WEEK TEN...READING, BLOGGING, WRITING

Hi there, good 305ers!
As this is the last week, and as we have a big project due this week, there will be no other required blogging.

If, however, you have a question about the project or simply want to brainstorm an idea regarding your project, feel free to ask questions on here.

The Tipping Point is a book that has applications all over the place, so if you have an idea and want to get some conformation on it, post it here--or email me.
Here are some examples that I have thought about in the past week:
>>>food culture(ever since the original Iron Chef, food has become an obsession in the U.S.);
>>>wine culture;
>>>sushi (seriously, there was a time when Bako had no sushi restaurants);
>>>barefoot running(even Nike now has minimalist shoes);
>>>mud races, color me rad races;
>>>cancer awareness walks;
>>>paper or plastic? ecological awareness;
>>>ipads in the classroom;
>>>common core in education;
>>>slavoj zizek(if you are a philosophy major, you  might know him);
>>>ted talks;
>>>digital data storage in hospitals;
>>>smart infusion patient care;
>>>robotic surgery;
>>>various ideas regarding globalization in business(read the World is Flat if you have not);
>>>neuroplasticity in kinesiology.

That was just a quick brainstorm. But for each of those, there are implications that can be gleaned by examining the idea in light of the Gladwell book.

Enjoy!

dr. s

FINAL ESSAY OF THE QUARTER: THE TIPPING POINT

FOR THIS ESSAY, THERE ARE TWO MAJOR REQUIREMENTS. 
First, you must write the essay...duh.
Second, you must email the essay to a classmate. The classmate will revise and edit and send the essay back to you.

Let's start with the essay itself. The essay is about 3 pages, double spaced. There are two questions that you can write about:
1. How might one or more of the ideas in the book The Tipping Point apply to your chosen profession or major? 

2. How relevant is this idea of a tipping point? To discuss this question, locate a trend [social, political, cultural, other] that seems to exhibit a "tipping point" phenomenon. Provide a brief explanation of why you think this phenomenon meets any or all of Gladwell's three criteria for tipping point phenomenon: a) contagiousness b) little causes having big effects c) not gradual but dramatic change. 

FOLLOW THESE DIRECTIONS CAREFULLY!!!

On or before March 14, you will email your essay to a classmate. (I will notify you who that will be)
Once you receive a classmate's essay, you will comment on it, suggesting numerous ways to improve the essay.
You will then email the essay back to the author AND TO ME by Monday the 17th of March.

The final essay will be due to turnitin on March 21. 

WEEK NINE BLOG ENTRY...the Neruda question.

I can never tell what is going to happen with you great 305ers, so let's see what you do with some Neruda. The poet Pablo Neruda wrote a book filled with questions: contradictory, existential, poetic, a bit Buddhist, too, if you ask me.
So, read these and then add your own Neruda style questions. You can copy his style all you want.
Later in the week, comment on or respond to some of the questions that people pose.

Without further ado, here are the Neruda questions:


In what language does rain
fall over tormented cities?

How do the oranges divide up
sunlight in the orange tree?

Tell me, is the rose naked
or is that her only dress?

And what did the rubies say
standing before the juice of pomegranates?

Why doesn't Thursday talk itself
into coming after Friday?

Does he who is always waiting suffer more
than he who’s never waited for anyone?

Who shouted with glee
when the color blue was born?

Why does the earth grieve
when the violets appear?

Why do trees conceal
the splendor of their roots?

Who hears the regrets
of the thieving automobile?

Is there anything in the world sadder
than a train standing in the rain?
― Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions    

WEEK NINE READING

Read the Tipping Point this week.
You have more than just this week for it, but by all means, get started. It is a good read. And fear not, I know some of you found the last book a bit sad. This one is not sad, but it is great!

WEEK NINE WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ

Find a good sentence in the Tipping Point. Write it here and discuss why it matters.

WEEK EIGHT BLOG ENTRY

What was your favorite game to play as a child? Did this activity involve other children or family members?
What is the meaning of play?


----on a completely unrelated animal note, you may also answer this----

I have a friend who always insists that animals do not play. I would always argue with him that if you watch a dog chase a ball, it sure looks like play. He says no. Animals don't play; they practice for real world engagements. Even domesticated beasts simply act out of instinct. What do you think? Do animals play?

WEEK EIGHT READING

THIS MAY SEEM AN ODD READING FOR THE WEEK, BUT THE IDEA OF "RENT" PARTIES IS FASCINATING, AKIN TO THE CROWD-FUNDING OF SITES LIKE KICKSTARTER.

