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The Goldfish Never Said That

A fabricated statistic taught a generation to believe their minds had broken. The truth about attention is stranger, and it names a culprit nobody wants to indict. Picture the goldfish. You have met it a thousand times, in conference keynotes and morning television and the opening line of ten thousand blog posts. It swims in its little bowl of received wisdom and carries one damning number on its back: nine seconds of attention, a full second longer than the modern human animal. We hold nuclear codes and write string quartets, and we supposedly lose the thread after eight seconds while the fish swims on, victorious. The crown of creation, outconcentrated by a snack with fins.

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The Rented Crowd: Nero’s Five Thousand, the Paris Claque, and the Box That Laughed for America

For the better part of two decades, the laughter of the United States lived inside a padlocked box. Charles Rolland Douglass, a CBS sound engineer who had spent the war helping the Navy develop shipboard radar, built the device in the early 1950s and guarded it the way a sexton guards a reliquary. The laff box, as he called it, stood a little over two feet tall and worked like an organ: keys for titters, chortles, belly laughs, shrieks, a foot pedal to let a wave of mirth swell, crest, and die on command. Douglass wheeled it from studio to studio himself. Clients heard the output and never saw the mechanism. Only his immediate family knew what the inside looked like, and when he finally stepped back from the work, his sons carried the trade forward like a guild secret. The industry word for what he did was sweetening, which tells you the industry understood the product. Sugar is what you add when the thing itself goes down easier disguised.

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Stand Up if You Plan to Play the Blues

If you want to effectively play The Blues — or any style of guitar, really — you need to get off your chair, strap in your guitar, and stand up!

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Curse of the Beautiful People

Have you noticed how people born beautiful are actually cursed throughout their lifetimes — even though they may not know it?  There is a viciousness about The Beautiful that seeps from the inside out and changes their natural shine into an ethereal ugliness.

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Banning Laptops and Beating WiFi

We are reminded of the early, heady, days of the internet when
university campuses were just beginning to provide WiFi access to the
school network instead of requiring a tethered Ethernet cable.  Students,
of course, abused the new wireless freedom by bringing their laptops to
class and surfing the internet when they should’ve been taking notes.

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The Driving Danger Dyad

We now have scientific evidence that talking on the phone while driving is more dangerous than chatting with the person in the car with you:

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Biologically Hardwired to Wander: The Eighteen Minute Attention Span

Attention spans are in a growing deficit.  That means we listen to each other less.  We read less.  We pay less attention in social learning circles like schools, business meetings and church sermons.

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