitting there, as if it’s waiting to eat you. Of course, the feeling of smallness is demolished once you take your seat, when (unless you’re flying posh class) your cramped surroundings suddenly make you, and whoever’s next to you, feel like an imprisoned giant.

Nevertheless, is there anything more amazing than being rammed into a crappy seat and staring dolefully out the window at featureless tarmac and scrub, before taking off and suddenly, out of nowhere, the sea appears over your shoulder? It looks like it goes on forever, and then you remember that what you see is only something like 0.1% of all the bodies of water on the planet.

(Confession: sometimes when I’m on a beach and I’m staring out at the vast, endless sea, and I think about how many unexplored regions there are beneath the surface, and how many waves there have ever been… Well, I wonder how many human bodies there are under the sea. There, I said it.)

You can’t help but feel small looking at the sea, and it blows my mind to think about its size. 70% of the Earth’s surface is water. There are mountain ranges under the Pacific Ocean. The sea is deeper than the land on earth is tall. The sea floor goes down a couple of miles or more. As you read this, the human race is the most advanced it has ever been – and yet experts reckon we’ve explored 7% of the sea floor, tops. It’s so dark down there that for years we thought nothing could live there – but loads of things live there that we know about, and probably even more that we don’t. And so on.

Nature’s always going to win out against man-made structures when it comes to making you feel small. But man can document nature pretty effectively, and perhaps no photo has had an impact on the human race like 1968’s Earthrise. The first photo of Earth from space, it was taken by the Apollo 8 crew, who were the first people to orbit the Moon.

And if you want to feel small, quotes from cosmonauts, astronauts and astronomers on the view of the Earth do a grand job. Here are some of my favourites:

“Once during the mission I was asked by ground control what I could see. ‘What do I see?’ I replied. ‘Half a world to the left, half a world to the right, I can see it all. The Earth is so small.’” — Vitali Sevastyanov, Soviet Cosmonaut 

“As we got further and further away, it [the Earth] diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man.” — James B. Irwin, Apollo 15

“I think the one overwhelming emotion that we had was when we saw the earth rising in the distance over the lunar landscape . . . It makes us realize that we all do exist on one small globe. For from 230,000 miles away it really is a small planet.” — Frank Borman, Apollo 8

“It’s tiny out there… it’s inconsequential. It’s ironic that we had come to study the Moon and it was really discovering the Earth.” — Bill Anders, Apollo 8

“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.” — Neil Armstrong

I suppose nobody has ever felt smaller than those who have been into space and looked back at our planet. But while looking at the sea or a massive chair might imbue you with a sense of majesty at the abilities of both Mother Nature and man, this surely is a different feeling. To be able to see your planet and everything you’ve ever known hanging there, like a conker waiting to be smashed? Armstrong’s awe must have been laced with a fair dose of helplessness. While David Bowie’s Space Oddity wasn’t written about the moon landings, on reading Armstrong’s quote I couldn’t help thinking of the line: ‘Planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do.’

(If you want a nice long dose of feeling infinitesimal, I’d recommend watching In The Shadow of the Moon, the 2008 documentary which features interviews with NASA astronauts who went to the Moon. If you’re in the UK, it’s available on 4OD.) 

I find that beyond pictures of the Earth, my mind is unable to latch onto most other space wonders in any meaningful way. I mean, how do you get your head around the fact that there are solar flares bigger than our planet? A centuries-long storm on Jupiter that is, again, bigger than Earth? That doesn’t make me feel small. It doesn’t make me feel anything, except thankful for Britain’s mercurial but considerably less life-threatening climate.

Do you like to feel small? What does it for you – skyscrapers? Stadiums? The Grand Canyon? I’m keen for new ways to get smallness hits.

Stuart on Google+

New Star Soccer. To paraphrase Foreigner, I’ve been waiting for a game like this to come into my life.