Langston Hughes' Collection of Harlem Rent Party Advertisements:

These cards, collected by Langston Hughes and held with his papers in Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, advertised “rent parties” to be held in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s.

Hosts of these gatherings opened up their apartments for a night, charging a fee to guests in return for live music, dancing, and socializing. Food was extra, and the accumulated cash went to help the hosts pay their rent. Sandra L. West points out that black tenants in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s faced discriminatory rental rates. That, along with the generally lower salaries for black workers, created a situation in which many people were short of rent money. These parties were originally meant to bridge that gap.

As advertisements for the parties, the cards name the kind of musical entertainment attendees could expect using lyrics from popular songs or made-up rhyming verse as slogans. Kathleen Drowne writes that the cards always used euphemisms to name the parties’ purpose. You can see the use of the names “Social Whist Party” and “Social Party” here, but Drowne also mentions cards from the 1920s that advertised shindigs under the names “Too Terrible Party,” “Boogie,” or “Tea Cup Party.”

How did Hughes come to collect these cards? The poet wrote about rent parties and rent party cards in the Chicago Defender in 1957, explaining, “When I first came to Harlem, as a poet I was intrigued by the little rhymes at the top of most House Rent Party cards, so I saved them. Now I have quite a collection.”
 

Hughes noted that rent parties seemed to disappear after the Depression but had returned in the postwar era: “Maybe it is inflation today and the high cost of living that is causing the return of the pay-at-the-door and buy-your-refreshments parties.” He argued that these new parties weren’t as fun as the older ones had been, since live music had been superseded by recorded entertainment. The new cards, however, “are just as amusing as the old ones.”

------
FINALLY, go to the site below to see the examples of the "rent" party cards:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/03/14/rent_parties_langston_hughes_collection_of_rent_party_cards.html
 

WEEK EIGHT WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ

Just finish up your TC Boyle Synthesis essay this week. I look forward to reading your brilliant analysis!

WEEK SEVEN BLOG ENTRY

What are the best qualities of humans?
--or--
What are the worst qualities of human beings?

Whichever you choose, include a good example.

WEEK SEVEN READING: CAN MONEY BUY HAPPINESS?

Money can't buy happiness

Extremely wealthy people have their own set of concerns: anxiety about their children, uncertainty over their relationships and fears of isolation, finds research by Robert Kenny.

By Amy Novotney

July/August 2012, Vol 43, No. 7

Print version: page 24

Most of what we think we know about people with a lot of money comes from television, movies and beach novels — and a lot of it is inaccurate, says Robert Kenny, EdD.

In an effort to remedy that, Kenny, a developmental psychologist and senior advisor at the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy at Boston College, is co-leading a research project on the aspirations, dilemmas and personal philosophies of people worth $25 million or more. Kenny and his colleagues surveyed approximately 165 households via an anonymous online survey and were surprised to find that while money eased many aspects of these people's lives, it made other aspects more difficult.

The Monitor spoke to Kenny about his findings and about the significance of his research for those of us who don't have a net worth of $25 million or more.

WHAT PROMPTED YOU TO STUDY WEALTHY FAMILIES?

We wanted to try to understand the deeper motivations of people in high net worth households. They are rarely questioned about this, and instead are asked whether they would like a Mercedes or a Lexus. Do they prefer Tiffany's or Cartier? Most surveys of high net worth households are marketing surveys to sell a product, so the questions that are asked are pretty narrow.

We decided to ask three major questions: First, we asked, "What is the greatest aspiration for your life?" As far as we can tell, no one has ever asked this population that question, yet there are assumptions made about this all the time. The second major question was, "What's your greatest aspiration for your children?" Our third question was, "What's your greatest aspiration for the world?" After each of the major questions we asked, "How does your money help you with your greatest aspiration?" and, "How does your money get in the way?"

WHAT DID YOU FIND?

People consistently said that their greatest aspiration in life was to be a good parent — not exactly the stereotype some might expect. When asked whether their money helps with that, they answered with all the obvious: good schools, travel, security, varied experiences. But when we asked how their money gets in the way, that was a payload. We received response after response on how money is not always helpful. They mentioned very specific concerns, such as the way their children would be treated by others and stereotyped as rich kids or trust fund babies, they wondered if their children would know if people really loved them or their money, whether they'd know if their achievements were because of their own skills, knowledge and talent or because they have a lot of money.

