First of all, I’m just so psyched about finding a house in Northampton to live in.  It’s in my favorite neighborhood in the city, it’s a bike ride from work, and it has three bedrooms, a porch, a backyard, a fireplace, and a washer and dryer.  Some of you might think it’s a bit banal to get excited over these things, but if you’ve lived in New York at all you’ll know that these features all seem luxurious.  Just having a bathroom that can fit two people at a time is thrilling. I’m gonna invade Nicole’s bathroom time, just because I can.

Five other things I let my mind drift to today (in no specific order):

1. The importance of doing work that you really care about.  In this case, I’m pretty proud to be able to tell people that I’m doing online organizing for media reform. A copy of Free Press’ Changing Media – a book that was produced for our Summit this month — is sitting on my desk, and it’s a reminder of the important work we’re doing and the ways it connect to real peoples’ lives.

Forgive me for sounding self-important, but working on media reform is a huge deal because it’s at the root of so much of what we call “democracy.” From a free and accessible media springs everything else that we hold dear — education, transparency, accountability, community action, a healthy populace, etc.  So I’m pleased to be helping fight the good fight.

1a. The importance of working with people you respect and admire.  All of my colleagues at Free Press appear to share my enthusiasm for the work we do.  That’s key.

2. The necessity of work-sanctioned free time, formerly known as weekends.  After a few years of working for startups or startup-like outfits, it’s a relief to treat a weekend like a weekend and know that your colleagues are doing the same.

2a. The wonder of spending time with your kid.

3.  This is random, but it occurred to me tonight that including delicious links on my blogs is spammy and boring.  A quick call to friends on Twitter confirmed it.  Delicious links, begone.

4. Coney Island is a treasure, even when it sucks.

We walked down the boardwalk today from Coney down to Brighton Beach.  The people are crazy and the attractions burned out, but I never get tired of it.  The site of so many completely different New Yorkers sharing the boardwalk is enough to bring me down once or twice a summer.

5.  Ironically, the move from Brooklyn to Northampton will mean getting to see much, much more music than we saw in New York, at least in the last couple of years.  Ever since we’ve had Arlo (and really, since Nicole’s been pregnant), our rate of concert-going has trickled down to pretty much nothing given the logistics of it all.  But now that going to a show means a walk down the street, and now that we have built-in babysitters in-laws living 15 minutes away, we’ll be much freer to see shows.

We’ve already started; last week we saw an amazing Bonnie “Prince” Billy show.  Tonight, we bought tickets to see St. Vincent.  Please, lords of Pioneer Valley, brings us some Grizzly Bear.

5a. The change in pace and location may be enough to get me to pick up my instruments again and seek out some bandmates.  Look out!

Alexis writes:

In 2000, California consumed about 60 million gallons of ethanol.
That grew to 100 million gallons by 2002 and 600 million gallons by
2003, according to the California Energy Commission. In 2006,
California consumed about 970 million gallons of ethanol. That’s a
1,500% increase in use of the biofuel in seven years.

Some in the energy debate say that this type of transformation is
impossible. Other say radically changing our energy infrastructure is
necessary. Many realists seem to suggest that both statements are true.

Read the rest for more. This is journalism you can be proud of. It’s only accountable to the folks that funded it, and it’s good and necessary. A taste of good things to come.

Merlin Mann to the rescue. In yet another awesome post, the man who made it cool to think about things like todo lists breaks down nine things that “help make for a good blog.” The post is itself a good example of what makes a good blog post — it’s funny, it presents information as a must-read list, it’s unorthodox — and includes essential nuggets like this:

Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can’t stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person’s obsessions take them?

And this:

Good blog posts are made of paragraphs. Blog posts are written, not defecated. They show some level of craft, thinking, and continuity beyond the word count mandated by the Owner of Your Plantation. If a blog has fixed limits on post minimums and maximums? It’s not a blog: it’s a website that hires writers. Which is fine. But, it’s not really a blog.

Note the (added) emphasis. Mann highlight two important aspects of good blog writing — focusing on obsessions and carefully crafting your posts — but it sure to interject some teenage-level dirty humor. The result? I get what he means, I laugh, and it sinks in. Again, the actual form of his post illustrates his points. Although why only nine, and not ten, items on the list?
As we at Change.org develop blogs about nice and light topics like genocide, human rights, criminal justice, and global warming, it’s key to remember that your best points often are made with humor. I’m not sure how funny we can make Darfur, but we can try.
If I could, I would have every blogger read this post for breakfast for a month. I really would.