I won’t bang on about it, but if you’re into football and you haven’t played it, downstall New Star Soccer into your device immediately (but not if you have exams or important stuff coming up – this thing will eat your life). It beat some big guns to win a BAFTA Games award earlier this year, in a victory pleasingly comparable to, say, Rotherham United beating Chelsea in the FA Cup final.

If you’ve played the game you’ll know there are elements of New Star Soccer that could be improved. And, like any good modern-day outfit, the company behind the game tends to ask for opinions/suggestions from users through sozialmedia. I happened to have some time on my hands, so I submitted my suggestions regarding incorporating players’ retirement age into the game on their Facebook page.

They were warmly received by the person behind the feed, who I believe is the game’s creator, Simon Read. I reproduce them here for posterity/royalties should they be taken up in the next update of the game.

The original question was:

My response:

Have given this a bit of thought, and I think there’s a way of combining retirement with a rewarding continuation of the compelling gameplay. It goes like this.

1. Introduce a ‘Marriage’ option, so you can make an honest WAG of your girlfriend.

2. Let’s say marriage happens at age 24, and then there’s a ‘Breed’ option at age 25. For the purposes of reality your child will need to be a son (hey, I don’t make the rules on who plays in the Premiership/Football league).

3. By the time you reach age 41, your child will be 16. At this point you retire and start to play as your son instead.

4. Your son, unable to escape being compared to his legendary father, faces a more challenging route to the top. Perhaps there could be a mini-game in which the son tries to minimise mentions of his father’s name in media reports, etc. Maybe he turns to drugs as a way to cope, and you need to play a mini-game to complete a successful stint in rehab.

5. The son overcomes these obstacles and gradually forges his own career. Unbeknownst to him (you), in parallel to this, the father (i.e. you in your previous life) has begun a career in management. At some point the son has to make the decision of whether to join a club managed by Pops.

6. Users will be unable to resist trying this out. However, again here there are complications to overcome. Maybe the father thinks the young ‘un has it too easy compared to back in his own day, and he drops him. Maybe he farms his son out on loan to a North Korean club, to teach him a lesson for that time he got drunk at age 14 and vomited on the family’s precious Persian rug. Perhaps the father sleeps with the son’s girlfriend. (I’m just spitballing here.)

7. A calamitous falling-out ensues. The son leaves the club acrimoniously, and joins the arch rivals of the club the father manages. Mini-game: protecting your beautiful mock-tudor mansion from the attentions of angry fans.

8. The derby games between the son’s team and the father’s team are volatile affairs, and you’ll need all your cunning and self-discipline to convince your own fans of your love for your new club while avoiding being sent off.

9. Next, the son marries his own WAG, and the following year his wife gives birth. But this time: TWINS.

10. In this way, the game can continue in perpetuity, with a growing family tree of increasingly emotionally damaged young footballers helplessly following in the footsteps of their legendary ancestors.

11. If you play for long enough, every match within the game will feature a complex series of familial sub-plots, in which wronged siblings seek vengeance against inbred/illegitimate cousins, and so on. I see weapons featuring at some point.

12. This opens the door to an enhanced level of in-match violence, which will surely just be a reflection of how society – and therefore the beautiful game – will look by the year 2230.

I haven’t really thought through how all this impacts on the protagonist’s international prospects, but I would have thought Robocop-style body armour would be a no-brainer by this point, as it would allow FIFA to up its game against the by-now dominant UEFA Champions League.

Happy to work together to flesh this out, Simon/New Star Games.

New Star Soccer for mobile/tablet

Stuart on Google+

SOCKS
They shield your feet, make you feel real neat
SOCKS
They cushion your shoes, take away the blues
SOCKS
With some buttons and thread, you can give them both heads
SOCKS
Need a holder for your phone? It’s already sewn
SOCKS
If you need to drain rice, a sock will suffice
SOCKS
Having grapes for lunch? A sock can carry a bunch
SOCKS
Put one on each ear, winter holds no fear
SOCKS
Absorb your tears when you weep, as you go to sleep
SOCKS

Stuart on Google+

Into #longreads? Check out my Google+ community, Non-Fiction Addiction

The best thing about the Christmas/New Year period is All The Lists. Lists lists lists. Lists. (Children may feel otherwise, but what do they know.)

