By ERIC KLINENBERG
NY Times Published: February 4, 2012

MORE people live alone now than at any other time in history. In prosperous American cities — Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco and Minneapolis — 40 percent or more of all households contain a single occupant. In Manhattan and in Washington, nearly one in two households are occupied by a single person.

By international standards, these numbers are surprising — surprisingly low. In Paris, the city of lovers, more than half of all households contain single people, and in socialist Stockholm, the rate tops 60 percent.

The decision to live alone is common in diverse cultures whenever it is economically feasible. Although Americans pride themselves on their self-reliance and culture of individualism, Germany, France and Britain have a greater proportion of one-person households than the United States, as does Japan. Three of the nations with the fastest-growing populations of single people — China, India and Brazil — are also among those with the fastest growing economies.

The mere thought of living alone once sparked anxiety, dread and visions of loneliness. But those images are dated. Now the most privileged people on earth use their resources to separate from one another, to buy privacy and personal space.

Living alone comports with modern values. It promotes freedom, personal control and self-realization — all prized aspects of contemporary life.

It is less feared, too, for the crucial reason that living alone no longer suggests an isolated or less-social life. After interviewing more than 300 singletons (my term for people who live alone) during nearly a decade of research, I’ve concluded that living alone seems to encourage more, not less, social interaction.

Paradoxically, our species, so long defined by groups and by the nuclear family, has been able to embark on this experiment in solo living because global societies have become so interdependent. Dynamic markets, flourishing cities and open communications systems make modern autonomy more appealing; they give us the capacity to live alone but to engage with others when and how we want to and on our own terms.

In fact, living alone can make it easier to be social, because single people have more free time, absent family obligations, to engage in social activities.

Compared with their married counterparts, single people are more likely to spend time with friends and neighbors, go to restaurants and attend art classes and lectures. There is much research suggesting that single people get out more — and not only the younger ones. Erin Cornwell, a sociologist at Cornell, analyzed results from the General Social Survey(which draws on a nationally representative sample of the United States population) from 2000 to 2008 and found that single people 35 and older were more likely than those who lived with a spouse or a romantic partner to spend a social evening with neighbors or friends. In 2008, her husband, Benjamin Cornwell (also a sociologist at Cornell), was lead author of “The Social Connectedness of Older Adults,” a paper in the American Sociological Review that showed that single seniors had the same number of friends and core discussion partners as their married peers and were more likely to socialize with friends and neighbors.

SURVEYS, some by market research companies that study behavior for clients developing products and services, also indicate that married people with children are more likely than single people to hunker down at home. Those in large suburban homes often splinter into private rooms to be alone. The image of a modern family in a room together, each plugged into a separate reality, be it a smartphone, computer, video game or TV show has become a cultural cliché.

New communications technologies make living alone a social experience, so being home alone does not feel involuntary or like solitary confinement. The person alone at home can digitally navigate through a world of people, information and ideas. Internet use does not seem to cut people off from real friendships and connections.

The Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community Survey — a nationally representative survey of 2,512 American adults conducted in 2008 that was the first to examine how the Internet and cellphones affect our core social networks — shows that Web use can lead to more social life, rather than to less. “Social Isolation and New Technology,” written by the Rutgers University communications scholar Keith Hampton, reveals that heavy users are more likely than others to have large and diverse social networks; more likely to visit parks, cafes and restaurants; and more likely to meet diverse people with different perspectives and beliefs.

Today five million people in the United States between ages 18 and 34 live alone, 10 times more than in 1950. But the largest number of single people are middle-aged; 15 million people between ages 35 and 64 live alone. Those who decide to live alone following a breakup or a divorce could choose to move in with roommates or family. But many of those I interviewed said they chose to live alone because they had found there was nothing worse than living with the wrong person.

In my interviews, older single people expressed a clear preference for living alone, which allowed them to retain their feelings of independence and integrity, and a clear aversion to moving in with friends or family or into a nursing home.

