From the very beginning of the novel, it’s questionable whether his wife really has been replaced or if it’s all in his head, especially since the only patient of the doctor’s that we ever meet has similar delusions. Because I have these doubts so early on (hello… the narrator is a psychologist), and because they’re not really answered until the very end of the book, I found most of it kind of boring. You can’t take anything that the narrator says very seriously because you think he’s crazy. I liked the idea of the novel enough to give me hope that there’d be more, but I ended up expecting there to be so much more to it that I was disappointed.

I don’t regret reading Atmospheric Disturbances but it’s not a book I would tell other people to read. Here are my highlights:

Loc. 103-5, added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 03:00 PM

She does often manage to give people the impression that she loves them in a very personal and significant way; I must admit I find it pretty tiresome dealing with all her pathetic devotees who think they play a much larger role in her life than they actually do;

Loc. 148-51, added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 03:07 PM

Functionally speaking, Harvey’s main problem—or some might say his “conflict with the consensus view of reality”—stemmed from a fixed magical belief that he had special skills for controlling weather phenomena, and that he was, consequently, employed as a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology, an institute whose existence a consensus view of reality actually would (and this surprised me at the time) affirm.

Loc. 174-75, added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 03:11 PM

When asked about his absences, Harvey’s elucidation tended to go no further than to say that he was “laboring atmospherically.” Arguably these disappearances actually endangered his life.

Loc. 186-88, added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 03:13 PM

I did make a few other efforts to gently instill in Harvey some creative doubt in the internal perceptions of his world—such doubt being the usual cornerstone of delusional treatment and the path back to the consensus view of reality. But I failed.

Loc. 198-200, added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 03:15 PM

But that I—unlike Harvey—was an agent of superior rank. Who was in touch with an agent of even more superior rank. “Psychotics very much respect ranking,” she announced authoritatively.

Loc. 214-16, added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 04:17 PM

“There’d still always loom the possibility of being discovered, of being revealed as a liar. I wouldn’t be able to go a day without worrying. I can’t live like that.” “Oh,” Rema answered with a small unimpressed shrug, “but that’s what life is like all the time, no?”

Loc. 262-63, added on Sunday, May 10, 2009, 04:24 PM

it struck me anew that I’d once thought that after enough time with me she would have put on a precious little potbelly and let her hair remain messy at home.

Loc. 277-78, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:01 AM

it seemed like she’d been infected by a very American idea of identity, to think that who you were mostly consisted of what you did to get paid—that seemed silly to me.

Loc. 302-4, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:05 AM

I don’t mean to be smug by proclaiming my inherent honesty; I don’t think of my honesty as moral value, since I think of morality as involving choices, and I’ve never particularly chosen to be honest, have simply never been able to be otherwise, feel rather predetermined to fail at lying.

Loc. 372, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:14 AM

But when I pushed her as to what she noticed, she

Loc. 377-78, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:15 AM

Even though I know better than to trust appearances, especially posed, studio-airbrushed, heathered-backdrop appearances, still: the Gal-Chens had the look of a happy family.

Loc. 382-84, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:16 AM

at times such “feelings”—such limbic system instinctual responses—are the most superficial and anachronistic of all, like the feeling a baby duck must have when it responds more strongly to a stick painted red than to the beak of its own mother.

Loc. 393-95, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:19 AM

I liked to watch her try to pour from the little metal teapot without spilling, which wasn’t easy, since at almost any angle the water’s path of choice was to travel retrograde along the outside of the spout and spill on the table.

Loc. 404-6, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:21 AM

My mother used to say that almost any problem could be solved by one of the following three solutions: a warm bath, a hot drink, or what she called “going to the bathroom,” though she never specified what was to be done there.

Loc. 441-42, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:29 AM

I’d gone where I wanted her to be, not where there was any reason or unreason for me to believe she actually would be.

Loc. 450-51, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:31 AM

Sometimes it terrifies me, when I sense the exponenting mass of human lives—of unlabeled evidence of mysteries undiscerned—about which I know nothing.

Loc. 468-69, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 08:49 PM

Though my initial progress did not look or feel like progress, I believe it was a kind of progress, that of just staying in place, of not slipping backward into despair.

Loc. 477-78, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 08:51 PM

It’s just like how we have so successfully forgotten as a species that a smile was born as a masking afterthought to the sudden baring of teeth. At least that’s the most convincing smile theory I’ve heard.

Loc. 560-63, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:04 PM

I would search feet and hands and wrists and crooks of elbows, and it would be difficult for me not to reach out and place the pad of a finger on those veins and feel the blood coursing through. It’s like a ghost living in us, our blood, that’s what I think it is like, having something within us—like our blood, like our livers, like our loves—that goes on about its business without consulting us.

Loc. 575-76, added on Monday, May 11, 2009, 09:05 PM

I don’t know where things like that disappear to, the kinds of things one has on one’s fridge.

Loc. 834-36, added on Wednesday, May 13, 2009, 07:09 PM

for me silence is like a humid swelling of scents, originless clicks, phantom elbow pains, a puff of air near the eyes, a sense of grass pushing up through the earth somewhere, or everywhere at once.

Loc. 922-23, added on Thursday, May 14, 2009, 08:51 AM

“Oh I’m sorry, you see I said I’m happy with anything when actually the opposite is true, I’m never satisfied.”

Loc. 937-38, added on Thursday, May 14, 2009, 08:54 AM

I had a little moment of imagining being over there on that side of the mirror, the side where we were happy and new and now forever.

Loc. 984, added on Thursday, May 14, 2009, 09:02 AM

I’m not the only psychiatrist who advocates occasionally leaving silences silent, not confounding confession with intimacy.)

Loc. 1241-43, added on Friday, May 15, 2009, 08:51 AM

I asked the Rema-ish waitress for an apple Danish; it tasted like real apple rather than like apple flavoring. Ironically this made the taste seem ersatz to me, on account of the fact that all my childhood the apple flavor I knew and loved took the form of fritters wrapped in plastic.