I love browsing end of year lists. It’s a great way to catch up on stuff you missed, and it fills those somnolent post-turkey holiday days like a charm. Whether the lists are in newspapers, mags, blogs… Best books, best gadgets, best songs, worst songs, worst pop-up restaurants where you can’t reserve a table and the queuing system amounts to ‘elbow a fellow aspiring diner in the trachea to get a whiff of hipster-fried chicken’ (Wishbone Chicken Brixton, you are death); yes, I love all the lists.

In bygone years I tended to create sprawling music playlists. A top ten of the year was no good. It always needed to be comprehensive, unwieldy and, ideally, drive me to the brink of insanity while I compiled it (example: my Best Of 2010 Spotify playlist features 192 tracks). You know you’ve made a good fist at a list if the mere thought of trying to fulfil your original vision makes you want to cry.

Which brings me to my 2012 end of year list. As I’ve babbled previously, this year has seen my reading habits change significantly. I didn’t read many books (boo), but I did learn that I could send longform articles to my Kindle (yay). Since sending stuff to my Kindle creates a record of all such articles in my Amazon account, I figured it might be interesting (for me, if nobody else) to put everything I’d read this year into a list.

Sadly this only occurred to me in November, and since Amazon accounts only record text information as opposed to links, it meant I had to (I say ‘had to’):

1. Trawl all the way through my Amazon account

2. Copy the title of each article and/or its author

3. Paste this information into Google

4. Go to the source article link and copy the relevant info & URL

5. Paste this information into my list

Now, it might not sound that arduous. But by the time I’d finished compiling my list of Every Article I Read On My Kindle In 2012, it was 457 items long. That’s a whole lot of copying and pasting, and I’d say it’s easily the most boring way to spend time I’ve yet devised. It really cut into my Christmas shopping efforts, too (this year everyone will get a Keep Calm And Carry On tea towel and be happy with it).

This list may be something people like to browse through. I hope so, given the time I spent on it. But when I got the idea I think my main motivation was this: I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do this before. Why would they? It’s insane, and people have lives. So while it would almost certainly have been generally more useful to create a ‘Best of 2012′ list, I figured people like Longreads and Longform.org have that covered.

(Update: OK, I caved. Here are my 30 Great Reads Of 2012, compiled for The Electric Typewriter; and here’s a Readlist of all of them, should you wish to export them all to your device in one go.)

So my list is unfocused, wide-ranging and includes articles from before 2012. The oldest was published in 1869, but the majority are from 2000 onwards. It’s all non-fiction, and it paints a picture of a reader who is variously interested in, among other things, Scientology, serial killers, Bill Murray, paperclips, pornstars, Carly Rae Jepson, magic, Reddit, David Sedaris, con artists and the Olympics.

If you take a look at it and find something that piques your interest, I hope you’ll share it with others. It might make my RSI worth it.

Every Article I Read On My Kindle In 2012

A mention for the places where I tended to find all these links, and which I continue to browse regularly:

• Longform.org
• The Electric Typewriter
• The Long Good Read
• The Feature
• @IfYouOnly on Twitter
• Longreads.com
• The Browser
• Byliner
• Via Instapaper – most popular articles on Twitter
• The #longreads hashtag on Twitter, which tends to include a mixture of stuff from the above sources

@glinner you might like this. Guy kept a record of every longform article he read last year, some fantastic stuff. stuartwaterman.com/everything-i-r…

— hollyjunesmith (@hollyjunesmith) February 3, 2013

Stuart on Google+

This time I tried the WeWood Jupiter. It’s a dual dial affair with a more modern feel than the Date. It’s probably the WeWood that would appeal to the kind of folk who like things like Tokyoflash watches, although the Jupiter does have the slight advantage of actually allowing you to tell the time without making your brain jump through hoops.