According to research by the Rutgers sociologist Deborah Carr, at 18 months after the death of a spouse, only one in four elderly men and one in six elderly women say they are interested in remarrying; one in three men and one in seven women are interested in dating someday; and only one in four men and one in 11 women are interested in dating immediately.

Most older widows, widowers and divorced people remake their lives as single people. A century ago, nearly 70 percent of elderly American widows lived with a child; today — thanks to Social Security, private pensions and wealth generated in the market — just 20 percent do. According to the U.C.L.A. economist Kathleen McGarry: “When they have more income and they have a choice of how to live, they choose to live alone. They buy their independence.”

Some unhealthy old people do become dangerously isolated, as I learned when I researched my book about the hundreds of people who died alone in the 1995 Chicago heat wave, and they deserve more attention and support than we give them today. But the rise of aging alone is also a social achievement. The sustained health, wealth and vitality that so many people over age 65 enjoy allow them to maintain domestic independence far longer than previous generations did. What’s new today is that the great majority of older widows, widowers and divorced people prefer living alone to their other options, and they’re willing to spend more on housing and domestic help for the privilege. Some pundits predicted that rates of living alone would plummet because of the challenged economy: young people would move into their parents’ basements; middle-aged adults would put off divorce or separation for financial reasons; the elderly would move in with their children rather than hold on to places of their own.

Thus far, however, there’s little evidence that this has happened. True, more young adults have moved in with their parents because they cannot find good jobs; but the proportion of those between 20 and 29 who live alone went down only slightly, from 11.97 percent in 2007 to 10.94 percent in 2011. In the general population, living alone has become more common — in absolute and proportional terms. The latest census report estimates that more than 32 million Americans live alone today, up from 27.2 million in 2000 and 31 million in 2010.

All signs suggest that living alone will become even more common in the future, at every stage of adulthood and in every place where people can afford a place of their own.

By Jonah Keri
Grantland, February 8, 2012

Some pitchers grew to be known as artists, skilled practitioners who worked for years on mastering their tricky pitches and hiding their guilt.

“I was a big fan of Gaylord Perry,” said Derek Zumsteg, author of the book The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball. “I would go with my dad to see him pitch for the Mariners. Dad would say to me, ‘He throws a spitball, watch for it,’ and my eyes would be as big as saucers. You’d watch him fidget through his whole routine. Then he’d throw this crazy pitch. The batter would swing and miss, then look at the ump as if to say, ‘Come on!’ It was so, so cool.”

Perry was a very good pitcher with great command and exceptional endurance, firing 300 or more innings six times between 1969 and 1975. But you couldn’t separate his success from the Vaseline-loaded pitches he slimed at hitters. Perry was so successful throwing illegal pitches and so impossible to catch that after the 1973 season, baseball began granting much broader powers of judgment to umpires who suspected cheating. The next year, Perry spilled his guts in his book, Me and the Spitter, An Autobiographical Confession, copping to his rule-breaking and even sharing intimate details on exactly how he threw his various spitballs and greaseballs. He was already 35 years old by then. All he did thereafter was pitch another decade and rack up 137 more wins, returning to his illicit ways in rapid order.

“It was like a Penn & Teller thing,” Zumsteg said. “‘I’m going to tell you how the trick is done, I’m going to stop doing it … then I’m going to do it again.’ He really was a magician.”

The magician went more than two decades without getting caught, too, constantly mixing up where he stashed his precious petroleum jelly, perfecting hand wipes, and keeping umpires guessing. It wasn’t until his 21st season that Perry finally got suspended for his trickery.

