Desculpe a Poeira

Aviso: este blog mudou para o portal do jornal O Estado de S.Paulo. O endereço: http://blogs.estadao.com.br/ricardo-lombardi/

Obrigado.

Sugestão de leitura para os bons bebedores: “Vodka Nation — How the flavorless, colorless, odorless spirit became a billion-dollar business” (em inglês), reportagem de Victorino Matus publicada no The Weekly Standard.

Nos Los Angeles Times: um editor compilou 50 histórias policiais memoráveis e colocou uma cópia de cada uma delas no site, começando em 1903 e terminando nos dias atuais. Para fãs de James Ellroy.

O novo livro de Nicholson Baker, “House of Holes” (Casa dos Buracos), que será lançado neste mês nos Estados Unidos, é mais sujo que “Vox” e “The Fermata” juntos, diz esta matéria de Charles McGrath publicada pelo New York Times. “It’s a series of loosely linked vignettes set in a sexual theme park where the attractions include Masturboats; the Porndecahedron, a 12-screen planetarium showing nonstop blue movies; and the Velvet Room, where the Russian composers Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov use their genitals to give foot massages”, informa McGrath. Nós gostamos. Espero que esteja nos planos da Companhia das Letras, que lançou os outros títulos de Baker no Brasil.

Sugestão de leitura: a matéria “Looking for someone — Sex, love and loneliness on the internet“, de Nick Paumgarten. Foi publicada na mais recente edição da revista New Yorker. Abaixo, separei um trecho (mas a matéria está disponível no site, no link acima). Algum jornal deveria traduzir e publicar.

“(…) The process of selecting and securing a partner, whether for conceiving and rearing children, or for enhancing one’s socioeconomic standing, or for attempting motel-room acrobatics, or merely for finding companionship in a cold and lonely universe, is as consequential as it can be inefficient or irresolute. Lives hang in the balance, and yet we have typically relied for our choices on happenstance—offhand referrals, late nights at the office, or the dream of meeting cute.

Online dating sites, whatever their more mercenary motives, draw on the premise that there has got to be a better way. They approach the primeval mystery of human attraction with a systematic and almost Promethean hand. They rely on algorithms, those often proprietary mathematical equations and processes which make it possible to perform computational feats beyond the reach of the naked brain. Some add an extra layer of projection and interpretation; they adhere to a certain theory of compatibility, rooted in psychology or brain chemistry or genetic coding, or they define themselves by other, more readily obvious indicators of similitude, such as race, religion, sexual predilection, sense of humor, or musical taste. There are those which basically allow you to browse through profiles as you would boxes of cereal on a shelf in the store. Others choose for you; they bring five boxes of cereal to your door, ask you to select one, and then return to the warehouse with the four others. Or else they leave you with all five. (…) “

Sugestão de leitura: o ótimo texto de Jonathan Franzen publicado pelo New York Times: “Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts”. Abaixo, destaco um trecho.

“(…) A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to likeâ€� from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)

But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.
If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting).
Consumer technology products would never do anything this unattractive, because they aren’t people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery.

And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors. (…)”

Via The New Yorker.

Via The New Yorker.

Este link dá acesso a várias matérias (de vários jornais e revistas) que o editor da The Atlantic considera exemplares. Boa leitura.