The Jupiter flaunts the WeWood brand a little more than my other watch. It’s in a nice subtle way though, with the brand name below the face and a little ‘WW’ logo above it.

Over to my official photographer now, who I shall be firing imminently.

The face is large. It’s a bit like having a particularly satisfying chunk of Yorkie on your wrist. I have to stress though, that WeWood watches really are made from wood, and are therefore inedible.

I got the brown one, but it also comes in black, beige and ‘army’ (i.e., kind of khaki). I thought about going for the beige one, because I like how understated it looks. But then I remembered how white my skin is, and I figured I might not be able to see it against my wrist. In my opinion the brown recalls the classiness of a nice leather watch strap.

At the time of writing I’ve worn the Jupiter for about a week now. If compliments were ironing boards, I reckon I’d have a good 7 or 8 ironing boards by now (the dream).

As before, I needed to have a couple of links removed, and as before I elected to get someone else to take care of that rather than get involved myself. Should you want to give it a go, however, there are videos online to give you a hand.

Not much more I can say really – it’s a lovely ‘piece’, and it allows you to tell the time in two timezones, should you be the kind of sod who is important enough to require such a function. Hopefully it’ll hold up as long as my other one has.

WeWood official UK retailer

WeWood UK Facebook page

My previous post: Waterman’s WeWood watch weview

Stuart on Google+

What I wanted was a way to use the ‘Share via’ function in the Android browser, and have ‘Send to Kindle’ be one of the options presented (alongside the usual suspects like Facebook, Twitter, etc).

After trying a couple of apps that didn’t consistently do the trick (nor offer much guidance on how to fix the glitches), and plus not really wanting to have the Amazon Kindle app taking up space on my phone, I tried the Push to Kindle app by FiveFilters.org.

Hey presto! It works really well and I found the instructions on how to set it up straightforward, which means it’s worth paying the £1.50 they charge. And even better, it uses Readability‘s early open source code - which means the article that reaches your Kindle is all cleaned-up and easy to read.

The developers even made a little video to show you how to use it:

(Tip: In the ‘Send from’ section of the set-up screen I just used my personal email address, because I’ve already set that up to be one of the email addresses from which my Kindle will accept articles.)

Download Push to Kindle from Google Play

By the way, if you’re looking for good longform stuff to send to your Kindle, some other sources I’ve been using recently in addition to Longform.org are:

• The Electric Typewriter
• The Long Good Read
• The Feature
• @IfYouOnly on Twitter
• Longreads.com
• The Browser
• The #longreads hashtag on Twitter, which tends to include a mixture of stuff from the above sources

And a few recent favourite articles I’ve encountered:

• Scandals of classic Hollywood: Warren Beatty thinks this song is about him
• David Sedaris: The man who mistook his hat for a meal
• Is Kip Litton a marathon fraud?
• The Chase Is the Thing and the Thing Is the Chase: Learning to Love Failure
• I Was One of America’s Top Psychics — And Like All of Them, a Complete Fraud
• The secret mainstream: contemplating the mirages of Werner Herzog
• Don’t wear yum-yum yellow - Travels through the Hidden World of Sharks 
• An Inquiry Into the Very Public Private Marriage of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise
• Inside the Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night (the article that inspired Saturday Night Fever)
• How We’re Wrecking Our Feet With Every Step We Take
• Corruption, Murder, and the Beautiful Game
• Loch Ness Memoir
• I Was an A-List Writer of B-List Productions

Stuart on Google+

It’s difficult to justify eschewing social engagements just because 22 strangers are kicking a ball around on a field thousands of miles away, or because an array of non-British women are about to jump over a collection of hurdles (literal hurdles mind, not puny figurative ones).