Loc. 1356-57, added on Saturday, May 16, 2009, 11:51 AM

There was a time when the belief was prevalent that all those who cared for the mentally ill became mentally ill,

Loc. 1395-97, added on Saturday, May 16, 2009, 11:56 AM

Why did I use that word “legions”? The use of all caps for emphasis embarrasses me. And I cannot even express the nausea evoked by recalling my feeble attempt at mysterious wisdom.

Loc. 1404-5, added on Saturday, May 16, 2009, 11:57 AM

He had forwarded me a note from tzvi@galchen.net.

Loc. 1700-1702, added on Sunday, May 17, 2009, 08:29 PM

But I saw Rema all prismatically, all fractured and reconstituted as if seen in the valley of an unshined silver spoon, and actually I’m glad love does that, I shouldn’t complain about love, or love’s perspective—distorted or no, to feel superior to it would be wrong, as if there were some better way of seeing.

Loc. 1717-19, added on Sunday, May 17, 2009, 10:47 PM

although it was an electric teakettle, so instead of a certain trembling there’s a more cavernous gentle rumbling sound, and one waits expectantly for the understated click that means the thermostat has been thrown

Loc. 1964-66, added on Monday, May 18, 2009, 09:33 AM

not in search of what one desires to be true but rather in search of whatever truth there is—then one must be willing to accept, to engage, even to pursue further the most unwelcome and confounding data. One must be willing to make discoveries that shatter one’s most deeply held beliefs.

Loc. 1992-93, added on Monday, May 18, 2009, 09:36 AM

I thought of the last of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, a poem I’d once been made to memorize,

Loc. 2462-63, added on Tuesday, May 26, 2009, 09:06 AM

“Everyone’s a butterfly, Dr. Leo,” Harvey said, not even turning from the television set.

Loc. 2539-40, added on Tuesday, May 26, 2009, 09:18 AM

That is to say, a piece of information may be important in some very local sense, but what does it have to do with, as they say, the price of tea in China?

Loc. 2652, added on Tuesday, May 26, 2009, 07:11 PM

She’s a lily of the valley here to see you. A creamy daff of the dill. An atmospheric phenomenon.”

Loc. 2805-6, added on Wednesday, May 27, 2009, 09:28 AM

“Don’t cavil,” I said, and I admit being pleased to use a word that I suspected she would not understand.

Loc. 2841, added on Wednesday, May 27, 2009, 09:54 PM

The ice-cream man would be yelling, ‘Buy a cone and you’ll be happy forever!’”

Loc. 2854, added on Wednesday, May 27, 2009, 09:55 PM

Oddly, in his absence, I only felt closer to him. To everyone, I was feeling closer.

Loc. 2984, added on Thursday, May 28, 2009, 08:45 AM

he says things sometimes like ‘the foul rag and bone shop of my heart’ .

Loc. 2992-93, added on Thursday, May 28, 2009, 08:46 AM

what came to mind was a diagram, with each pronoun a blank box on a language tree, and each possible meaning shifting as I filled in the boxes with different names

Loc. 3081, added on Thursday, May 28, 2009, 08:58 AM

I turned on the TV, very quietly, to stop her mean talk.

Loc. 3166-67, added on Thursday, May 28, 2009, 09:11 AM

In many ways, I’ll realize, this alternate life of mine will be a small but fitting memorial to my life with Rema.

For a few weeks after that, my parents bombarded me with emails quoting things from anti-gay organizations. Then the emails finally stopped and we never talked about it after that. My parents stopped asking me about girlfriends or anything related to that subject, a silent acknowledgment that what happened happened. A few years later I briefly confessed to my mom (over e-mail) about having broken up with a boyfriend whose mom accepted us being gay and liked me a lot, telling her I wish my parents were like that, but shortly after that the subject was never brought up again.

Four years later, my current boyfriend Alex and I decided to move in together and I knew I wouldn’t want to do that without resurfacing these issues with my parents again. I had been living by myself for a long time and I had no other reason to move in with somebody besides that we were in a relationship and this was a natural progression for us. I had to tell my parents that Alex was my boyfriend and that I’m getting an apartment with my boyfriend.

I was nervous as hell, but I had hints from my mom that things wouldn’t go as badly as they did the first time. By then, I had already talked about Alex a lot with her (he’s a handbag designer and he even got her a free bag from the company he worked at) and once she asked me if he’s “a good boy” in a way that sounded like “is he good to you?” (although that was just me reading into things). My parents were also really into reality tv where over and over they saw people like them rally around gay people and support them (and rally against their anti-gay cast members). My mom even named certain gay people as her favorites (like Will Wikle from Big Brother 5) in a “see, I can like gay people” way (again, me reading into things). People like to disparage the value or quality of reality television, but in my opinion nothing has made the issues that gay people face as clearly and easily accessibly to Middle America as shows like Big Brother and Survivor.

So when Alex and I moved, I sent my parents an email with my new address, explaining to them that we’ve been together for four years and this was the next step in our relationship. My mom called me pretty quickly after that and I forget what the first thing she said was, but she was extremely supportive! She went right into asking questions about Alex’s grandparents (cause he had been living with them before, so she was worried how they reacted) and if our dog Miki (who she loves like a grandchild) was happy and had enough room, what our apartment was like, if it was close to work. It was really amazing to be able to talk about those things with her, about Alex, and have her know that he’s somebody I love and he’s not just a friend.

To varying degrees, every gay person is broken by the experiences they’ve had on their way to coming out. We’re broken when we get mistreated as children for being different than other kids, we’re broken during the difficult time of pre-adolescence when our sexual urges are kicking in and we’ve been told same-sex urges are not OK, we’re broken when we can’t start relationships the way every teenager can with the support of our peers and families (or even the same tough love of a father not wanting his daughter to date too soon), we’re broken when we’re confronted with lost friendships and hostility in our communities (and government) with regards to our relationships and starting our own families.