…there have been three epochs of intellectual affectation. The first, lasting from approximately 1400 to 1965, was the great age of snobbery. Cultural artifacts existed in a hierarchy, with opera and fine art at the top, and stripping at the bottom…

This code died sometime in the late 1960s and was replaced by the code of the Higher Eclectica. The old hierarchy of the arts was dismissed as hopelessly reactionary. Instead, any cultural artifact produced by a member of a colonially oppressed out-group was deemed artistically and intellectually superior….

But on or about June 29, 2007, human character changed. That, of course, was the release date of the first iPhone.

I tend to disagree with Brooks on, oh, nearly everything, but methinks there’s something here. There’s a lament for the old, “refined” version of culture buried in this piece (which is supposed to be “funny”); he seems flabbergasted that our culture obsesses about the means, rather than the fruits, of production. The iPhone (or, more accurately, the techo-cultural change it represents), says Brooks, has turned tastemaking on its head, making those of us that bookmark, aggregate, and share content the thought-leaders and those of us who make the content second-class netizens. (What about those us that do both?)

Take out the linkbaiting references to iPhones and Gizmodo, however, and you’ll see that what Brooks is describing is the gradual democratization of popular culture. To use his example, to be able to quote and dissect “The Waste Land” took an expensive upbringing of fine schools, absorbing literary taste via familial osmosis, and an impressive knowledge of the English language. It wasn’t for the masses, and it wasn’t meant to be.

But networked culture — in whatever form it takes — gives us the chance to move on from T.S. Eliot’s show-offery and to point to those things that we find valuable, deep, and interesting, and to share them with people in our social network.

In 1960, as today, “The Waste Land” was meaningless to most of us lacking an Ivy League education. Yet it sat atop the cultural pyramid, the pinnacle and symbol of higher learning and refinement. Now, a post on Boing Boing about bike seats that give cops “penile numbness” and erectile dysfunction is also meaningless to most of us, but it may be read by half a million people in one day. For some, in order to prove your intellectual credentials, you need to be reading posts like this on Boing Boing.

The truth is, there are a billion other things you could be doing or reading that also bolster your credentials. Most thought-leaders start out by asserting that whatever obscure-but-interesting thing they know about is actually important. Though the network, many of them rise in popularity. Others never do. Either way, this system usually has nothing to do with traditional learning or upbringing but by having something unique and different to say. That seems like a much more natural unfurling of culture than being force-fed cultural treasures by over-educated white men.

I’m not making a qualitative comparison between “The Waste Land” and Boing Boing (though that would be interesting…), but a distinction in the way we receive and transmit meaning and culture. That’s been changing for a long time, and will continue to change, and I’m encouraged by the thought that more of us can become thought leaders by participating, commenting, and posting, rather than by the dumb luck of being born into the right family in the right place at the right time.

After spending the morning scrolling through my feeds in Google Reader, I realized that, out of thousands of posts that were written in the last week or so, I was only interested in reading a handful. The signal to noise ration is disturbingly out of whack.

This has been the pattern for the last month or so. Is it just the summer slowdown or is Google Reader — and all traditional feed-reading — simply failing me?

I’m thinking about jumping ship and trying out alternative schemes for a while, like recently bookmarked Delicious links (love that new design!), Netvibes, or something else. What do you do?

Then I realized I was experiencing what millions of others experience: the modern curse of multitasking, skimming the virtual surface, distracting myself to death, etc, etc.

In the last few months — neatly coinciding with the revelation that in October the first of my offspring will enter this mortal coil — I’ve worked hard to put those habits behind me. I want to dig deep again, whether it’s reading an article online, connecting to friends on Facebook, writing posts like this one, or (gasp!) reading a novel. There’s no reason advanced minds such as our own can’t handle the crazy influx of information that whooshes in every day, every hour, every second.

But it looks like social trends are veering in a different direction. Writes the Times Online’s Bryan Appleyard (emphasis mine):

One irony that lies behind all this is the myth that children are good at this stuff. Adults often joke that their 10-year-old has to fix the computer. But it’s not true. Studies show older people are generally more adept with computers than younger. This is because, like all multitaskers, the kids are deluding themselves into thinking that busy-ness is depth when, in fact, they are skimming the surface of cyberspace as surely as they are skimming the surface of life. It takes an adult imagination to discriminate, to make judgments; and those are the only skills that really matter.

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,” Allen Ginsberg wrote way back when. I’m thinking the same thing, but instead of post-war hysteria and psychotropic drug use, I’m seeing Google Reader addiction.

(A disclaimer: I use Google Reader and I’m a big believer in online social networks. But I don’t think the use of these things and a deeper intellectual life need to be mutually exclusive. Sue me.)