It’s irrational, really. But if you’ve looked forward to the big sporting tournaments for your whole life, it’s a difficult thing to just turn off. That’s why I virtually disappeared during Euro 2012 and have gone to ground during the Olympics.

Sport was a huge part of my childhood. I played football, but my obsession was about more than the thrill of scoring the odd goal, and it was about more than just watching. To me, it presented an alternate universe as compelling as the likes of Star Wars.

I read and re-read books full of football statistics. I read and re-read and re-read an ITV Sport-produced tome about the history of the Olympics (football and athletics were – and remain – my favourites).

I drew pictures of goals being scored. You know those playbook-style diagrams you see in newspapers, where they illustrate the movement of the ball leading up to a goal? I was drawing those – loads of them, uselessly illustrated using colouring pencils and felt-tips – on a daily basis. I used Star Wars figures as footballers, kicking a Subbuteo ball around on the carpet and trying to score past my brother who would be holding Darth Vader as a goalkeeper (Subbuteo itself was always too frustrating for us, so we invented our own, more free-flowing variation).

I watched and re-watched videos of league goals and, in the absence of any other useful information filling up my brain, knew the home and away score for every match, for every team, throughout the season. You could have asked me what the score was for, say, Everton v. Derby 6 months ago, and I would know. I would also know who scored all the goals.

When I think about the time I now spend commuting, ironing, washing dishes, cooking, socialising… all of this time, when I was a kid, was spent obsessing over sport. There was nothing, nothing more exciting than the prospect of a new World Cup, European Championships, FA Cup or Olympic Games. So actually, I think I’ve done pretty well to emerge from such an all-consuming obsession a relatively well-rounded human being. Sure, I spent, cumulatively, a full 24 hours watching football during the opening week of Euro 2012 – but at least I still made it into work and somehow managed to feed myself (with awful, unnaturally-hued food – but no matter).

Of late I’ve been thinking about what sport taught me during my formative years. I’m not talking about ‘teamwork’ and ‘determination’, or any of that life-lesson pishposh. I’m talking about practical, tangible, how-do-you-spell-Mönchengladbach general knowledge. Because following football means more than just watching a ball being kicked around, and the Olympics is about more than chucking a stick into a field.

There’s always a context there, and it’s from these contexts that I think my childhood education was actually improved by sport. I’m not saying I learned more than I did in school, but my awareness and knowledge of the world was definitely enhanced. Not with semi-ironic stuff like the fact that, ha ha, the Germans never miss penalties – I mean actual, semi-useful facts and figures.

I’ve had a bit of a think about this, and here’s some of the stuff I learned as a result of being a sports-nerdlinger child.

Languages

While children are undoubtedly chocolate-mouthed idiots who can’t even say ‘helicopter’, I got a huge head start when it came to pronouncing unfamiliar names and places. I was exposed to the peculiarities of numerous languages thanks to early exposure to people with names like Zbigniew Boniek,  Preben Elkjær Larsen, Said Aouita, Heike Dreschler and Emilio Butragueño; and teams called Widzew Lodz, Fiorentina, Shakhtar Donetsk, Rotor Volgograd, Fluminense and Stenhousemuir.

At an early age I’d acquired the Spanish madre due to its tendency to be mouthed – preceded by puta – by Spanish-speaking footballers when they missed a sitter, and thanks to my Dad’s glee at pointing it out and explaining what it meant. And just in case I was in any doubt as to what the Spanish for ‘goal’ was, Football Focus’s occasional highlighting of over-excited South American commentators soon cleared that up. Growing up in Wales and watching Italian and Spanish football on S4C’s Sgorio (the only way to access such exotic matches back then, pre-internet) also helped improve my Welsh; even now I can remember that ‘offside’ is camsefyll.