The advantage Perry, Sutton, and their contemporaries had on today’s pitchers was infrastructure. Sutton and Drysdale could and would exchange notes on how to beat hitters using doctored pitches. If you didn’t have a teammate who threw a spitter, your pitching coach may have known how to throw one. Or a pitcher on another team. Or a recently retired pitcher willing to share his trade secrets. You apprenticed at the feet of the masters, learned the ways of deception, then passed your own knowledge on to the next generation. But Sutter’s emergence and the subsequent spread of the split-fingered fastball ate away at that support system. The incentive to throw a spitball dropped with a new weapon emerging, and then even if a pitcher wanted to learn to throw a spitball, there were far fewer teachers willing and able to show him how it was done.

“Pitchers got reluctant to do it simply because they didn’t know how to do it,” said Jim Hickey, pitching coach for the Tampa Bay Rays and a former minor league pitcher. That knowledge base eroded so badly that today, “it’s like a hitter trying to change the way he positions his hands. He’s afraid to do it, even for one at-bat, because he doesn’t want to go 0-for-1. Pitchers now are afraid of using an experimental pitch, getting whacked, and losing the game because of it.”

That’s not the only reason, of course. The advent of newer pitches such as the cut fastball have given pitchers even more weapons to deploy against hitters without risking the suspensions and damaged reputations that can come from getting caught. Catching a pitcher in the act has become easier, too. Chesbro and Cicotte pitched decades before the advent of television. When Perry and Sutton first broke in, you might have one or two primitive cameras to cover the entire field of play. Even when Rogers got caught on live TV just six years ago, games weren’t routinely broadcast in high-definition the way they are now. Now you have an army of crystal-clear cameras and legions of video experts able to slice and dice footage and discover the tiniest little transgression. Advanced play-by-play systems such as PITCHf/x and TrackMan go even further, tracking the arm angle, break, and velocity on every single pitch thrown in a big league game. Even a handful of aberrations would show up as big, flashing question marks to the brilliant analysts who break down such data for a living. Technology has done more than its share to exterminate the spitter.

Of course, that doesn’t mean pitchers have stopped cheating completely. With such a sharp decline in teaching the pitch, so many technological safeguards, and so few embarrassing incidents to raise public pressure, umpires aren’t exactly hunting for rogues.

“We have always tried to keep our eyes on the pitcher,” said Randy Marsh, MLB’s director of major league umpires, who spent 27 years umping in the big leagues. “They have to step off the rubber if they’re going to their mouth to rub the ball up — we watch that. But there hasn’t been any crusade or directive with umpires to go after guys with spitballs. It hasn’t even been mentioned.”

There are factors working in a pitcher’s favor, if he wanted to bend the rules. Though blatantly spitting on a ball is strictly forbidden and easy to spot, the definition of a foreign substance remains vague. A rosin bag sits at the foot of every pitcher’s mound in every ballpark. Pitchers are allowed to use that rosin to dust their hands and get a better grip on the ball. Leave a rosin bag out in the rain, though, and you get a substance that’s so sticky, it’s “as good as having pine tar in your hand,” said Marsh. Still, you won’t see many umps walk out to the mound, chemistry sets in hand, to gauge the relative moisture of a rosin bag. Beyond stashing rosin, pine tar, or other substances on their person — say, under the brim of a cap or on a sleeve — enforcing the rules depends on an umpire’s interpretation. Even the best umpires are, of course, subject to human error.

A bigger factor is the reluctance of managers to call out a pitcher. Hickey said he’s talked more than once with Rays manager Joe Maddon about a pitcher they suspect might be cheating. But if Maddon asks an ump to inspect an opposing pitcher, he’s inviting other teams to come back at his guys twice as hard. Even if James Shields or David Price or Matt Moore is found to be clean, getting frisked by an umpire in plain view of an entire stadium could break the pitcher’s routine, maybe even leave him rattled. Not only that, “you don’t want to be that unsportsmanlike guy who’s calling people out,” Hickey said.

By RICHARD S. CHANG
NY Times Published: February 3, 2012

WHEN Japanese cars and trucks began arriving in the United States in earnest during the 1970s, they were widely seen as disposable.

Reliable, maybe. Future classics? Not likely.