Some were concerned about motivation. They worried that if their children have enough money and don't have to worry about covering the mortgage, what will motivate them? How will they lead meaningful lives? This is where the money might get in the way and make things confusing, not necessarily better. Very few said they hoped their children made a lot of money, and not many said they were going to give all the money to charity and let their kids fend for themselves. They were, however, really interested in helping their children figure out how they could live a meaningful life. Even though they did not have to "make a living," they did need to make a life.

As for the respondents' aspirations for the world, they focused, once again, on how to help the youth in the world live healthy, meaningful and impactful lives. Their answers were consistently youth-focused: They were concerned about being good parents, they were concerned about their children and they were concerned about the children of the world in general. We found that to be very interesting, and even surprising because it runs contrary to so many of the stereotypes about this population.

WHAT HAD YOU EXPECTED TO HEAR?

One could expect that you might hear things like, "I wanted to make a lot of money and become financially independent and be able to do whatever I wanted to do whenever I wanted to do it." But very few said anything like that, although they appreciated the temporal freedom. It was so non-financially focused. I expected that when we asked them about their greatest aspiration for their children, we'd get a lot more people saying they wanted their children to be world leaders, but that's not what they said at all. People said, "I'd like them to think about how to make their world a better place." Not the world, their world — their community, theirneighborhood, their family.

WHAT MIGHT PSYCHOLOGISTS FIND MOST INTERESTING ABOUT THIS WORK?

A net worth of $25 million or more brings temporal freedom, spatial freedom and sometimes psychological freedom, but it's not always easy. Eventually temporal freedom — the freedom to do anything you want — raises dilemmas about what the best way to use all your time might be. There's also spatial freedom: You get to build anything you want — a house, a business, a new nonprofit — and people often get lost or befuddled with all of their options. And you get choice. You can go to this restaurant or that one, this resort or that one, buy this car or that one. People can get overwhelmed by all the choices and possibilities, and the amount of freedom that they have.

Then the overwhelming question becomes: What is the best use of my time and resources? After a while one can actually become stymied and even dispirited. There are plenty of folks who are more than willing to make suggestions, but it takes a lot of individual work to develop the psychological freedom to make decisions. For most, that's not a problem because time and money are limited, so the choices are limited. Being willing to try to understand the challenges of having an oversupply of time and money can be difficult for therapists.

The takeaway from all of this is that there seemed to be a trend that said you can't buy your way out of the human condition. For example, one survey participant told me that he'd sold his business, made a lot of money off that and lived high for a while. He said, "You know, Bob, you can just buy so much stuff, and when you get to the point where you can just buy so much stuff, now what are you going to do?"

WHAT'S THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS RESEARCH FOR THE VAST MAJORITY OF US WHO AREN'T WEALTHY?

This research shows the rest of the world, who often think that if they just made one more bonus or sold one more item or got one more promotion, then their world and their family's world would be so much better, that this isn't necessarily true. There's another whole level of concerns that parents are going to have about their kids. One of those concerns is this feeling of isolation. That's actually a No. 1 concern for families with a high net worth — this sense of isolation — and the higher the wealth, the worse it gets. We know this is a very powerful feeling when it comes to one's overall sense of well-being, and these people feel very isolated because they have what most of the world thinks they want. But just because you have money doesn't mean you're not going to have a bad day every once in a while. But what you often lose when you have all this money is the friendships that support you through the difficult times.

WHAT HAVE YOU LEARNED THROUGH YOUR YEARS OF WORKING WITH PEOPLE WITH A HIGH NET WORTH?

I think the toughest part about both working with this population and being in this population is that as soon as you say they have a net worth of $25 million, someone will start playing the violin. Like, "Oh, cry me a river, you have all this money and it's causing problems?"

No one is saying, "Poor me, I have a lot of money." In fact, most of them are saying, "I love having a lot of money. But don't get me wrong, there are some downsides."

These people don't have to worry about whether they'll have enough to make the mortgage payment, and they feel very fortunate. But it isn't nirvana either. If their kids have access to a lot of money, and therefore a lot of drugs, that hurts just as much as if they don't have any money and their kids are doing drugs. It doesn't save you from any of that. It's still a parent who has a child who is hurting.

---

Amy Novotney is a writer in Chicago.

WEEK SEVEN WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ

Take a position for or against the author's main point or any of the other assertions in this article.

WEEK SIX BLOG ENTRY

There is a story about Hemingway that goes like this. He is in a bar--he was often in a bar. Someone challenges him to write a story in a very unHemingway way. It could only contain six words. They bet a bottle of scotch, so for Hemingway, these are high stakes! He accepts. He pens this masterpiece: "For sale, baby shoes, never worn."
He wins the bets and establishes the six word memoir.
This week, your blog entry should have six words, your own six word memoir. The only requirement is this; it must only have six words. Then, later in the week, you can come back and comment on the six word memoirs of your classmates.
Also, you can do multiple ones, so have a go and then skip a space and do it again. I'll try one:

dreary sunday, rain clouds, only hope.

