Chekhov’s gun is a literary technique whereby an apparently irrelevant element is introduced early in the story whose significance becomes clear later in the narrative. The concept is named after Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, who mentioned several variants of the concept in letters. Chekhov himself makes use of this principle in Uncle Vanya, in which a pistol is introduced early on as a seemingly irrelevant prop and, towards the end of the play, becomes much more important as Uncle Vanya, in a rage, grabs it and tries to commit homicide.

Check out the article on ‘Red herring’ to learn about the opposite technique.

Brave New Thermostat →

An excellent article about a fascinating (and probably revolutionary) device.

Quantum levitation

Destroy All Monsters →

“Here I am tempted to advance a wild argument. It goes like this: in a society that conditions people to compete, and rewards those who compete successfully, Dungeons & Dragons is countercultural; its project, when you think about it in these terms, is almost utopian. Show people how to have a good time, a mind-blowing, life-changing, all-night-long good time, by cooperating with each other! And perhaps D&D is socially unacceptable because it encourages its players to drop out of the world of competition, in which the popular people win, and to tune in to another world, where things work differently, and everyone wins (or dies) together.”

This is a lengthy and well written article about Dungeons & Dragons (no, I’ve never played this game… I’m not
that nerd).

Amazon Rewrites the Rules of Book Publishing →

“Everyone’s afraid of Amazon,” said Richard Curtis, a longtime agent who is also an e-book publisher. “If you’re a bookstore, Amazon has been in competition with you for some time. If you’re a publisher, one day you wake up and Amazon is competing with you too. And if you’re an agent, Amazon may be stealing your lunch because it is offering authors the opportunity to publish directly and cut you out.

The New Value of Text →

“Yet we are terrified that in the digital age, people are constantly distracted. That they’re shallower, lazier, more dazzled. If they are, then the text is not speaking clearly enough. We are not speaking clearly enough. Like over-stuffed attendees at a dull banquet, the mind wanders. We are terrified that people are dumbing down, and so we provide them with ever dumber entertainment. We sell them ever greater distractions, hoping to dazzle them further.”

Connan Mockasin - Forever Dolphin Love

My Family’s Experiment in Extreme Schooling →

“My three children once were among the coddled offspring of Park Slope, Brooklyn. But when I became a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, my wife and I decided that we wanted to immerse them in life abroad. No international schools where the instruction is in English. Ours would go to a local one, with real Russians. When we told friends in Brooklyn of our plans, they tended to say things like, Wow, you’re so brave. But we knew what they were really thinking: What are you, crazy?”

The major gang bosses are well-known celebrities. Bosses from the Sumiyoshi-kai and the Inagawa-kai grant interviews to print publications and television. Politicians are seen having dinner with them. They own talent agencies that the general public knows are yakuza front companies—such as Burning Productions—but that does not stop major Japanese media outlets from working with them. There are fan magazines, comic books, and movies that glamorize the yakuza, who have metastasized into society and operate in plain view in a way unthinkable to American or European observers.

Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan

There are twenty-two officially recognized yakuza groups in Japan. The big three are the Sumiyoshi-kai, with 12,000 members; the Inagawa-kai, with 10,000 members; and at the top the Yamaguchi-gumi. There are 40,000 members of the Yamaguchi-gumi and more than a hundred subgroups.

Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan