November 2010
16 posts
Submit to Is Greater Than’s third semi-annual X >... →
In 2007 and 2008, we did a year-end roundup using the following format:
X event/news item/cultural artifact/personal experience was > Y event/news item/cultural artifact/personal experience
(short…
Tradeoffs →
Photo by Geir Halvorsen on Flickr
If Dave switches from an extra large coffee to a small one daily, he’ll save roughly $365 this year, as this year is not a leap year. With $365 dollars, he can…
Orange Skillet Cake →
The skillet cake, or upside down cake, is too strongly associated with canned pineapples and maraschino cherries, imagined to be a sickeningly sweet concoction full of things you’d rather not eat if…
Reading Room: Misleading Metaphors, Imaginary... →
For the short holiday week, an early Reading Room:
Patti Smith talks books with Jonathan Lethem. In other Lethem news, he’s got a new book about John Carpenter’s over-the-top political allegory…
Early and Often: Is Greater Than Reader Survey →
Please participate in this (short) reader survey! It’d be an enormous help to us as we plan the site’s future. RSS and mobile readers can access the survey here.
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Doubling Down With Four Loko →
As you have no doubt heard, Four Loko has caught flack from all directions: Parents, university administrators, high school administrators, idiot teenagers, busy body 20-somethings who probably…
Insanity Meets Fashion: The Twentyten →
On the outskirts of Brooklyn, away from the bars and boutiques there is a place where the desire to be hip isn’t so concentrated. The buzz of twenty-somethings having fun is replaced by the buzz…
Reading Room: Steampunk as Totalitarianism, Online... →
Historical footnote still bears grudge against marginally more relevant legacy indie-rock outfit.
David Mitchell auctions off a character name in a future novel to benefit autism.
Does the…
Records By Their Covers: Why So Serious? →
There’s a fine balance that most musical acts have to consider between being serious and sincere about your art and just taking yourselfway too seriously. Of course there are exceptions on both…
Downsizing →
He wakes up. Slowly. Like an elderly robot with a defective switchboard, his left eyelid opens milliseconds before the right. For a moment the hungry paws beneath the door-jam evoke an irrational…
The Green Zone: Kung Fu and WMD’s →
When I saw that Paul Greengrass directed Matt Damon in this flick about the search for WMDs in the early days of the Iraq War, I feared that the film would devolve into another Jason Bourne movie….
Reading Room: Sore Winners, Information as... →
Welcome to a new weekly feature on Is Greater Than, a roundup of interesting items I’ve come across over the past few days:
“The Tea Party, in this sense, is not a new development so much as it is…
Just Another Dopamine Squirt: Texting, Facebook,... →
The last chapter of Jennifer Egan’s new novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, takes place approximately twenty five years in the future. Global warming has become the norm, producing fabulous…
Meat Men →
No people who turn their back on death can be alive. The presence of the dead among the living will be a daily fact in any society which encourages its people to live.
- From A Pattern Language …
Typography and Baseball →
A couple of months ago I discovered a box full of stuff that I had long ago tucked away in a closet. Included among the photos, clippings, magazines and yearbooks was a thick wool sweater that was…
The Aura of Art →
British sculptor Rebecca Warren is most famous for her unfired clay female figures that straddle the line between abstract and figurative. Impossibly balanced, these ghostly white-gray figures are…