Ultimately we have to find the strength within ourselves to be OK with who we are, and surround ourselves with people that have our support. But no matter how OK I might think I am with being gay, steps like this one that I took with my parents feel like another piece coming back together again, like I’ve entered a new level of gayhood, one I didn’t realize existed.

A few months ago my mom met Alex and we had dinner together. All three of us were nervous and a little awkward, but it was great. My mom bought Alex a big cooking pot as a gift because she knew he likes to cook. When she went to Poland, she asked what size slippers Alex wore so she could buy him these traditional Polish slippers. When we had problems with our landlord, she suggested that Alex and I should consider buying an apartment together! One time before that she sent me an email out of the blew saying that I should be careful with us sharing our finances, because I never know where things will end up. OK, that’s not exactly positive but it’s relationship advice from my mother! It’s amazing for us to be at this place right now, something I hadn’t imagined back in 2002.

I bought Rob Walker’s Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are after seeing him in Objectified, a documentary about product design. His attitude was on the verge of being cynical, but I think it was just his no-B.S. way of explaining things that I really liked.

Buying In is about consumerism. It tries to explain why people associate or disassociate themselves with certain brands and make the purchasing decisions that they make. I’m not sure if I’d want to buy any more books on this subject, but it was pretty interesting. The book goes through a lot of different examples of brands and sub-cultures and I think it depended on them a little too much. I expected more conclusions to be drawn and a lot of times he would say he would go into things later towards the end of the book, but I don’t really think he did.

It is pretty obvious that he’s obsessed about this topic, though, and knows his stuff. I especially liked how he talked about Etsy.com and American Apparel, two sort of anti-bad-consumer brands that fit into the bigger picture in interesting ways.

While highlighting this book on my Kindle, it was funny how I kept highlighting big chunks of information, compared to the book I read before, Smilla’s Sense of Snow, where a lot of meaning was packed into one or two sentences. Here are my highlights for Buying In:

Loc. 176-78, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 09:18 AM

But why, really, did I feel so strongly about a brand of sneaker—any brand of sneaker? I know why I rejected the swoosh. In Air Force 1’s, I’d feel like a brand zombie. But what I suddenly couldn’t reconcile was my belief that I could project my individuality through some other brand.

Loc. 195-97, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 09:21 AM

So we can talk all we want about being brandproof, but our behavior tells a different story. This is why I have come around to the view that there is nothing to be gained by simply believing we are immune to brands. But there might be something gained in understanding why we aren’t.

Loc. 262-64, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 09:28 AM

So when Consumer Reports, or whatever other authority is doing the testing, studies some group of products, the conclusion is invariably that most of the choices are, you know, pretty good. All that’s left is to sift among increasingly minor differences to decide which one is the very best value of all, by however absurdly narrow a margin.

Loc. 354-57, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 09:42 AM

Marc Milecofsky grew up in Lakewood, about an hour and a half south of Manhattan, and spent more time in malls than in the streets. His father was a pharmacist, his mother a real estate agent. He had two sisters, one of whom was his twin, Marci. (The name Ecko is derived from a family story: When his mother was pregnant with Marci, the doctor informed her of an “echo,” which turned out to be Marc.)

Loc. 373-75, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 10:23 PM

The first brand logo worn on the outside of a garment is believed to be the Lacoste crocodile: 1920s French tennis star René Lacoste, playing off a nickname given to him by the press, had one embroidered on a jacket he wore and then tennis shirts he designed and sold after retiring.

Loc. 376-77, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 10:23 PM

A logo can acquire its meaning from the product it is attached to or the people who use the product—in ads, in the real world, or in the gray area in between, such as pictures of celebrities in magazines.

Loc. 395-98, added Friday, April 17, 2009, 10:37 PM

A working-class Jewish kid from the Bronx defined WASP status in a way that was accessible on a mass scale. He made it the acceptable thing for the skeptical sixteen-year-old Jersey mall rat who would become Marc Ecko and who never gave a thought to whether the relationship between that Polo symbol and the man who created it was an “authentic” one or not.

Loc. 440-43, added Saturday, April 18, 2009, 03:28 PM

Hello Kitty’s blank, “cryptic” simplicity, he argues, is among her great strengths; standing for nothing, she is “waiting to be interpreted,” and this is precisely how an “ambiguous”—and let’s be frank: meaningless—symbol comes to stand for nostalgia to one person, fashionability to another, camp to a third, vague subversiveness to a fourth.

Loc. 532-35, added Saturday, April 18, 2009, 03:40 PM

These days, talented young skaters send “sponsor me” videos to equipment makers, hoping to get “on flow” (meaning that they get free, branded, product). A skater named Skyler Siljeg was on flow by the age of ten, with almost twenty sponsors, including Jones Soda (which got its name onto Siljeg’s helmet when he was five years old) and Black Flys sunglasses, along with various equipment and apparel makers like Quiksilver.

Loc. 561, added Saturday, April 18, 2009, 03:43 PM

Sloan Wilson’s famous 1950s novel

Loc. 563, added Saturday, April 18, 2009, 03:43 PM

book The Organization Man

Loc. 567, added Saturday, April 18, 2009, 03:44 PM

2000 book Bowling Alone

Loc. 597-98, added Saturday, April 18, 2009, 03:54 PM

1979 book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, by Dick Hebdige, deconstructed punks, mods, teddy boys, and others.

Loc. 609-11, added Saturday, April 18, 2009, 03:55 PM

Consider, for example, the Red Hat Society, notable for bright costumes, exuberant group behavior, and the fact that it is made up of women age fifty and over. Here the subculture motive is to challenge the way that society expects older women to behave.

Loc. 636-38, added Saturday, April 18, 2009, 03:58 PM

But the “Beautiful Losers” crowd and the Red Hat Society offer examples of very different ways to do something that appears quite similar—using symbols of leisure activities and material culture to help us feel as if we have resolved the tension between individuality and belonging.

