Daily Office: Thursday
¶ Matins: At The Economist, a report on the social nature of television watching. The piece shows why “there is little to suggest that television is growing a long tail of niche interests.” The implication is that people watch television largely because other people watch television. This is heartening news, in its way — if people didn’t believe that they were participating in some sort of group pastime, they wouldn’t watch television. But it also contributes to the pile of explanations why really good television programming will always be vaninishingly rare. (via Arts Journal)
¶ Lauds: Peter Plagens offers a list of “ten things to think about regarding” the record-breaking sale of a 1964 Picasso painting the other day. (ARTicles)
¶ Prime: We were wondering when Felix Salmon would get round to dicing the Buffett/Deal Book piece to which we alluded yesterday in this space.
¶ Tierce: Philip Ball suggests that proponents of “Intelligent Design” familiarize themselves with the work of evolutionary geneticist John Avise. “What a shoddy piece of work is man.” (Nature; via 3 Quarks Daily)
¶ Sext: At Sparksheet, an intereview with Blake Eskin, the Web editor of The New Yorker. As long-time subscribers, we feel that we’re in good hands. (via The Rumpus)
¶ Nones: Good grief! In the middle of everything that’s going on in the world today, the leaders of nations belonging to the Unasur bloc (a counter-US South American treaty organization) won’t play show up at the EU-Latin America summit if Honduran president Porfirio Lobo attends. It’s amazing that there’s still any life in this story. (BBC News)
¶ Vespers: The Rumpus at its best: Kevin Evers writes about a drolly meta book, From Old Notebooks, in which Evan Lavender-Smith assembles a miscellany of thoughts about writing his first book. Which of course the miscellany becomes.
¶ Compline: Researcher Paul Bloom’s sketch of an investigation at Yale into the moral nature of very small children makes for fascinating reading, but it’s the conclusions drawn at the end that make this preview from the coming weekend’s issue of the Times Magazine a must-read.