Here's another:

youth, writing limitless words, all red.

Have fun!

WEEK SIX READING

WILLIAM BLAKE, TYGER! TYGER!   (1794)

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 

In the forests of the night; 

What immortal hand or eye, 

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies. 

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain, 

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp, 

Dare its deadly terrors clasp! 

When the stars threw down their spears 

And water'd heaven with their tears: 

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright, 

In the forests of the night: 

What immortal hand or eye,

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

WEEK SIX WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ

Using all of your poetic interpretation skill (actually, I used all mine constructing this sentence), tell me what one line of this poem means. Just interpret one line. Use as much or as little space to do that as you would like.

TC BOYLE ASSIGNMENT

TC BOYLE SYNTHESIS “ESSAY”   DUE TO TURNITIN ON FEBRUARY 28TH

 

I put "essay" in quotes because this is not an essay, per se. It is more, a synthesis exercise.

 

As you read TC Boyle, number on a page from 1-10. Write out the ten sentences from the book that catch your eye or make you think. After each sentence, give a brief description of what the sentences means to you or why you included it.

 

1.    "For a long moment they stood there, examining each other, unwitting perpetrator and unwitting victim, and then the man let the useless bag drop from his fingers with a tinkle of broken glass" Page 8

This sentence caught my eye because of the word unwitting. Why does the author put these people together so early in the book and then say that they are both “unwitting?”

 

2.    She didn't answer, and he felt the cold seep into his veins, a coldness and a weariness like nothing he'd ever known.   Page 355

Boyle does a good job of describing the emptiness of death in this sentence, both cold and weary and unlike anything Candido, or anyone, can experience.

 

After those ten sentences comes the more difficult but rewarding part. You are going to write a synthesis. A synthesis is a type of writing where you take various unrelated writings and find some insight drawn from them. It is writing that creates connections between thoughts. You are not comparing the thoughts, but you are using these ten sentences to say one thing. When you examine the ten sentences together, what new insight do you gain that may have been undeveloped just by looking at one or two sentences.

That will be labeled “Synthesis” and will be at the bottom of the numbered ten sentences.

As I said, this is a little weird, but it usually produces good writing. You are simply numbering and writing about ten sentences and then writing about how they are connected.

 

Since it is a bit odd, I wanted to give you one good example of the synthesis part. The length of the synthesis is about a page, SINGLE-SPACED.. The author should have used one or two more examples of his main point of synthesis. But as you can see, the author has located clearly what the one area is that ties his sentences together. By the way, if your key idea only captures five or six of your sentences, that is fine too. You do not have to use all ten. Also, where this one is lacking is in the analysis. It is a bit pedestrian. Strive for depth!

 

STUDENT SAMPLE: The similar connection between most of the chosen passages would be the racist or hate aspect. The focus on race or between being Mexican or not is a huge factor throughout the book. It seems as though all the characters want to be or think that they are better than the person next to them. “Fucking Beaners. Rip it up man. Destroy it.” (page 64). This is an example of a quote from the book that shows the anger or animosity towards different races. Most of the quotes are also driven with anger or hate. I found that harsh words were spoken when characters were most upset or seemed to be in some type of turmoil. The unique choice of words Boyle uses for these passages is also a connection between the quotes. It seems as though Boyle chooses words that build some type of emotion or fire within the reader, as if he was aiming to provoke emotion within the reader. At the very least these quotes cause the reader to pause and think or feel the anger or pain the characters are feeling at the time. Another link between these quotes would be their context they are almost all referring to someone other than themselves, or trying to pass the blame a different way. Overall this book and these quotes are thought provoking as well as emotion filled passages that allow a person to feel what the characters are feeling.

 

VERY IMPORTANT...PLEASE RECALL THE TWO EXAMPLES USED IN CLASS: RESENTMENT AND UNREQUITED LOVE, WHEN TALKING ABOUT THE SONG ROSES...REMEMBER THAT BIT OF BRILLIANCE FROM YOUR CLASSMATES?

REMINDER...IN CLASS ESSAY THIS SATURDAY!!!

Here is a reminder: we have your only scheduled face to face meeting this quarter on Saturday, February 8th, from 9-12, in Classroom Building 101.
We will write our in class essay. You will receive the topic on Saturday, so it is not something you can "prepare" for.
However, hint hint, be sure to do the rather long but interesting reading this week in the "Reading" section of the blog. That "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" reading will by all means inform what you write on the in class essay.