Loc. 649-51, added Saturday, April 18, 2009, 07:58 PM

he acknowledged that it’s more typical to cite the culture of consumption as something that undermines social togetherness, not creates it. But he countered that groups of Saab, Bronco, and Apple admirers—all studied by Muniz and O’Guinn—even possessed “a sense of moral responsibility.”

Loc. 753-56, added Sunday, April 19, 2009, 11:53 PM

Essentially, they had invented, on a nonconscious level, a rationale for their behavior that justified it despite clearly contradictory evidence—much the way a smoker who knows cigarettes are dangerous invents rationales for having another one just the same. Festinger labeled this phenomenon “cognitive dissonance.”

Loc. 845-49, added Monday, April 20, 2009, 09:13 AM

Finally, the researchers repeated the experiment, with a twist. This time, the ads and ad evaluation questions were tweaked to include Bugs Bunny, who (you might recall) is not a Disney character at all. About 16 percent of subjects subsequently claimed that, as a child, they had shaken hands with Bugs Bunny at a Disney theme park. Subsequent research found that repeated fake-ad exposure led to higher false memory rates—25 percent in one study and 36 percent in another.

Loc. 920-23, added Monday, April 20, 2009, 09:24 AM

In their book Trading Up, about the “better-educated, more sophisticated,” and “more discerning” modern consumer, Michael J. Silverstein and Neil Fiske contend that buyers of Viking Range products are expressing their “Individual Style” as well as their interest in adventurous seeking of new experiences—presumably culinary ones, in this case. Then they add this observation: “Some 75 percent of Viking cooktops installed are never used.”

Loc. 1147-50, added Monday, April 20, 2009, 07:14 PM

The more salient the iPod became, the more consumers discovered ways that it was relevant—but not because of any single specific property of the device. The key wasn’t in a single answer; it was in the variety of answers. And this is what connects it to the Livestrong bracelet. The iPod succeeded not because of any specificity, but because of multiplicity. It fit into many disparate personal narratives, by way of many disparate rationales.

Loc. 1454-55, added Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 09:24 AM

An even more compelling, and crucial, instance involves rap pioneers Eric B. and Rakim. Look at the cover of their 1987 album, Paid in Full.

Loc. 1462-65, added Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 09:13 PM

As Persaud suggested, the Gucci logo certainly had currency in Harlem street style by the early 1980s; if you look at photos from that era, you may wonder where these garments positively covered with the logos of Gucci and other luxury brands came from. They came from Dapper Dan and other customizers, who seized these symbols that were loaded with top-down meaning from the world of haute couture and essentially used them to create something new, from the bottom up.

Loc. 1466-68, added Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 09:14 PM

a 1982 glazed calfskin jacket all-over-screened with Louis Vuitton logos and a jacket featuring Nike logos that apparently predates any actual Nike clothing.

Loc. 1475-77, added Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 09:15 PM

Both the making and the buying of such garments stand as a vivid example of a bottom-up seizing of absolute control of a logo, a brand, and its meaning. Through Dapper Dan’s creations, luxury brands were given, against their will, a fresh significance to a new consumer who had never been those brands’ intended target.

Loc. 1540-45, added Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 09:25 PM

“Converse is a brand that is uniquely qualified to rely on its consumers to express themselves creatively,” Greg Stern, president of the agency, explained to me. “It’s always been worn by creative people; the brand itself is a symbol of creative expression.” Some sample ads made by Converse-wearing friends of the agency were posted to a site called ConverseGallery.com (along with one hundred cleared music tracks that potential ad makers could use), and then the agency “seeded” blogs and chat groups with an invitation to brand fans to “express yourself” by making a spot.

Loc. 1671-73, added Wednesday, April 22, 2009, 09:28 AM

Some cited the famous scene in Blue Velvet, when the character named Frank Booth, played by Dennis Hopper, reacts to another character’s preference for Heineken by saying: “Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!”

Loc. 1747-50, added Wednesday, April 22, 2009, 10:25 PM

The single key text in Pabst marketer Neal Stewart’s codification of the meaning of PBR was, of all things, the book No Logo, by the journalist and commentator Naomi Klein. Published in 2000, No Logo presented an argument about branding and marketing overload, the bullying and rapacious mind-set that this trend represented, and evidence of a grassroots backlash against it, especially among young people.

Loc. 1863-67, added Wednesday, April 22, 2009, 10:37 PM

She told an anecdote about a friend from her college days, an alt-rock type, who has ended up driving a shuttle bus for a university and refused to sell ad space on it; apparently, he didn’t want students to think he was selling them out in some way. Yoshizu sounded impatient with her friend’s attitude. “Those kids don’t care,” she said. “They understand. Y accepts advertising and marketing.” They are not, she argued, hung up on the notion of “selling out.”

Loc. 2072-74, added Sunday, May 03, 2009, 11:15 AM

I’m afraid the poor old billboard doesn’t qualify as a medium at all; its medium, if any, is the scenery around it, and that is not its to give away. Nor is a walk down the street brought to you through the courtesy of outdoor advertising.”

Loc. 2193-96, added Tuesday, May 05, 2009, 09:17 AM

Well, I asked, if a deodorant isn’t competing against deodorants, what is it competing against? “Pop culture,” Gelner replied. “You’re competing against things like movies, television shows, sporting events, other advertisers, the Internet.” So to sell something like Axe, he concluded, “you have to become part of pop culture.”

Loc. 2208, added Tuesday, May 05, 2009, 09:19 AM

Art Prostitute, a magazine based in Denton, Texas, with a print run of 2,500.

Loc. 2580-83, added Tuesday, May 05, 2009, 07:39 PM

Jackson Lears, in his books Fables of Abundance and Something for Nothing, has explored a history of America that is not simply a triumphant march of progress, but an ongoing competition between two visions of life: one guided by doctrines of science and technology and rationality, the other by beliefs that transcend the measurable and controllable and tilt over into the realms of fate, providence, and even magic.