But in the past decade, those bargain-price models from the ’70s and ’80s have been revisited by a generation of enthusiasts who grew up riding in the back seats.

“For many like myself, it’s nostalgic,” said Jun Imai, a 36-year-old designer at the Hot Wheels division of Mattel, where he directed the styling for die-cast models of two 1970s-vintage Nissans released last year.

“It’s a very special feeling I have for cars like these — the designs, the sound of the engines, the way they drive,” Mr. Imai said. “They are so distinctive, yet most are approachable in terms of costs and availability.”

Mr. Imai, who lives in Southern California, owns a 1971 Datsun 510 wagon and a 1972 Datsun pickup. The vehicles’ peculiar silhouettes, diminutive scale and heavy use of chrome trim are typical of Japanese styling of the period.

Yorgo Tloupas, a co-founder and creative director of Intersection magazine, which is based in Paris, is the owner of a 1981 Honda Prelude. “I love that they don’t look like anything else,” Mr. Tloupas said.

“The first time I saw the Honda 600, I had to have the car,” he said, referring to the tiny 2-cylinder sedan that was among the company’s first models shipped to the United States.

The trend has grown rapidly. In 2005, Terry Yamaguchi, 39, and her husband, Koji, 41, who own a 1972 Toyota Celica coupe and a 1977 Celica liftback, started a casual meet-up in Long Beach, Calif., for like-minded enthusiasts. More than 200 cars showed up; the next year they created an official event, the Japanese Classic Car Show, now in its seventh year and attracting some 350 entries.

“We were not going to continue,” Ms. Yamaguchi said. “It cost a lot and we didn’t have any sponsors. We only did it for ourselves. But people were excited.”

The Japanese have a term for their suddenly trendy vintage cars. They are called nostalgic cars, said Benjamin Hsu, a co-founder of Japanese Nostalgic Car, a Web site and magazine based in Diamond Bar, Calif. “You know how the Japanese like to appropriate English terms but use them in a slightly different way,” Mr. Hsu said.

Yet the name is fitting. The demographic that’s seemingly responsible for the popularity of Japanese nostalgic cars is 30-something men who grew up with the cars. Mr. Imai remembers his uncles working on and racing Datsun 510s and 240Zs when he was a boy.

“When you have cars that were everyday cars, there’s an emotional connection,” said Bryan Thompson, a designer for Nissan, both in the Japan and the United States, from 2001 to 2009. “They’re a part of your life in the way a pet is a part of your life, or a family member.”

Mr. Thompson, who is now a contract designer for Volvo, cited his parents’ 1983 Toyota Tercel wagon as the inspiration behind his career choice.

For Mr. Hsu, interest in the era’s cars was stimulated during a layover at the Narita airport near Tokyo on a trip to Taiwan. “I stepped out for one second and saw the coolest cars I had ever seen,” he said. “They were cars that I never knew existed. That kind of blew my mind.”

Mr. Hsu founded the Japanese Nostalgic Car Web site with his brother, Dan, in 2006. They began publishing the magazine, a quarterly, two years later.

Mr. Hsu said that the nostalgic car trend in the United States was partly an evolution of the Japanese import-tuning craze of the 1990s that spawned the “Fast and the Furious” film franchise. A further push came around 2000, as interest rose in performance cars made for Japan’s home market (a movement in its own right, known as Japanese Domestic Market, or J.D.M.).

“People really wanted to find out what Japanese people were doing,” Mr. Hsu said. “And what Japanese people were doing was drifting.”

Drifting, a professional motor sport in Japan since 2000, came from the same hooligan spirit as drag racing. But instead of speeding in a straight line, drivers slide their cars around curves, smoke pouring off the tires. It required a specific kind of car — lightweight, and more important, rear-drive.

“Japanese companies weren’t building rear-wheel-drive cars, unless you get to high-end luxury,” Mr. Hsu said, which meant using models like the Toyota Corolla GT-S and theNissan 240SX from the 1980s.

