Author: nell-boeschenstein

Even if they aren’t always followed, New Year’s resolutions are a ritual for many of us. What’s more, year after year, Americans tend to resolve to do the same things they resolved to do the year before, probably because when we made our resolutions the previous year we stuck to our guns through mid-February, but by March had already found excuses to continue eating dessert after every meal or smoking socially. But Charlottesville, let’s make this year our year to stick to our resolutions. Let’s get in shape, lose weight, quit smoking, spend more time with our families and finally pay off that damn credit card we knew we should never have gotten.

There’s no single website to help with all these ambitions, but CrossFit can help those of us who have promised the goddess of 2008 that we will lose weight and get in shape. Everyday, CrossFit posts a workout for you to follow, mixing it up each day in order to target and tone different parts of your body. On a recent day, your CrossFit workout would have unfolded as follows: Five rounds each of the following exercises, at whatever time it takes you: 20 pull-ups, 30 push-ups, 40 sit-ups, 50 squats. Then, on another day, simply “Run 5K.” If you don’t understand the instructions, you can watch a video each day to get a clear picture of what you are supposed to be doing.

In short, no excuses this time, people. Just do it.

What’s really nice is when the Internet allows for a little armchair activism. I say that without a trace of cynicism in my voice because, with most people chained to their desks all day every day, armchair activism is all any of us have a chance to do before going home and crashing into bed. Plus, the more armchair activism there is in the world and on the Internet, the further said activism will go and the more impact it can make. With that in mind, the website Free Rice makes it easy to make a difference while you are sitting on hold with the insurance broker, while you are eating a meatball sub at your desk, while you are waiting for a conference call to wrap up. In other words, Free Rice takes your dead time and makes it useful.

The sister site of Poverty.com, Free Rice is a nonprofit vocabulary-cum-activism website that gives visitors a vocabulary test and, for every word that a visitor gets right, donates 20 grains of rice through the United Nations to help end world hunger. Needless to say, it’s addictive. The vocabulary test is as long as you want it to be ( i.e., the site will just keep hitting you with words so long as you want to be hit with them), meaning that I sat down to test my skills and looked up 20 minutes later, thinking, "Ack! I have work to do!" But, when I looked at what I had actually done in those 20 minutes I felt a bit better: I had made a donation of 1,000 grains of rice. If I do that every day for a year, that’s not a bad contribution to the world at all.

The site started in October, and since my last visit 9,481,828,970 English vocabulary questions have been answered correctly by people around the world (making for a total of 189,636,579,400 grains of rice that have been donated through the site to the United Nations). And this number will only continue to grow if we, at our desks, realize that these desks are not what is keeping us from getting out there and making a difference.

It’s a well-established fact that the holidays can be depressing and stressful. So, if you’re feeling the seasonal pressure, suffering from holiday shopping crowd-related claustrophobia and finding it difficult to meaningfully commune with anything aside from your computer screen, and that in turn is making you more depressed, may I suggest a brief Lolcat intermission? Because if your computer is your only friend (and even if it’s not), the Lolcats will make you smile. It’s the gift of giving to yourself: the gift of giving yourself a smile. Isn’t that nice?

Lolcats are pictures of cats with funny, misspelled captions in a slightly anachronistic-looking typeface. It sounds a little weird, and indeed it is. They sound even weirder when described on Wikipedia (yes, I looked up "Lolcats" on Wikipedia): "Lolcats are images combining photographs of animals, most frequently cats, with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption in broken English referred to as Kitty Pidgin or Kitteh." For instance, a picture of two angry-looking Siamese cats curled up together on a couch and a caption that says, "Termanator cats will eat YOUR FAMILY" [sic]. Or how about the one of two cats hugging that says, "This is my frnd…u treat him good, yes?" Funny, right? You’re laughing, right?

And the fun doesn’t end with pictures and misspelled captions. There is also a video element to this website of pure cat delightfulness where you can feast your eyes on adorable kittens being bottle fed, a weird cat that sounds like he’s talking when he meows, or a hilarious video of a cat that has just been sedated at the vet and can’t stand up. And if that doesn’t brighten the holidays for you, then I don’t know what will.

There is no doubt that there are some things that the Internet is very good for: gossip, news, pointless games, funny videos, research tools. One thing I have never really thought that the Internet was very good for was art. I stand corrected. The latest project from artist, designer and computer scientist Jonathan Harris (known for his previous projects "We Feel Fine," "Lovelines," "Universe" and "10×10"), "The Whale Hunt," is simply extraordinary.