Loc. 2583-85, added Tuesday, May 05, 2009, 07:39 PM

“The recurring motif in the cultural history of American advertising,” he has written, “could be characterized as the attempt to conjure up the magic of self transformation through purchase while at the same time containing the subversive implications of a successful trick.”

Loc. 2596-99, added Tuesday, May 05, 2009, 07:41 PM

A study in the journal Nutritional Neuroscience reported that the only ingredient in energy drinks found to have a measurable impact on mood and performance was caffeine (energy drinks generally have extremely high caffeine content). As for taurine, another nutrition expert, at Rutgers, has summarized: “We haven’t got a clue to what it does.”

Loc. 2642-44, added Wednesday, May 06, 2009, 09:10 AM

In 2006, it cut a deal with the Independent Film Channel to produce five-minute alt-sports documentaries about its various stunts and extreme-sports activities, never shilling directly for the drink but not exactly turning the camera away if it happened to come to rest on a Red Bull logo worn by a participant. (This fit into IFC’s efforts to create “TiVo-proof” revenue sources, Brandweek noted.)

Loc. 2703-6, added Wednesday, May 06, 2009, 09:16 AM

The sausage campaign was organized by a small company in Boston called BzzAgent, part of a wave of firms that have sprung up in recent years to serve the growing number of companies that concluded they needed to find new, postclick forums for consumer seduction. The forum they had in mind was not TV ads or billboards or even video games, but rather the conversations we have in our everyday lives.

Loc. 2713-16, added Wednesday, May 06, 2009, 09:17 AM

an agency working on behalf of Sony Ericsson once hired sixty actors in ten cities to accost strangers and ask them: Would you mind taking my picture? Those who obliged were handed, of course, a Sony Ericsson camera-phone to take the shot, at which point the actor would remark on what a cool gadget it was. And thus an act of civility was converted into a branding event.

Loc. 2720, added Wednesday, May 06, 2009, 09:18 AM

Vance Packard’s book The Hidden Persuaders

Loc. 2761, added Wednesday, May 06, 2009, 09:25 AM

The Frog King was a quirky, comic first novel by a young writer named Adam Davies.

Loc. 2793-94, added Wednesday, May 06, 2009, 09:29 AM

she heard about BzzAgent through a website called Bookcrossing.com, an online community where someone had posted about the firm.

Loc. 2819, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 09:07 AM

1962 academic book Diffusion of Innovation, by Everett Rogers

Loc. 2837-39, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 09:10 AM

The results of these businesses have been mixed. Aprons for men was one legendary trend-spotting gaffe that emerged from the mining of Magic People thoughts. In the mid-1990s, Sputnik predicted such trends as “guys in vinyl skirts,” “see-through track shoes,” and “suspenders with African-print shirts.”

Loc. 2889-90, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 09:15 AM

He submitted a rave review for a fantasy novel he was buzzing called Across the Nightingale Floor to the Concord Monitor, and it was published;

Loc. 2911-12, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 09:17 AM

The implication is that it doesn’t matter if you know what you’re talking about, as long as you are willing to talk a lot.

Loc. 2930-31, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 09:20 AM

Word-of-mouth marketing leverages not simply the power of the trendsetter, but also, as Balter puts it, “the power of wanting to be a trendsetter.”

Loc. 2943-46, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 09:22 AM

They found that when two items of equal value are handed out randomly to a group of people and those people are given the opportunity to trade, hardly anyone does. It’s very unlikely that all the participants were randomly handed the objects they would have preferred had they been asked in advance, so the economists concluded that once something has been given to us, we value it more.

Loc. 3017, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 09:31 AM

William Gibson novel Pattern Recognition

Loc. 3051, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 07:10 PM

another book he had read because of BzzAgent. Called Join Me,

Loc. 3077-79, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 07:13 PM

There’s an alternative, one that’s summed up neatly in a question that A-Ron had been asking himself around the time that I first met him: “How do I turn my lifestyle into a business?”

Loc. 3140-42, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 07:21 PM

Perhaps the threat that brand-smart young people really pose to commercial persuaders is not that they have stopped buying symbols of rebellion. It is that they have figured out that they can sell those symbols, too—and the next big thing will be a million small things.

Loc. 3160-61, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 07:23 PM

Ten years ago, a new T-shirt design could not be flashed around the planet minutes after completion. Nor could it be championed in blogs like Hypebeast and Slam X Hype, dedicated to this practice, reporting dozens of new products or design collaborations from the brand underground every day.

Loc. 3164-65, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 07:25 PM

I met Yu-Ming Wu. He was twenty-three and the cofounder and “sneaker editor” of a website called Freshnessmag.com.

Loc. 3176-78, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 07:25 PM

book about sneaker hunting in the 1970s and 1980s, Where’d You Get Those?—a blend of memoir, sociology, and the cataloglike history of urban sneaker collecting that made the case for sneakers as nothing less than symbols of personal identity.

Loc. 3178-82, added Thursday, May 07, 2009, 07:26 PM

If there was a consumer base willing to think of athletic shoes made by multinational corporations that way, then a new breed of boutique stores, which started to appear in the early 2000s, would serve them. Eventually the sneaker companies got wise and began to cater to this market, manufacturing rarity through “limited editions,” commissioning small runs of sneakers made for specific stores or designed with the help of people like Mister Cartoon or Neckface. (If you don’t know who they are, these shoes aren’t for you.)

Loc. 3294-95, added Friday, May 08, 2009, 09:35 PM

gritty, turn-of-the-century New York underworld described in Luc Sante’s book Low Life.

Loc. 3335-36, added Friday, May 08, 2009, 09:40 PM

In his book about luxury, Living It Up, scholar James Twitchell compared the effect of certain rarefied, high-end brands with a dog whistle.