Mr. Hsu owns a 1986 Toyota Corolla GT-S. “It had all the performance goodies — twin-cam, 16 valves, rear-wheel drive with an optional limited-slip differential,” he said. “To me that is the ideal performance package. The car is lightweight. It handles brilliantly. The motor revs to 7,500 r.p.m.”

The Corolla GT-S “was the gateway drug” to other nostalgic cars, Mr. Hsu said. He also cited other popular examples: the first-generation Toyota Celica; the Honda N600 and Civic CVCC; and several Mazdas — RX-2, RX-3 and the first-generation RX-7.

Many nostalgia-car enthusiasts modify the engines and suspensions, and install parts made for Japan-market models. But the appeal of vintage Japanese cars isn’t based solely on performance.

Mr. Tloupas, whose magazine collaborated with Honda last year in customizing a CR-Z, said he had always been captivated by Japanese design. “They were kind of quirky, he said.

Mr. Thompson explained that Japanese designers were still trying to find their aesthetic and, much as Chinese automakers are doing today, they imitated existing forms.

“Look at a lot of the early to mid-1970s Japanese economy cars,” he said. “They were oftentimes reinterpretations of American cars from the 1960s. Because they didn’t have the same proportions, they were very strange.”

Of course, Japanese automakers didn’t always get designs wrong. The Datsun 240Z was popular from its release as a 1970 model. The Datsun 510 has served as a platform for road racers for decades. And Japanese pickups are noted for their durability; it’s not unusual to find one with 300,000 miles on the odometer.

This year, Hot Wheels released two 1:43 scale diecast models of vintage Japanese cars, the 1971 Nissan Skyline 2000GT-X and 1973 Nissan Skyline 2000GT-R. In Japan, they are equivalent to the 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air or Corvette, but neither car was sold new in the United States.

The Skylines are very rare, even in Japan, and very expensive. Of the 1971 Skyline, Mr. Imai, said, “From a cultural standpoint, you’ll notice more recently this car appearing in movies and video games.”

Another model, the Toyota 2000GT, is widely regarded as the original Japanese supercar. It was sold only in limited numbers in the United States and is valued at more than $400,000 in collector-car guides; a 2000GT racecar is currently being offered for $1.7 million.

But most vintage Japanese cars remain very affordable. On eBay, a 1976 Honda Civic CVCC 5-speed with 59,000 miles recently sold for $3,550. A 1977 Corolla SR5 with 55,000 miles sold for $4,000.

Those prices may sound high for 35-year-old Japanese compacts — the prices are roughly what the cars sold for when new — but they are low compared with, say, a vintage Alfa Romeo or Chevrolet Camaro. And now owners, aware of the rising interest, are increasingly choosing to hold onto their cars.

“There are people out there,” Mr. Hsu said. “They’ve got extremely low-mileage cars, completely original, stowed in their garages all over the place.”

1. 90% of all community feedback is crap.

Let’s get this out of the way immediately. Sturgeon’s Law can’t be denied by any man, woman, child … or community, for that matter. Meta community, I love you to death, so let’s be honest with each other: most of the feedback and feature requests you give us are just not, uh, er … actionable, for a zillion different reasons.

But take heart: this means 10% of the community feedback you’ll get is awesome! I guarantee you’ll find ten posts that are pure gold, that have the potential to make the site clearly better for everyone … provided you have the intestinal fortitude to look at a hundred posts to get there. Be prepared to spend a lot of time, and I mean a whole freaking lot of time, mining through community feedback to extract those rare gems. I believe every community has users savvy enough to produce them in some quantity, and they’re often startlingly wonderful.

2. Don’t get sweet talked into building a truck.

You should immediately triage the feedback and feature requests you get into two broad buckets:

We need power windows in this car!

or

We need a truck bed in this car!

The former is, of course, a reasonable thing to request adding to a car, while the latter is a request to change the fundamental nature of the vehicle. The malleable form of software makes it all too tempting to bolt that truck bed on to our car. Why not? Users keep asking for it, and trucks sure are convenient, right?