I look forward to seeing you Saturday!

WEEK FIVE BLOG ENTRY

Imagine two worlds, one in which you are able to have twenty-four hour a day access to your loved ones--all through technology...text, Skype, phone. In another world, you only have access to your loved ones for a few hours a day, but the interaction is entirely face to face.

Think this week about which world you would prefer to inhabit.

If you prefer to avoid the simple dichotomy of the question, answer me this: how are relationships different when they are face to face versus technological? What are the implications of so much new technology on humanity and human interaction?

WEEK FIVE READING

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)
For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.
I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace  anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”
Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”
"The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen..." By James Fallows
“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford  described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”
The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum  observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing  proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.
The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.
Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor  carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”
Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”
Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?
Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.
So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman  eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”
I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/

Copyright © 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

WEEK FIVE WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ

So, is Google making you stupid? Or is your phone the guilty party? Or is it the device that all of my teachers said was making me and my generation stupid, the television? Or are we obsessed with this issue unnecessarily? How do you respond to this article?

RESTAURANT REVIEW DUE DATE REMINDER

--JUST A REMINDER: OUR FIRST ESSAY IS DUE TUESDAY BY MIDNIGHT--

Once your essay is finished, you will upload the final draft at any time on or before the 28th to turnitin.com

If you have not used this site before, you will go to turnitin.com and sign in using your own information. To enroll in the class, you will need the CLASS ID and password. They are below:
CLASS ID: 7498544
PASSWORD: english

WEEK FOUR BLOG ENTRY

This week, give some advice regarding editing and revision. What are some ways that you revise essays to make them better?
If we run out of steam on that topic, tell a story of a time when you did not revise enough, or when you edited incorrectly and "fixed" a bunch of your own good sentences, or when the dog ate your homework. Think about your own writing experiences. After all, you have been a student for many years now and have been doing quite well at this being a student "game" we learn to play.
And if neither of those strike your fancy, as a last resort, just tell me what you are doing for the Super Bowl next week...

WEEK FOUR READING

Are you a Supertaster? Mindless Eating & Your Taste Buds

Are you a Supertaster?

Published on June 25, 2010 by Susan Albers, Psy.D. in Comfort Cravings

Are your taste buds to blame for mindless overeating?  They may be contributing more than you think.

Scientists divide people into three categories:  supertasters, medium tasters and nontasters.  Supertasters have a much denser distribution of taste buds than medium and nontasters.  So supertasters experience food as richer and tastier than other people.  It's an explosion of flavor in your mouth.
Approximately, 25% of people are known to be “supertasters,” 50% are medium tasters, and 25% are nontasters.
THE DOWNSIDE
While getting the full pleasure out of food may be fun, supertasters have an increase risk of cancer, particularly colon cancer. This is mainly because they are very sensitive to bitter foods, which may make them avoid certain good-for-you vegetables that are bitter in taste like broccoli.  Instead, supertasters are also drawn to sodium and therefore use more salt.  In theory, supertasters may be using more salt to mask the bitter taste of foods.  This increases their risk for a heart attack.
The upside for female supertasters is that they often avoid sweet, high fat foods, which makes them less vulnerable to cardiac problems and obesity.  It makes sense.  Supertasters don’t need much sweetness or fat in their meals because a little goes a long way for them.  Male supertasters, on the other hand, are more likely to be drawn to high fat foods, which increases their risk of obesity.
If you aren’t a picky eater, you might be a nontaster.  Nontasters are more likely to try more foods because their taste buds are less discriminating.  Supertasters notice the subtle differences in food taste and textures, which makes them good chefs and food critics.  Nontasters experience food as more bland.
THE TEST
If you aren’t sure if you are a supertaster, you can try a simple test to find out.  Place some dark blue food coloring on the tip of your tongue.  On a piece of paper, punch a standard three ring binder sized hole.  Place the paper on your tongue.  Count the number of little dots that you see inside the hole.  On average, supertasters have 35, average tasters have between 15 and 35, and non-tasters have less than 15.  Or, if you know a biology teacher, ask for a PTC paper.  Supertasters have a gene that allows them to taste the bitterness of a chemical called PROP (propylthiouracil).  If you place the PTC paper on your tongue and you taste bitterness, you know you are a supertaster.
SUPERTASTERS & MINDFUL EATING
So if you are trying to eat more mindfully, consider how your taste buds may be impacting the way you eat.  Do you always reach for the salt shaker?  Do you find yourself overeating because the taste is so amazing?  Or, do you struggle with getting veggies into your diet because you don't like them (which may be due to the bitterness)?  Learning to eat slowly and with full awareness can help everyone (no matter what kind of taste buds you have) eat more mindfully.  When you are aware of your eating habits and style, you are more in charge of what and how much you eat.  Supertasters, for example, are likely to get into the mindless habit of salting their food before they taste it.  If you are aware of this, you can stop this automatic habit by taking a small bite and consciously evaluating it before adding salt.  To learn more about mindful eating click here.  www.eatingmindfully.com
To read more about supertasters:  http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2010/06/16/127880219/for-supertasters-a-desire-for-salt-is-in-their-genes
http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/06/16/salt.taste/index.html
 By:  Dr. Susan Albers, psychologist and author of the new book, 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food and Eating Mindfully.