Loc. 3560-61, added Saturday, May 09, 2009, 08:40 PM

young woman shot in a raw and vaguely decadent style reminiscent of Terry Richardson or Nan Goldin.

Loc. 3554-57, added Saturday, May 09, 2009, 08:40 PM

While more and more mass-market companies were introducing ethical-sounding subbrands or products to appeal to a concerned niche, America Apparel was attempting to move in the opposite direction: from a “sweatshop free” image that appealed to a relatively small group of consumers to a much bigger customer base that may not know a thing about where or how the company’s products are manufactured.

Loc. 3576-78, added Saturday, May 09, 2009, 08:42 PM

Charney had concluded that ethical consumers were—whatever the polls might say—a niche. And he wasn’t going to sell as many T-shirts as he wanted to by targeting a niche. He didn’t want a niche, he wanted a generation. And thus: youth and sex. “We make sexy T-shirts for young people,” he summarized.

Loc. 3602-5, added Saturday, May 09, 2009, 08:45 PM

It’s not that he cares less about treating his workers ethically, Charney insisted, it’s that he doesn’t think trumpeting work conditions will help him compete. Sure, he hoped quality or social consciousness or logo escapism would each attract some consumers. But he also hoped that selling a sexed-up version of youth culture to young people would attract others, and hopefully in greater numbers.

Loc. 3646-49, added Saturday, May 09, 2009, 08:49 PM

he had pulled out a copy of a book called The 48 Laws of Power and read me number thirteen, which suggested that to get what you want, you must appeal to the self-interest of others, not to their mercy. “That’s the problem with the anti-sweatshop movement. You’re not going to get customers walking into stores by asking for mercy and gratitude.” If you want to sell something, ethical or otherwise, he said, snapping the book closed, “appeal to people’s self-interest.”

Loc. 3674-75, added Saturday, May 09, 2009, 08:53 PM

As Lizabeth Cohen, an American studies professor at Harvard, explains in her book A Consumers’ Republic, the notion of “ethical consumption” dates back at least to the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Progressive era,

Loc. 3686-87, added Saturday, May 09, 2009, 08:54 PM

In his book The Marketplace of Revolution, historian T. H. Breen even makes a case that collective consumer protest was crucial to nothing less than the founding of the United States itself.

Loc. 3761-63, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:04 AM

Reiterating the political and “antiauthority” aspects of the “ethic of Do It Yourself,” she mused: “In the age of hypermaterialism, Paris Hilton, and thousand-dollar ‘It’ bags, perhaps making stuff is the ultimate form of rebellion.”

Loc. 3788-90, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:07 AM

Debbie Stoller, founder of the pop-culture-meets-feminism magazine Bust (which began as a photocopied zine), championed knitting in a book called Stitch ’N Bitch, which became a minor sensation in the early 2000s.

Loc. 3816-18, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:10 AM

“Everyone agreed,” she told me, “that having your own small business at this time we are at in America is a political movement in itself. Running a small business yourself and trying to separate yourself from the masses—it’s a political statement.”

Loc. 3857-60, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:15 AM

what backlash? Type “iPod” into the online craft emporium Etsy.com’s search engine and you get nearly a thousand product listings—all manner of nifty handmade personal things in which to encase what is, rather definitively, a mass-market object, available at big-box retailers everywhere.

Loc. 3868-69, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:16 AM

The Wal-Mart Effect, which delves into the negative social consequences of the low-low prices that have lured so many shoppers for so long.

Loc. 3878-80, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:19 AM

But still: Buying a handmade iPod cozy doesn’t sound revolutionary—it sounds more like creating new desires than finding new ways to fulfill enduring needs. Kalin replied to this point by saying he has made it a personal goal to end up with a wardrobe that consists entirely of handmade clothing.

Loc. 3884-87, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:21 AM

Stores like Target were selling shirts that only looked as if they were hand-silk-screened with rough, unfinished edges, she said—but maybe this helped make genuinely handmade goods “more approachable” to a wider group of consumers. “People say, ‘I can buy something like this at Target for $10, how come you’re selling yours for $40?’ And I can tell them, ‘Well, that was made in China, and I made this one myself.

Loc. 3894-96, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:24 AM

If you’re worried about tainted dog food from a foreign factory, you won’t find an alternative on Etsy. Many crafters work with raw materials—beads, fabrics, and so on—that are actually products of the global supply chain.

Loc. 3959-61, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:31 AM

what Warren’s argument suggests is nothing less than that commercial culture is a dead end—that it can never really resolve the fundamental tension of modern life, and that whatever pleasures you may find in consumerism will not last. The ultimate irony of what he has called “America’s rampant individualism” is that it does not satisfy the self.

Loc. 4021-23, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:37 AM

But one of the themes that eventually emerged from their work, described in their 1981 book, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self, is that some objects matter a great deal—not least because of their relationships to other people or larger ideas.

Loc. 4023-25, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:38 AM

In other words, the things that mattered had meaning precisely because they were symbols: The crucifix, the wedding ring, the diploma, and the trophy are some obvious examples of things that exist purely to join us to—to symbolize—something else (a belief system, a union, an achievement, a memory).

Loc. 4030-34, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 12:39 AM

Part of what the authors found was that—not surprisingly—the most meaningful objects were rarely chosen on the basis of some intrinsic, rational property, like marketplace value, cutting-edge quality, simple aesthetic pleasure, or anything that an economist might describe as “utility.” They were chosen instead for connections to something else: family or social ties, a particular episode in the narrative of the subject’s life, perhaps religious faith or some other belief system affiliation.

Loc. 4060-63, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 02:10 PM

what adaptation research suggests is not that we don’t know novelty fades, but that we’re not good at figuring out how to factor this knowledge into our decision making: “Thus, when we find the pleasure derived from a thing diminishing, we move on to the next thing or event, almost certainly make another error of prediction, and then another, ad infinitum.”