The project documents in 3,214 photographs a nine-day trip Harris took in May to Barrow, Alaska (the northernmost settlement in the United States), where he participated in a whale hunt with the Inupiat Eskimos who live there. From waking up in Brooklyn and driving to a Newark airport to gathering supplies in Barrow to waiting out on the ice for a whale to come within striking distance to harvesting two 36′ Bowhead whales, the project is an exercise in exhaustive, meticulous storytelling. The photographs were taken at five-minute intervals throughout the course of the trip, except in moments when Harris’ adrenaline was high; during those moments, the photographs were taken with a greater frequency, mimicking the rate of Harris’ heartbeat. When watching the slideshow of the photographs, there is a graph resembling a heartbeat at the bottom of the computer screen. The graph indicates moments in the sequence of the slideshow during which Harris’ adrenaline was high, and gives more of a narrative shape to the story.

But this isn’t just a new way of telling a story on the Internet. In many cases, the photographs themselves are simply stunning. If you don’t have the time to watch the entire 3,214 photographs of the slideshow, at least look at the "Highlights" link. Scrolling through these photographs, it’s easy to forget you aren’t in a Chelsea gallery, but instead sitting on your couch with a cup of tea.

A friend helpfully pointed out to me the other night that I am, beyond any doubt, the most utterly nerdy example of uncoolness. I recommend this website to you with his words ringing in my ears. BibliOdyssey is without a doubt a nerdy website, but it is also a treasure trove of human accomplishment and imagination that sheds light on some of the dustiest corners of some of the world’s best museums, libraries, and other institutions that have any interest in the somewhat obscure discipline of book arts.

BibliOdyssey, which won a Cliopatria Award in 2005 for the Best New Blog, is a blog whose curator (because that is, indeed, what this person should properly be called), "Peacay," combs the Internet for online book art collections that would, if not highlighted on this blog, go almost entirely unnoticed, or at the very least unappreciated. BibliOdyssey posts pages from books such as artist and naturalist James Sowerby’s Mineral Conchology of Great Britain (1837) or Biblical Ethiopian manuscripts commissioned towards the end of the 1600s by the Emperor Iyasu I Yohannes. With each post on a specific book, Peacay includes at least a few paragraphs giving the book’s history, purpose and cultural context, so that the blog is not just about sharing pretty pictures, but about creating a discussion about those pictures as well. But the pictures sure are pretty, so even if all you want is eye candy, that’s O.K., too.

It’s not all single books, however. Peacay also highlights entire collections that are available online. One of the most recent posts, and one about which Peacay is clearly delighted, is a post announcing the online launch of The British Museum’s prints, drawings and paintings collection. "In my opinion," writes Peacay, "this is the equivalent of the NYPL or the Library of Congress online," and clearly Peacay knows what he’s talking about, so I’ll take him at his word.

I used to be a fan of Slate. Not so much anymore. It’s gotten to the point where I can have a stupid conversation with a friend and end up thinking that, with the right headline, the conversation could become a 3,000-word Slate tirade. "How Patchouli Came to be the Scent of a Subculture," for example, or, say, "The Death of the ‘What Would Jesus Do’ Joke." So instead of getting my regular dose of savvy and sophisticated news from Slate like I used to, I now turn my browser to The Morning News; the writing is better and the schtick is less easy to mock…or even pinpoint. One of Time magazine’s "50 Coolest Websites in 2006," The Morning News has one of the more modest names out there; in other words, it’s hardly just news. Paste magazine describes it as "a symbiotic mix between The New Yorker’s crackling insight and NPR’s ‘This American Life.’" I think that sounds about right.

To satisfy the news hounds, the site links to all the headlines you need to get through an average day culled from The New York Times to National Geographic. But then, to satisfy newshounds with a weakness for perhaps less urgent forms of distraction (I count myself as among this subset), the site includes humor writing, personal essays, book reviews, profiles, opinion pieces and photography. On a recent day, for example, the site posted such useful articles as "Three Simple Ways to Abandon Your Family" and "How to Cook Thanksgiving Dinner"; it’s in these pieces that you’ll find top-notch writing by regular contributors to the site as well as its staff members. Just to name drop for a second, these folks include Gawker Media godfather Choire Sicha, authors Anthony Doerr and Paul Ford and blogger Margaret Mason.

But whether it’s news or not doesn’t matter. Each morning when I read this thing, I feel smarter than I did the night before.

It’s a bit embarrassing for me to admit that sometimes I much prefer reading the Internet to reading a good, old-fashioned book, or even a chapter of a book. I suppose this means I have become what my parents and their friends fear. No doubt I am scary, but in my defense, allow me to say that there really is so much good writing out there in cyberspace.

Case in point is an essay I found on, yes, the Internet about a week ago entitled "100 Ways to Say I Love You" by the writer Paul Ford (Harper’s editor and author of Gary Benchley, Rock Star). This essay was the best thing that I had read in weeks: I laughed aloud, I envied the imagination, I aspired to the syntactical originality. All this, and it wasn’t just snark; the piece had a real heart to it as well. Completely enamored, I found myself then drawn to Ford’s website, Ftrain.com.