Don’t fall into this trap. Stay on mission. That car-truck hybrid is awfully tempting to a lot of folks, but then you end up with a Subaru Brat. Unless you really want to build a truck after all, the users asking for truck features need to be gently directed to their nearest truck dealership, because they’re in the wrong place.

3. Be honest about what you won’t do.

It always depressed me to see bug trackers and feedback forums with thousands of items languishing there in no man’s land with no status at all. That’s a sign of a neglected community, and worse, a dishonest relationship with the community. It is sadly all too typical. Don’t do this!

I’m not saying you should tell your community that their feedback sucks, even when it frequently does. That’d be mean. But don’t be shy about politely declining requests when you feel they don’t make sense, or if you can’t see any way they could be reasonably implemented. (You should always reserve the right to change your mind in the future, of course.) Sure, it hurts to be rejected – but it hurts far more to be ignored. I believe very, very strongly that if you’re honest with your community, they will ultimately respect you more for that.

All relationships are predicated on honesty. If you’re not willing to be honest with your community, how can you possibly expect them to respect you … or continue the relationship?

4. Listen to your community, but don’t let them tell you what to do.

It’s tempting to take meta community requests as a wholesale template for development of your software or website. The point of a meta is to listen to your community, and act on that feedback, right? On the contrary, acting too directly on community feedback is incredibly dangerous, and the reason many of these community initiatives fail when taken too literally. I’ll let Tom Preston-Werner, the co-founder of GitHub, explain:

Consider a feature request such as “GitHub should let me FTP up a documentation site for my project.” What this customer is really trying to say is “I want a simple way to publish content related to my project,” but they’re used to what’s already out there, and so they pose the request in terms that are familiar to them. We could have implemented some horrible FTP based solution as requested, but we looked deeper into the underlying question and now we allow you to publish content by simply pushing a Git repository to your account. This meets requirements of both functionality and elegance.

Community feedback is great, but it should never be used as a crutch, a substitute for thinking deeply about what you’re building and why. Always try to identify what the underlying needs are, and come up with a sensible roadmap.

5. Be there for your community.

Half of community relationships isn’t doing what the community thinks they want at any given time, but simply being there to listen and respond to the community. When the co-founder of Stack Exchange responds to your meta post – even if it wasn’t exactly what you may have wanted to hear – I hope it speaks volumes about how committed we are to really, truly building this thing alongside our community.

Regardless of whether money is changing hands or not, you should love discovering some small gem of a community request or bugfix on meta that makes your site or product better, and swooping in to make it so. That’s a virtuous public feedback loop: it says you matter and we care and everything just keeps on getting better all in one delightful gesture.

And isn’t that what it’s all about?

I used to love Yelp.

I remember when the Web 2.0 site meant that I could indulge my obsession with finding local gems. You know what I’m talking about…the type of place that you drive by every week and always wonder if it’s any good (it is). Crowdsourced reviews meant I could trust my neighbor to tell me what was good without ever having to actually talk to them. What? I’m shy.

Then something happened, people became assholes. Blame Food Network, Top Chef, or even American Idol. Going out to eat no longer meant checking out a new cuisine, culture, or neighborhood. Our newly formed Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives culture means the masses expect every dining experience to be unique and mindblowing; we expect to be floored with delight and convulse with adoration. Fuck local business if they don’t bend backwards for our hard-earned dollar…it’s a goddamn recession and we expect to be entertained.

Somewhere along this process we forgot that these local businesses are what make up the concept of a community. A beer at our bar on a Thursday night, a slice of pizza with the softball team, dishing about crazy girlfriends at the barber shop these experiences are a cornerstone of what brings people together. Local businesses are owned by people just like you and they make a living by providing for the community around them.

The problem is some people just don’t really give a shit. They don’t care that somebody owns a business that they pour their heart/soul into, and just how much it costs to run a business.

