Nora, Nora Everywhere

Lena Dunham remembers Nora Ephron:

Over the course of our year-and-a-half-long friendship, Nora introduced me to, in no particular order: several ear, nose, and throat doctors; the Patagonia jackets she favored when on set because they were “thinner than a sweater but warmer than a parka”; ordering multiple desserts and having small, reasonable bites of all of them (I thought, Oh, so this is what ladies do); the photography of Julius Shulman; the concept of eating lunch at Barneys; self-respect; the complex legend of Helen Gurley Brown; the Jell-O mold; her beloved sister Delia. She explained how to interact with a film composer (“Just say what you’re hearing and what you want to hear”) and what to do if someone screamed at you on the telephone (“Just nod, hang up, and decide you will never allow anyone to speak to you that way again”). She called bullshit on a whole host of things, too: donuts served in fancy restaurants; photo shoots in which female directors are asked to all stand in a cluster wearing mustaches; the idea that one’s writing isn’t fiction if it borrows from one’s life.

Admittedly, my familiarity with Ephron's film work is limited, but I'd be lying if I said that Julie & Julia isn't one of the most viewed items on our MySky decoder. I do have a great deal of respect for a number of her essays, though. (Take a look at this hilarious Shouts & Murmurs piece.)

James Wolcott writes that her writing deserves more popular attention:

For all the fuss made over the importance of "voice" in writing, fact is, very few writers have a voice on the page that you can pick out of a crowd and Ephron had it, a casual-seeming conversational voice that (like Wilfrid Sheed's) seems easy to emulate until you actually try it and find yourself straightening out paper clips, sighing at the ceiling, stumped. For me this voice will always be associated with Ephron's early collections of personal journalism, Wallflower at the Orgy, Scribble Scribble, and Crazy Salad, which are so smart and enjoyable and seem not nearly as well known as, say, Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album, which so many readers still consult whenever they feel a need to uncheer themselves down. 

The end of the 'white' majority, ctd

Last month, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that most children under age one are 'minorities'. Matthew Yglesias points out the statistical faultiness of America's census data with regard to racial categories:

Hindu and Korean vanished in 1950, but Korean returned in 1970 along with an “Other” category. In 1980, “Vietnamese,” “Asian Indian,” and “Guamanian” became races, and the government started classifying people as Hispanic or not-Hispanic over and above their racial designation. Only in 1990 did the Census hit upon the idea of lumping a bunch of people together into a catchall “Asian” race. In 2000 they gave us the “two or more races” category. The point of this long-winded recitation is simply that with the important exception of the black/white dichotomy, America has never operated with a stable conception of race. The factoid that 50 percent of our latest baby crop is other than non-Hispanic white is true only relative to the 2000 census scheme. There’s no reason to believe that this particular categorization will continue as bureaucratic practice or social reality.

You might remember the initial post on the subject.

Vonnegut, idol of the young

William Deresiewicz on Kurt Vonnegut, author of, among other things, Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five:

He was an idol of the young, a voice of the counterculture, a man whose views would henceforth be solicited for a never-ending stream of interviews, articles, profiles, addresses. He stood for peace, love, decency, humanity—became the Kurt Vonnegut we knew for the final four decades of his life, a figure about whom it was possible to say, in the words of a recent book, that “precious few authors have ever loved mankind so completely.” He became, in other words, exactly what he had always warned against, a prophet of gimcrack religions: in this case, a facile faith of niceness that neatly concealed his bottomless darkness.

"Dear Sir, I am Prince Kufour..."

Given that so few people are fooled, why haven't email scammers of the famous 'Nigerian' variety upped their game? A new paper on the subject by Cormac Herley explains:

Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives. By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.

Brad Plumer goes further:

Scamming people, after all, costs time and money. Herley notes that everyone who responds to a scamming ploy “requires a large amount of interaction.” The worst thing that can happen, from the scammer’s point of view, is that a savvy person starts responding and toying with the scammer. (Teddy Wayne, a writer for The Awl, recently conducted an amusing three-month Facebook correspondence with a man from Malaysia pretending to be a beautiful woman — this is a nightmare for scammers!) Better to keep the e-mails predictable and tired. That way only the most unsuspecting suckers respond.