Loc. 4111-13, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 02:16 PM

The Andrew Andrew fashion line had never included an actual article of clothing. “That’s the whole point,” Andrew said. But from their perspective, it’s perfectly consistent with the way consumption now works. People do not buy objects, they buy ideas about products.

Loc. 4115-17, added Sunday, May 10, 2009, 02:16 PM

“And the thing about that is we’re in such an absurd place with clothing and food,” Andrew interrupted. “We don’t buy food for its nutritional value, nor do we buy clothing for its protective value. It’s entirely—we buy for all the wrong reasons.”

This got me thinking about what it means to be a fan of someone like Bjork. She is constantly releasing special edition CDs and box sets and DVDs and various combination of them of all her music. Her last studio album, Volta, was released on May 7, 2007, and it had a CD, special edition CD, double vinyl, and four singles. Next month she is releasing more stuff based on the tour and music videos from this album, something with its own brand and unique artwork called Voltaic, coming in five different physical configurations of two CDs and two DVDs.

One could say that the ultimate Bjork fan would own EVERYTHING that Bjork releases, including stuff only released in other countries (sometimes the Japanese editions have songs not found in the U.S. or European editions). At Amazon.com’s “Artist Store” for Bjork, there are 161 items in the U.S. alone!

It’s true that a lot of thought and creativity went into the design of the booklets and packages that accompany them, and I appreciate the artistic value of those things on their own, but they again end up being something that I hold in my hands for a very limited amount of time and then put away. I would rather see it once or twice at an art gallery that many people can visit, and see some interesting features on her site. I did actually go to an art gallery in Queens where she made sculptures and drawings for Volta, and screened the first video from the album in 3D, and that experience meant more to me than owning anything.

Ultimately I like Bjork for her music, not her stuff, which is perfectly enjoyable in digital form inside my iPhone and computer.

“It’s not the way I was raised and it’s not the way that I am. [...] But at the same time I have a responsibility to uphold the Constitution. That’s my job, and you can’t allow discrimination to stand when it’s raised to your level.

Why, at such an important moment in Maine’s (and America’s) history, does he have to add the caveat that “it’s not the way I was raised”? What, he wasn’t raised to be gay? Is anybody? Or was he not raised to approve of gay marriage, or homosexuality in general?

At the very least it was a cowardly way for him to save face with his anti-gay supporters, but I also find this to be a really immature way to define your beliefs. My parents had a lot to do with who I am and I appreciate everything that they did to make me the person that I am today, but I would never defend my beliefs because they’re the beliefs I was raised with. Today I believe in something because it’s what I believe as the adult that I have become, where on a regular basis I still question my own beliefs and change them based on my life experiences.

This is the same poor excuse that Carrie Prejean, Miss California, threw out when she was asked about her beliefs about gay marriage during the Miss USA pageant, after Vermont legalized it. I found it really embarrassing for her to constantly repeat, even in interviews after the show, that this is just not how she was raised. If she was raised around racist family members, would this excuse her racism? Would she still be the victim here?

1. Log into LinkedIn and click on the ‘Companies’ link at the top
2. Leave the ‘Company Name or Keyword’ field blank and select ‘Located in or near:’ from the ‘Location’ drop-down menu.
3. Put in any zip code for the city you want to find companies in, like 98104 for Seattle. There’s a ‘Look Up’ link that lets you search for them (or just Google for it).
4. Check ‘Only company headquarters’ (so you don’t end up getting retail stores if you’re searching in an industry that has them…)
5. Click on the ‘Show more…’ and select an industry from the drop-down menu (like ‘Internet’ if you’re trying to get a listing with a company like Amazon).
6. Press the ‘Search Companies’ button.

Voila! Searching for Internet companies in a Seattle zip code, with only the headquarters, gave me a list with Amazon.com at the top and other major sites like Classmates.com, Disney’s Internet Group, and Drugstore.com. I’m not 100% sure how these sources are sorted, besides the first set of them being companies that have employees that I’m connected to somehow.

On the right you can refine these even further by entering keywords (although that can narrow it down too much… Amazon.com doesn’t show up with “books” as a keyword, but does if I type “bookstore”…), the size of the company, related industries, and only companies that are currently hiring.

This is definitely better than a blind search on Google with city names and words related to your industry, or business directories which don’t let you filter the listings in any meaningful way.

People have been asking me if I’m annoyed that the Kindle DX came out after I got the Kindle 2, but I’m actually relieved that the DX is what it is. It’s not a slimmer, lighter, faster version of what I have; it’s almost exactly the same thing in a larger form factor (more suitable for documents than books) and it looks like Amazon is going to keep improving both as separate products in the same family.

One of the reasons I got a Kindle is because I love reading books and I wanted to be able to read more often. I usually read on the subway, but I also like to travel lightly (before the iPhone I was an iPod mini/nano person) so I’d end up leaving heavier books at home half the time. With the Kindle, the size and weight issue is completely gone.

No matter what I’m reading, no matter what books (plural!) I have with me, it’s always 10.2 ounces and 8″ x 5.3″. If I’m squished between two people, or standing up and holding onto a pole, I can still hold it comfortably with one hand and easily go to the next page (a tricky maneuver if you have to turn physical pages with one hand).

Plus I like that when I’m looking at the text of a Kindle 2, it’s still the same size as a real book. It doesn’t feel like the device is altering my experience and pacing of a real novel. Having the text re-flowed to double that size would feel more like reading a Word document on a computer screen.

I would love it when I was in college, especially since college books are way heavier (and all the great features like searching text, seeing definitions of words right on the spot, exporting highlights/notes/bookmarks would be even more useful), but if I’m using it mostly for books the Kindle 2 is a better fit for me.

Every time I finish a book on my Kindle, I’ll post the phrases that I highlighted (it saves them to a text file), as my personal summary of what I read. I’ll note spoilers if there are any. Sometimes I might highlight things to look up later (like other books or music that were mentioned). “Loc.” is the location of that phrase in the e-book (since you can change the font size, what ends up on a “page” varies so e-books have locations instead).

