Learning to eat
Michael Pollan’s Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual is the action-item, CliffsNotes version of his In Defense of Food. A very quick read, it contains 64 rules of thumbs for eating more healthily. These rules emerged from his own research as well as from soliciting reader comments on the New York Times’ Well blog. To get a flavor (ha-ha) for these rules, you can see Pollan’s twenty favorites here, though they did not all make it to the book.
More detailed reviews of the book can be found at The Huffington Post and at The Moderate Voice
An inside look at Islam
While spending a few weeks in the Middle East, I read the book Islam: Religion, History, and Civilization by Seyyed Hossein Nasr. I found the book to be very informative, as it outlines the main doctrinal beliefs and history of Islam from a traditional Muslim perspective, denouncing both fundamentalism and Western modernity. The overarching message is that Islam is a complete way of life, that the relation of man to Allah, at once transcendent and immanent, is one of “ontological indebtedness.”
Nasr seems to emphasize how all Muslims have this basic set of beliefs, and though some pervert them by being extremists (a la Taliban) and some forget them by being assimilated into the Western world, for the most part Muslims form one big brotherhood. While I am not an expert on Islam, what I’ve read from other sources makes this claim sound rather Pollyanish.
Still, this was an interesting (and even inspiring) read and I recommend it to anyone looking for an insider’s perspective into Islam.
Only connect…
Buzz and Wave and e-mail, oh my!
How do we communicate when? There are no hard and fast rules, but these are the guidelines in the back of my mind:
Blogs are a great medium to go on at length about a given topic (whether it’s yourself or an arcane area of expertise) without targeting specific people and without expecting a reply. I suspect that with the rising popularity of social networking sites, there is less of a tendency than before for blogs to contain the minutiæ of everyday life.
E-mail is great for conveying any amount of information deliberately and reflectively, without a great sense of urgency. You can craft your message carefully, including all relevant points and making any needed arguments. I use this when I have a lot to say and I can wait for the reply.
Wave is ideal for collaborating on documents. Unlike e-mail, where replies are sequential, with wave you can comment inline and even edit the original post. I think this is great for giving feedback or co-authoring, but it has not yet taken off as a replacement for e-mail in my social and work circles.
Chat (instant messaging) is for those times when you need to interact with someone right now for something time-sensitive (which may be as important as “tell me how to restart the servers” or as trivial as “watcha doin’?”). Chat, by its nature, demands more attention than e-mail, but it is less intrusive than telephoning: your respondents can still ignore you, deal with other things simultaneously, and have their hands comfortably free to keep typing.
Chat status starts getting into social networking. You can advertise information that is not targeted towards a single recipient and for which you do not expect a response. I use it as an FYI to display what I’m doing or feeling or to point out something generally interesting.
Facebook allows you to keep “lightly in touch” with a large number of people. You make available your status or any other information you wish, and do not necessarily expect a reply. Likewise, you can see what other people have published and respond if you like. I use it to get a flavor for what’s going on in my “friends’” lives, and to let them know about mine. Interestingly, the meaning of “friend” has become diluted by this medium, as people that you may superfically know, or know not at all in real life, ask to join your network. You’re still somewhat curious about them (and I think it’s good, on both pragmatic and idealistic grounds, to interact with a broader range of people), and so they become your quote-friends.
LinkedIn is like Facebook, but geared more towards explicitly building a network of professional contacts. As with Facebook, I find pressure to dilute the meaning of a professional contact to someone I know only socially, but since this is a secondary social networking site for me, I have been able to keep my network pure.
Google Buzz, just released this week, is a new social networking medium whose biggest selling points, in my mind, are that it integrates with other Google services like Mail and Maps, and can more easily syndicate content from some other sources like Google Reader and Talk. I use it as I use my chat status, to give a general status message, but also to publish interesting or valuable information and see what replies I get. Buzz also lets you control who sees each Buzz, which is handy at times. At work, it is proving a good forum to non-invasively solicit cooperation and feedback from others.
Of course, the boundaries among these use cases are porous: Facebook has email, you can have your IMs waiting in people’s inboxes, and you can have a conversation with someone using blog comments. Still, I like to have clarity as to what tool I should be using, so I don’t have to think about it every single time.
Illiteracy
Literacy is such a fundamental aspect of modernity that we cannot imagine not reading. If there is a series of strokes that can be interpreted as letters, the brain just treats them as such. They may represent a word I know or a weird admixture of foreign sounds—it doesn’t matter: I can’t not parse the lexical tokens.
How strange, then, to be in a foreign land where not only do I not know the language, but the alphabet itself is foreign. Though the people here in Israel generally speak at least some English, most signs do not have English versions (why should they, of course?). I am left puzzling over random squiggles that are not associated with phonemes in my mind yet, trying to consciously identify the couple of sounds that I know. It amuses me to feel so intensely how much our civilization depends on the written word just to function, and to wonder what life must be like for illiterate adults for whom the constant stream of written information, at once intellectual lifeblood and distracting noise, is non-existent.
Hearing spoken Hebrew is just a hair better, as here or there I recognize one of the words in my micro-vocabulary: “yes,” “no,” “water,” “please,” “thank you,” “peace.” (Hmmm, that would make for an interesting plot outline). I find it weirdly fascinating to be able to almost automatically tune out others talking, since their incomprehensible gibberish does not cause mental static like it would if they were speaking a language I know. Ironically, one of the mental games that I like to play is trying to think without words—a very hard proposition (try it!). Being in a setting where the language is so foreign provides a good approximation, I’m guessing, to what that must feel like.
Israeli workout
Though we’re staying at a fancy hotel here in Tel Aviv, the gym is extra. And really, what’s the point when there are free outdoor gyms on the boardwalk? I’d call them “adult playgrounds,” because that’s what they look like, but you’d get entirely the wrong idea.
Every morning I run on the boardwalk by the Mediterranean. On my “weight-lifting” days I join the random strangers (young and elderly, athletic and not) at one of these gym areas and do pull-ups, push-ups, dips, and that exemplar of classic beach calisthenics, body-weight squats. It’s a perfect way to burn off the sumptuous Israeli breakfast, and there’s enough inspiration around to keep one motivated…