Instead what they care about is that somebody gave them a funny look while they were waiting in line and that Rebecca Black’s Friday was playing on the radio. One-star.

They go to a bar order a beer they’ve never tried and don’t like it. One-star. Well, the bartender was cute though…two-stars.

The untold story of Yelp is that the business owner has no recourse against these types of reviews. Yelp will occasionally remove a falsified review, based on the subjective opinion of somebody working at Yelp HQ. Even owner comments that you see under a review must be approved by Yelp, and only in response to a false claim. Bottom-line: Yelp is not built to encourage fulfilling owner-customer relationships. Quite the opposite.

In any case…that’s just my opinion. No, I’m not a local business owner. I’m just a guy who really loves the concept of neighborhoods and localism. But whatever, haters gonna hate right?

By: Brian Lam
The Wirecutter, January 25, 2012

There’s a whole laundry list of disclaimers attached to it, but my pal (and Pulitzer winner) Matt Richtel wrote about a Stanford research report suggesting that spending considerable amounts of time on multimedia/technology can make us unhappy.

In his words: “The answer, in the peer-reviewed study of the online habits of girls aged 8 to 12, finds that those who say they spend considerable amounts of time using multimedia describe themselves in ways that suggest they are less happy and less socially comfortable than peers who say they spend less time on screens.” 

I owe my livelihood to technology and I love the raw capability it offers us as a tool, but I fear it a bit more than most people do. It’s a tool, but it’s not quite a hammer, because a hammer doesn’t seduce you into sitting around lonely in your underwear for 6 hours at a stretch clicking on youtube videos and refreshing Twitter. I fear technology because I fear that bad feeling I get after a three day XBox binge I go through every year around the holidays. I fear technology not because I think it’s evil, but because it’s too easy to start clicking and never stop, even if the stream of data starts to go from meaningful to useless after the top 5%.

I am fascinated by this study because everything I have been doing in the last year professionally and personally has been to reduce the overage of technology and noise in my life and it has increased my happiness by many fold.

Happiness is the most important metric in personal tech. If it improves lives, it is important. I’ve always suspected that sitting around on the internet was a sort of rot, but I had no proof until I read this piece on the Stanford study. I just don’t know why this research isn’t getting as much attention from reporters as new iPads, CEO changes, earnings reports, acquisitions, and other bullshit that only affects the greedy. People think I’m crazy for complaining about tech news and how stupid and boring the mass media internet has become, but I think they’re wrong. And I think most are writing about the wrong things.

It’s the perfect time, with this abundance of pages to read and videos to watch, to consider Clay Johnson’s book, The Information Diet. In his words, the book is about “How the new, information-abundant society is suffering consequences from poor information consumption habits” The book also outlines a plan for metering the kinds of content that we consume, as we do with food diets that need to be balanced between junk food and healthier food that initially taste worse but will make us healthier and happier. (For every milkshake, I average out a glass of green kale juice.)

Informationally, we are becoming lard-asses. In the pageview and ratings driven media economy, too much of the content these days is designed to be just like junk food to quickly boost quantifiable viewership. If you make content that is the intellectual equivalent of gummy bears, your site will appear to grow quickly. Advertisers reward size, and growing fast is expected in most places I’ve seen. Last month I visited Xeni Jardin, my blog-sister from Boing Boing and she said to me, “Only cancer and bullshit websites grow fast.” It’s happened to TV with reality shows, radio with clear channel, and it’s happening to words online. I’ve never seen a world-class sized publication that was founded in the past decade do world class quality work. It’s not because the people running them are dumb–it’s because they don’t have enough time to think their work through because there’s no short term incentive to. There’s an excuse there aren’t enough resources to go around, but that’s bullshit. It just takes a little confidence in the long game.

Read on.

(Editor’s note: Brian has asked me to write an article or two for The Wirecutter in the past, but writing with heart and soul. Reading this, I just might.)