WEEK FOUR WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ...or, what I expect from you on our first big essay.

Just work on polishing your restaurant review. Here is how you do that:

1. As a descriptive essay, I want to see some strong description. Rather than telling me, show me. What that means is, do not just tell me something tasted good. Instead, explain the feeling of that particular bite on your tongue, the way you had to close your eyes to experience the full sensation of sweetness from a particular dessert, the smoky essence when you breathed in after a sip of an oak aged cabernet sauvignon, or the welled up sense of hatred you felt when the restaurant overcooked your asparagus. Use all senses! Touch, taste, feel, smell, sound...

2. Avoid simple mistakes. I use the term "simple" because I do not want to write "stupid." Woops, I guess it came out anyway. Remember, this is fun writing(I hope it was fun!), but it is a final draft you are turning in. I do not expect you to know and use properly every single comma rule, but I do expect you to fix simple errors as those errors signify a lack of careful editing.

WEEK THREE BLOG ENTRY

This is unrelated to our current theme--savory and sweet deliciousness--but we will see what happens. This week, I want you to talk about the importance of sports in the U.S. Are they simply mindless masses of muscle, these athletes? Do they represent a new gladiator society? Are sports the essence of American culture, the only real locus of culture in a country that has lost its public space? What is the role of sports? Be specific and as personal as you wish. Maybe you were/are a football player, cheerleader, bowler, cymbal player (is cymbalist a word?) in the band, viewer or fan. Or perhaps you sat on the sidelines and scoffed at the whole endeavor. Maybe you awake to watch English soccer at 4am, drive to L.A. to enjoy the Dodgers, or pay exorbitant sums to watch every NBA game of the season. Regardless of who you are, what do all of these games mean? Do a little critical and creative thinking on the cultural meaning of sports.

WEEK THREE READING

Jonathan Gold | L.A. restaurant review: At Willie Jane, a local phenom refined

Govind Armstrong has hit a peak at Willie Jane by blending Low Country cuisine with a garden-fresh California presentation.

By Jonathan Gold
September 28, 2013

If you follow the restaurant scene in Los Angeles, you have known about Govind Armstrong for years, possibly since he was a teenage cooking prodigy whose mom drove him to stints on the line at the original Spago the way that other moms drive their kids to Little League practice. Or perhaps you know him from his long collaboration with locavore Ben Ford, or from his solo gigs at Table 8 and 8 Oz. Burger Bar. You may have followed Armstrong's short-lived adventure in New York, which wasn't well-received, and his appearances on "Top Chef" and on the list of People magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People.
It is more likely that you noticed his restaurant Post & Beam, which he started a couple of years ago with business partner Brad Johnson and is the most ambitious restaurant ever to open in the Crenshaw District. If you want to understand the power structure of South Los Angeles, you could do worse than to eavesdrop over grits and a Bloody Mary at Post & Beam after church on a Sunday afternoon.
But while Armstrong has been widely discussed as a phenomenon, and his cascading hair still makes teenage foodies swoon, his development as a chef may have been less examined — his style's evolution from California Mediterranean, his work with organic farmers, his burger-bar perfectionism, his streamlined African American menu at Post & Beam. Much of his early cooking was tasty but undisciplined, overgarnished and underthought. At Post & Beam, with a clientele that expected something close to perfection in dishes that reminded them of home (which is quite different from that of uptown customers demanding novelty), Armstrong finally settled into a groove.