A lot of writers have websites where they can practice the art of self-promotion —in fact, such websites are in some ways de rigeur these days, but not all writerly websites are created equal. Ford’s is among the finest that I have come across. The posts are mostly of the personal essay ilk, but just as often the pieces stray into humor pieces, and it’s these that I like the most. Favorites: "I Am Making a Difference" (eg., "I save on heating by burning the books of dissidents and minorities.") and "Wikipedia Explains R&B" (self-explanatory).

For those who fret and call good writing a rare commodity these days, Ford’s prose might just lift your spirits. It’s the kind of stuff that makes you think, "Hey, this young whippersnapper might just deserve all the press he’s gotten."

I don’t know about everyone else out there, but I was totally thrilled that Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize. Talk about one hell of a decade that man has lived. Good God. I was sitting in a coffee shop when I read the news of the award and I was so touched and happy for him that I got all teary and blubbery and sentimental and, well, happy that someone from this country was actually being recognized out there in the world for doing some good, old fashioned, making-the-world- a-better-place-type things.

I read somewhere once that Al Gore is a nerd’s nerd; him coming out on top is the ultimate revenge of the nerd, and this thought—along with the mere fact of the prize itself—distracted me from my maudlin moment of patriotism and reminded me (nerd that I am) of how I used to really love reading various Nobel lectures on the Nobel Foundation’s website. Al’s own lecture will join the oeuvre after the December awards ceremony and I look forward very much to reading it. In the meantime, however, I went back and revisited some of my past favorite lectures.

I’m a language person and so, simply by virtue of my own prejudices, many of my favorites are from the literature winners (although that doesn’t mean that I don’t have every intention of making a concerted effort in the future to branch out into the lectures given by scientists and such). But just to name a couple of my favorites: Czeslaw Milosz’s (Literature, 1980) words on poetry and the events that tore Europe in the 20th century and Garcia Marquez’s plea against the solitude of Latin America. I could go on, but I think it’s better that readers explore for themselves; there’s a world of knowledge in those lectures.

You know how whenever people are asked what they are looking for in a mate, more often than not at the top of that list is something along the lines of "has to make me laugh"? I certainly fall into that segment of the population, and this has forced me to pointlessly ponder the following stupid question for about a week now: How come boys play guitars to get girls instead of become comedians to get girls? Because I for one (and I have a feeling I am fairly typical) have recently found that I am ridiculously susceptible to the sexiness of a bevy of hideously ugly comedians.

Eugene Mirman is something of a king among the ugly comedian set. In fact, as his website reads, "Thanks to television, touring and the Internet, he has become mildly famous. If you Google ‘Eugene,’ he is ranked 4th—behind the city in Oregon, their arts weekly and some other newspaper there. However, he is the number one ranked human ‘Eugene’ on Google. Nice!" The point is that Eugene is both a top-notch comedian and, by all superficial calculations, pretty ugly. This might be a mean thing to say if he weren’t so sexy. To experience firsthand what I am trying to explain, all you need to do is take a trip to Eugene’s website. There you can read his writing which is freaking hysterical, view his low-budget videos which are freaking hysterical (check out the pot smoking one and Special Agent Eugene), listen to his stand-up routines which are freaking hysterical and, yes, fall in love with the man himself, because he is freaking hysterical.

Thinking about the question I asked in my first paragraph, I’ve begun to conclude that the reason that boys typically use guitars rather than jokes to get girls is that guitars are easier to master. Jokes are for a rarer breed.

The best gifts are always those that you didn’t ask for. For example, that set of pots and pans is great, but really it’s every time you wear that cashmere sweater that you feel like you’re opening up a present all over again. I would say that the website The Edge is similar to this old cliché in that it’s a website I didn’t know I needed in my life until a week ago when I learned about it, but now that I have it in my life I am not quite sure how I ever lived fully without it being there. Moreover, it asks questions that I never knew needed to be answered and yet, having read some of the answers to the questions that it asks, I am eternally grateful that someone out there in charge of The Edge did in fact have the curiosity of mind to ask these questions.

I am being confusing. Basically, The Edge asks some of the smartest people in the world provocative questions and then posts the answers on the website. The site’s tagline is, in fact, "To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves." The participants on the site include some of the foremost names in journalism, business, technology, psychology, art, you name it. The answers they come up with can be mundane, but they can also be provocative, poetic, funny or sad.

On my most recent visit to the site, people had been asked the question, "What is your formula? Your equation? Your algorithm?" The answers ran the gamut. A Nobel Prize winner in Economics answered with a simple equation about success and talent and luck whereas a Harvard physics professor took the opportunity to scrawl out a solution to Einstein’s equation of gravity. It’s just goes to show that what they say is true: It really never hurts to ask.