This one’s for Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg.

Loc. 1275-76:

“There was snow on the roof that he fell from. I saw his footprints. I have a sense of snow.”

Loc. 1277-78:

“Snow is the symbol of inconstancy,” she says. “As in the book of Job.”

Loc. 2257-58:

He boils milk with fresh ginger, a quarter of a vanilla bean, and tea that is so dark and fine-leaved that it looks like black dust. He strains it and puts cane sugar in both our cups.

Loc. 2565-66:

“I just wonder how you can conclude so much from so little.” “Language is a hologram.”

Loc. 3187-88:

in a nanosecond she’s reduced from the great, proud, sovereign, invulnerable mama to a spiritual gnome.

Loc. 3194-95:

Whining is a virus, a lethal, infectious, epidemic disease. I refuse to listen to it. I refuse to be saddled with these orgies of emotional pettiness.

Loc. 3205-7:

Modesty is part of the fundamental nature of human beings. It makes me sick to think of the European idea that they can solve all their own self-induced sexual neuroses by laying the meat on the table and putting it under a microscope.

Loc. 4030-31:

I hate being scared. There is only one path to fearlessness. It’s the one that leads into the mysterious center of the terror.

Loc. 4165-66:

Only when he shows it to me on the second negative can I make it out. Just like in glaciology. One occurrence is an accident. It’s the repeat occurrence that creates a structure.

Loc. 4891-94:

JØrgensen told us that when you’re tracking something, a systematic approach will take you only so far. “Whenever I lose my glasses,” he said, “first I search for them systematically. I look in the john and next to the coffee machine and under the newspaper. But if they’re not there, I stop thinking and sit down on a chair and survey the scene to see whether an idea will come to me, and it always does; an idea always comes to me. [Loc. 4895-96] we have to discover the crook inside ourselves and figure out where we might have stashed them.”

Loc. 5678-79:

These bells reinforce the feeling that we’re at a standstill, that we’ve never left port but have remained stationary in time and space, merely twisting ourselves farther down into meaninglessness.

Loc. 5761-62:

To find out what your purpose is. Maybe that’s what Isaiah has given me. The way every child can. A sense of meaning. Of a wheel turning through me, and through him, too—a vast and frail and yet necessary movement.

Loc. 6419-22:

You have to respect the dark. Night is the time when space simmers with evil and peril. You can call it superstition. You can call it fear of the dark. But it’s ridiculous to pretend that the night is just like the day, simply without light. Night is the time to huddle together indoors. If you don’t happen to be alone and have other obligations, that is.

Loc. 6459-62:

In Greenland I never had any cavities; now I have twelve fillings. Every year I need another one. I refuse to have novocaine. I’ve developed a strategy for handling the pain. I breathe deeply from my abdomen, and right before the drill pierces the enamel into the dentine of the tooth, I think to myself that now something is happening to me that I have to accept. That’s how I become an involved but not overwhelmed spectator to the pain.

Loc. 6571:

We live in a world of compressed juxtapositions.

Loc. 7517-22:

At first the snow is six-sided, newly formed flakes. After forty-eight hours the flakes break down, their outlines blur. By the tenth day, the snow is a grainy crystal that becomes compacted after two months. After two years it enters the transitional stage between snow and firn. After three years it becomes névé. After four years, it’s transformed into a large, blocky glacial crystal. It wouldn’t survive more than three years here on Gela Alta. By that time the glacier would push it out to sea. There it would break up and float outward to melt, disperse, and be absorbed by the sea. And then someday it would rise up as newly formed snow.

Loc. 7598:

Jules Verne’s book The Hunt for a Meteor

Loc. 7599:

Piper’s Uller Uprising

Loc. 7958-59:

At some point he will stop, and the cold will transform him; like a stalactite, a frozen shell will close around a barely fluid life until even his pulse stops and he becomes one with the landscape. You can’t win against the ice.

I work at a company that I consider LGBT-friendly. They have an LGBT affinity group, have events at the cafeteria during Pride Month to highlight important LGBT people, and I had no trouble registering my boyfriend as a domestic partner for health benefits. But one thing that doesn’t fit in that environment, and which I don’t really blame my employer for, but nevertheless is one of those situations when I don’t feel comfortable, is blood drives.

As of 1985, no man who’s had sexual contact with another man since 1977 is allowed to be a blood donor. It is a mandate for the Red Cross that the FDA has been asked to reconsider almost every year and every time they still refuse to back away “in the interest of public health.” A straight person who has frequent one night stands is considered less of a public health risk than a gay man who’s been in a monogamous relationship for ten years or a man who had sex with another man once, 30 years ago.

This law basically requires that a gay man be honest and not go to a blood drive pretending he’s straight (something I wouldn’t do out of principle but also because I’m a horrible liar). Why can’t this same level of honesty be expected from gay men about their behavior? Instead of excluding an entire population of people, the law should instead require honesty about individuals’ actions, actions that could be applied to both gays and straights.

I’d like to donate blood. I think I’m an extremely good candidate, more so than a lot of straight people I know. This is why it bothers me when I see posters at work urging me to donate, get emails reminding me about a blood drive in our cafeteria and hear employees talk about having donated blood, without any acknowledgment that all gay men in the company are excluded.

I read a good idea somewhere. Blood drives should let “ineligible” people sign a form each time they would have normally donated blood. Gay men could at least participate by making the government aware of their numbers and see how much blood is being rejected, perhaps making them reconsider if the form gives people a chance to explain what makes them good candidates. And by having people at company blood drives aware of this issue, supporting employees by making this an option, there would be one more thing companies would could tick off to be more LGBT-friendly.

We’ve been trying to gather up some old (mostly gay?) blog friends and get everyone to start blogging again. Strength in numbers! Find pther participants at our Facebook event.