At Willie Jane, the new restaurant he runs with Johnson on Abbot Kinney's restaurant row, Armstrong's style has become more refined yet — it's kind of a fantasy mash-up of Low Country cuisine with farm-driven California presentation, heavily reliant on the sharply tart notes that have become his trademark, and heavily reliant on Geri Miller's urban farm Cook's Garden, which happens to be right next door. When the collards and lettuces are grown less than 50 feet from your kitchen, and the farmer is apt to glare if you have treated her peppers with less than total respect, you have to maintain a certain watchfulness. Many of the dishes may have their origins in the coastal Carolinas, but they are grounded in Venice soil.
So in addition to the buttermilk biscuits with soft honey butter, the deviled eggs and the mussels steamed with ham and lemon, there are sliced peak-season peaches with burrata, smoked pecans and a handful of next-door arugula; a heap of milky ricotta with crunchy bits of fried bread and sliced next-door cucumbers; and a spicy watermelon salad with somewhat overcooked shrimp and a scattering of next-door lettuce. You can get a stack of spareribs brushed with a tart hibiscus-flower glaze — Mexicans call the herb jamaica — but it will be sprinkled with peppery yellow arugula blossoms, which is not what they put on the ribs at Bludso's. You may know shrimp and grits as the saucy, hammy breakfast dish you find everywhere in Charleston. Armstrong's version involves chile-marinated grilled shrimp, more Caribbean than South Carolina, with a small lake of organic Anson Mills grits and a kind of roasted pepper ragout. It is as close to Low Country shrimp and grits as New Orleans barbecued shrimp is to barbecue, and when you eat it, semantics don't come into play.
Most of the seating for the restaurant is outside, on patios that back up against the nursery on the other side of the building. The waiters have the ease (and the cheekbones) of models. The bartender rings herb-flavored seasonal variations on classic Southern cocktails like Old-Fashioneds, Vieux Carres and shrubs.

Is the fried chicken crisp, the pan-roasted salmon properly medium rare and the charred carrot as compelling as the hanger steak with which it is served? Indeed. The braised oxtail is compelling in its plainness, little more than fat chunks of tail soft enough to eat with a spoon, served with a lightly curried sauce you may never get around to using (it would be the main attraction at a soul food restaurant in Compton or Willowbrook). The pork chop brined in sweet tea is uncommonly juicy. The cast-iron chicken is sort of a marriage between Tuscan chicken under a brick and Edna Lewis-style pan-roasted chicken, bone out and cooked between two hot cast-iron pans until the juices run clear and the skin becomes about 90% crunch. The greens cooked down with pickled peppers, the black-eyed peas with tasso and kale, and the late-summer creamed corn are at least as interesting as the meat.
You may be tempted by the giant slabs of red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting, the berry shortcake or the pudding, but the one dessert you must try is the raisin-oatmeal cookie sandwich, as chewy, crisp and buttery as your fondest dreams, and stuffed with cool mascarpone cream.

WEEK THREE WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ

Just work on your restaurant reviews this week. I wanted you to read that review because the language is colorful and exact. But basically, there is nothing to write about in this section this week.

WEEK TWO BLOG ENTRY

One bite...that's it, just one bite. You have the describe using deep description the best single bite of food you've tasted in your life.

For all of us, this is hard, nearly impossible. But think of those glorious food moments and capture one bite of the moment. For me, I might think about family reunions in North Carolina, and the one bite would be this. Real southern hushpuppies. As I bite into this recently fried, perfectly bready southern delight, the smells of frying catfish fill the air, the hushpuppy so fresh that my tongue feels slightly splattered with hot oil. I can hear my Aunt Muriel's deep southern drawl as she lets out, "I'll declare, them is some good hushpuppies."
Describe your bite and the scene.

Have fun...and prepare to be hungry. Writing and reading about food makes me want to eat...

WEEK TWO READING: TACO TRUCK

Chef Carlos Salgado's mobile restaurant specializes in food that re-imagines tantalizing Mexican traditions.By Miles Clements Special to The Los Angeles Times
January 19, 2012
When food truck fatigue finally set in among the Twitter-equipped some time last year, the mobile movement all but stalled. Gone were the throngs that waited for hours, their attentions shifted instead to newly minted food artisans and itinerant pop-up restaurants. But in a Darwinian twist, only the strongest trucks have survived. And though the thrill of the chase may be gone for some, what remains are by and large the best meals on wheels.

Taco María is a product of that natural selection. The truck is helmed by Carlos Salgado, whose culinary pedigree instantly drove Taco María onto the radar screen of every serious Orange County eater. His has indeed an impressive résumé: Salgado served as pastry chef in some of the Bay Area's top restaurants, including Daniel Patterson's Coi and Oakland's Commis. He returned home to Orange County to help his parents transform the family's taquería. Taco María is what emerged from that reinvention, a truck that's constantly re-imagining lonchera traditions with the techniques and style of Mexican alta cocina.