Finally, when it comes to my mother tongue, I’m fairly sure I can thank football for introducing me to words like aplomb, temerity, efficiency, ruthless, blistering, aggregate, incisive and tenacious. Of course, using any of these words in the playground was a surefire short-cut to a chinese burn, but I had my eye on the long game.

Mathematics

If you’re going to be a real football fan, you can only avoid the intricacies of goal difference for so long – and once you’re aware of what the For and Against columns mean, you’re basically a little footballing accountant. Two-legged cup ties, meanwhile – with the added confusion of away goals – meant that I couldn’t hope to maximise my UEFA Cup final viewing experience without indulging in some arithmetic.

Watching athletics, and trying to get my head around the fact that world records could be broken by hundredths of seconds, didn’t prevent me from having to resit my Maths GCSE – but I don’t blame the sport for that.

Science

My biology knowledge was never harmed by early exposure to the fallibility of tendons, hamstrings, groins, cartilages and ligaments. I’d still have no idea what lactic acid is if I hadn’t seen runners tie up in the home straight and been thusly informed by commentators. Throw in plenty of performance-enhancing drug scandals, and I’d also gained a considerable insight into what the human body could achieve with a little modification. Plus: steroids make your eyes go a funny colour and can turn women into men.

When it came to physics, Diego Maradona’s domination introduced me to the concept of a low centre of gravity. He was like a particularly skilful weeble. (Diego also contributed to my lack of personal ethics thanks to his getting away with the ‘Hand of God’ goal. It’s his fault I cheat at cards.)

Oh yeah, and I think wind assistance in athletics is probably something to do with physics, isn’t it? No?

Geography

Sports fans since childhood will have a geographical knowledge far beyond people who spent their formative years playing with Meccano and stuff. By the age of 12 I reckon I knew where Montevideo was, the capitals of every country worth knowing about (that is, the ones with decent football teams); that Finland existed (that’s where Lasse Viren is from); and the fact that Mexico City (did you know it’s over 2,000 metres above sea level?) had one mother of an earthquake in 1985.

At the age of 12 I had but one reason to be aware of Bulgaria: Yordanka Donkava, the supposedly female 100 metre hurdler with only eight fingers.

History

Jesse Owens v. the Nazis in 1936; terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics; Black Power salutes at the 1968 Mexico Olympics; Zola Budd and South African apartheid; Russian and American boycotts – I’m pretty certain my Olympics history book taught me more about social and political history than any lesson I ever took.

And the fact that my football stats books had no FA Cup winners between 1939 and 1945 let me know that something reasonably important must have been going on during this period.

So there you go, you see. If your little one shows a weirdly obsessive interest in sport, it doesn’t necessarily mean he/she is doing so at the expense of learning stuff.

It might not be the right stuff, but it’s better than nothing.

Stuart on Google+

(Click to enlarge)
easel.ly

Stuart on Google+

I’ve wondered in the past if the men entering into battle on the beaches were aware of just how massive the overall operation it was. We know now that this was make-or-break in terms of the War, but did they know this as they set out?

Bill’s references to the task at hand made me realise that they knew it all too well. They knew that this was likely to be the largest invasion the world had ever seen, and that failure was not an option.

While most of the letter is concerned with descriptions of what he sees and does before and during the early part of invasion, this recognition of the enormity of the situation is most vividly illustrated in the cover sheet and in a passage that would look bombastic in virtually any other setting.

What was at stake:- The future of the whole civilized world depended on this, the Greatest Venture ever undertaken in the annals of World History. We must defeat this devil upon earth so that the people of the World should live in a world as our Lord planned it to be and for what He suffered and died upon the CROSS AT CALVARY.

(Click images to enlarge.)

Stuart on Google+

I certainly didn’t foresee that it would widen my reading so much, or that this would have nothing to do with books.

I’d been to longform.org previously and I really liked its notion of providing a place to encounter lots of quality journalism. But like a lot of folk, I imagine, I rarely seemed to have the time to read as many of them as I’d have liked.

So when I got my Kindle I went to Longform and started making use of its handy Send to Kindle button, which converts the text through Readability (whose button you should really install in your browser, by the way) and sends you the article via wi-fi. The result is that I’ve only read about three books in six months – but the articles I’ve been reading have been about a much wider range of topics than I would have encountered through books.

Not a week goes by when I don’t stop by Longform and send more articles to my Kindle. I’m a pretty slow reader, so it’s challenging to get through them all. But it’s less daunting than a bookcase (or Kindle) full of books.

This post happens to coincide with Longform’s 2nd anniversary, which means there’s loads of stuff to read – almost 3,000 articles. Longform partners with sites like Slate to present articles around certain themes, and invites guest editors to curate pieces. And while its selections are perhaps overly biased towards U.S. publications, they are from big players: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Smithsonian, Time, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and the like. It also invites you to submit articles you’ve found.

It has a lovely open source kind of feeling, and the clean design means there’s nothing to distract you from the important business of browsing through the stories. Or, as they put it in a recent blog post:

There’s no Most Popular box to keep the numbers churning for particular stories, we don’t SEO the hell out of posts, and every piece we recommend spends roughly the same amount of time at the top of the homepage.

You can browse in a variety of ways, too – by topic, by writer, by publication, by decade (one of the things I love about the site is the fact that you’re as likely to come across something from the 70s as you are a recent story). It’s a bit like having all the best magazine articles ever at your disposal, without having to buy the magazines or get ink on your fingers.

(What this means for the model of journalism that funds these articles nags at me constantly, and I think what I’ll do here is what I tend to do in my mind – uneasily try to ignore the potential implications. One thing’s for sure: this Longform-Kindle paradise wouldn’t be as seductive if you had to actually pay for the content. Ew!)

Another interesting thing about this way of reading articles is that you’re not exposed to the way magazines traditionally present them. I read Getting Bin Laden, from the New Yorker, last week. I don’t buy The New Yorker, so it’s unlikely I would have encountered the article without Longform; but if I had bought the magazine it’s the kind of piece I might very well have skipped over in favour of articles closer to my other interests.

But there’s something democratising about reading things on the Kindle – everything’s in the same font, there are no ads, no sidebars and one tends not to flick through looking at how long stories are and surmise whether it’s worth embarking on reading it. If you send it to your Kindle it’s because the subject sounds interesting, and that’s it. You know it’s going to be long, and that becomes a positive rather than something that may turn you off. It might take three or four commutes to/from work to get through it, but it’s a pleasant way of keeping your brain ticking over and you know that soon you’ll be onto another piece.

Over the past few months I’ve indulged my fascination for, um, creepy subjects like missing persons, nazis and serial killers, but I’ve also read about the Marfa Lights;  how Hollywood stars would look rubbish without stylists; what happens when pet chimps go nuts; KFC’s plans for world domination; a 1991 piece about Guns N’ Roses on the verge of implosion; a portrait of a paranoid, joyless Tiger Woods; battles and rivalries in the breathable outerwear industry (?!); a whole series of stories about Saturday Night Live.

Now, this orgy of article-reading isn’t helping to assuage one of my grim, enduring fears, which is that I’m never going to read all the books I want to before I die. But that’s a stupid fear anyway. And I do wonder what it means that I’d seemingly rather read lots of shorter things than one long thing. Is it good for my brain to read stuff from lots of different sources, or is it symptomatic of a shortening attention span? (I suspect it’s both.)

I also wonder what the magazine publishers think about this form of reading. On the one hand their content is being exposed to more people, but on the other hand people using the Send to Kindle button are reading it without actually going to their sites and adding pageviews or ad impressions. Like lots of the entertainment the web enables you to access for free, the fact that this feels too good to be true has me suspecting that it is, and that it may not last.

But while it does, I’d recommend that anyone with a Kindle give this way of reading a go. It’s a readolution!

Stuart on Google+