"My parents' restaurant, La Siesta [in Orange], has been in business for over 25 years," Salgado says. "It was when they started talking about selling a few years ago that I began pointing myself back toward my hometown. Taco María was to be an extension of the restaurant and a flagship for our catering operations.

"Coming to work for a different audience, at a different price point, I've had to simplify my approach and distill the cooking ethics that are most important to me into a method that works within the food truck model. And while I may not have a kitchen full of highly trained, Michelin-quality cooks, a Pacojet, Cryovac machine or a dozen immersion circulators, I do have my family to support me and keep me grounded. My dad is the best sous-chef I could imagine having."

Those at the truck inevitably start with the aracherra taco, made with grilled hanger steak, a blistered shisito pepper, caramelized onion and bacon's smoky quintessence. The taco has both the humble charm of a backyard barbecue and the finesse of a fine steakhouse.

Yet even the most hard-core carnivores ultimately end up ordering the jardineros taco as well: knobs of roasted pumpkin, black beans, cotija cheese and a pumpkin seed salsa de semillas. There's no need for meat — this is a vegetarian taco built not on the artifice of mock meat or incongruous fusion but on the simple rhythms of the market.

If the aracherra doesn't sway you, there's always the carnitas. The slow-cooked pork shoulder is lashed with a bit of citrus and enlivened by the noticeable warmth of cinnamon. The mole de pollo is even more richly spiced — the mahogany mole is as complex as an Indian curry.

But Taco María's ever-changing specials are its signature. The truck's quesadilla de tuétano triggers Pavlovian devotion. It's a dish already cemented in food truck lore: crisp nuggets of bone marrow, stringy queso Oaxaca and a garlic-and-herb paste pulverized in a molcajete. It's predictably rich but powerfully addictive.

Salgado's rendition of esquites is similarly good, chile- and lime-laced corn sautéed with garlic, thyme and epazote in a butter flavored with blackened corncobs and toasty husks.

"I was telling [my] mom about some of my favorite foods and struggling to find a translation for bone marrow," Salgado explains. "She said something like, 'I think we used to make quesadillas [with that].' I was floored and immediately wrote it into our opening menu. What I assumed would be a fringe dish for the adventurous actually turned out to be incredibly popular. My whole staff has cuts and scrapes on their hands from pushing marrow every day just to meet demand."

It isn't brunch without the truck's excellent chilaquiles: freshly fried tortilla chips enrobed in a cascabel chile sauce and topped with pickled onions, queso fresco and a fried egg. Taco María isn't all about masa, either — any taco can be turned into a burrito. And you've really got to try the beet salad dressed with avocado, orange, almonds and charred scallion vinaigrette.

There may be a melon-lemon grass agua fresca to drink, or perhaps one flush with hibiscus and Concord grape. Salgado's almond horchata, however, is what you'll want a jug of, almond milk perfumed with coriander seeds. It's a brilliant addition: fragrant and floral, the coriander is at once unmistakable and ingeniously subtle.

Whether it's by an obsessive need for completion or sheer force of will, you will find room for dessert. Salgado's sweets are every bit as good as his pastry training portends, like the steamed chocolate bread pudding strewn with fried peanuts and glazed with milky caramel. When there isn't dense rice pudding scented with star anise and cinnamon, there's a glorious ricotta flan of homemade ricotta, caramel and a few sangria-soaked raspberries.

Witness the truck's crowds at Orange County's farmers markets and business parks and you begin to understand Taco María's growing cult, a purveyor of precisely the kind of modern Mexican cooking that's destined not for disposable cardboard containers but fine porcelain.

Salgado hints at that future. "It's still too early for us to share details, but we're excited about creating a unique type of Mexican restaurant here in Orange County, where Mexican food is such a large part of our shared experience. Exactly where and when depend on how far our truck, Frida, can take us. What I can say is that the restaurant will remain local, honest and accessible, with a menu that is recognizably Mexican in soul, in a space that is central, warm and inviting and will hopefully become a fixture in our own community."

source: http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-find-20120119,0,3934262.story

WEEK TWO WRITING ABOUT WHAT YOU READ

I traveled to Portland, Oregon over the break and ate at some great food trucks: a German place called Allengartz was my favorite. If you were going to open a food truck, what type of food would you serve and where would it be? Remember, I am offering you unlimited imaginary funds, so please create exactly the type of rolling food factory that you dream about!