It's nearly time for the Salzburg Academy again — congrats to those going! — and there's no better reminder of why the Academy exists than in this week's New Yorker. Ken Auletta profiles Afghanistan media mogul Saad Mohseni and the complicated nature of his broadcasting.

Among the angles, Auletta writes about the Afghan Star show, the local take on American Idol. "Every Thursday night, an estimated one-third of Afghanistan's thirty million citizens gather in front of television sets to watch," Auletta writes. "In rural places without electricity, people fill generators with gasoline or hook up their TVs to car batteries."

The culmination of the passage is a sublime reminder about speech.

As on "American Idol," winners on "Afghan Star" are determined by the judges, the audience, and text messages sent from mobile phones throughout the country. Before the show aired, Mohseni made a deal with Roshan, the country's leading mobile-phone company, and ran promotional ads on Tolo and Arman instructing citizens how to place a vote. (The text messages cost voters about seven cents, the equivalent of a loaf of bread; three hundred thousand votes were cast in the final week.) With suspicious egalitarianism, the finalists have often been from each of the three main Afghan ethnic groups: Tajiks, Pashtuns, and Hazaras. At first, losers reacted badly on the air, smashing stage equipment and claiming ethnic prejudice, but, because their tantrums were so public, they were humiliated and seen as dividers.

In the third season, one of the finalists was Lema Sahar, a Pashtun woman from Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban. Religious leaders were outraged that a woman was allowed to perform in public, and Sahar received death threats. In the "Afghan Star" documentary, she said, "We hide the songbooks and other things at night. If the Taliban come at night, we have a special place to hide the computer. If they find something, they kill you." She was undaunted. "If I do not sing, what else can I do?" she said. Sahar's performances on the show demonstrate a somewhat tenuous relationship with pitch and rhythm, but she was a crowd favorite. Mohseni told a reporter at the time, "They all realized how it was for her to come from Kandahar, and we all want to root for the underdog." The text-message voting did something else, Mohseni says: It "has changed Afghanistan in ways you could not imagine ten years ago. It has given people power to vote someone off."

Rain has been pouring here for two or three hours, our first rain this week. Maybe the downpour started earlier, but I was pretending to sleep then.

Wake, hear the drops earnest on the shingles, wonder about my sandals or what else beneath the house (open among its pilings for hurricane visits), give those feelings over to the beach, and return to sleeping, my pillowcase over a stranger's brand-name pillow.

But the sun has a chance today. The sky is a clear yellow just above the horizon and just blue above the cloud line, up 45 or 60 degrees. Even as I write, this roof quiets. Stumbling, I cover my head and the camera with yesterday's paper to take a picture from the porch. In all: Beach, sea, the yellow, clouds, the blue, collectively nowhere in proportion with this page.

The rest of the house wakes. My mom notices the blue over the ocean, but my dad says the storm is coming from the west, still coming to the ocean. My mom grows concerned with an open window in a room we haven't used and is barely a room at all, just walls and felt over a deck. She opens the room and goes for paper towels, and I curse invisible mosquitoes flying in.

But I was lost before this minute. I just hid it better from my heartbeat and blood pressures. Otherwise, I wouldn't have woken so early and sought something beyond rest.

On the one beach night where my mom and dad and aunt and uncle — the greatest generation, which I can say because they won't see this post for days — go out to eat, the Cooper and Brinker cousins, more than 30 of us now across two generations, are left to our own devices.

This means: Pizza Hut take-out, beer, talking on the deck until the sun goes down, tubs of ice cream, Pictionary, and loud, loud charades. It is really very wholesome except for the pizza-charade-fueled violence.

Best blog concept of the night: As Tim blogs from American Samoa, I blog an alternative, folktale-driven version. Lots of conch-blowing.

Anyway. Onto the pictures. It appears to be a friendly game…

Until IT BEGINS.

Heartwarming moment after this: He still wanted his mom on his team.

At the other end of the table, high-stakes Sequence.

"Bad breath."

More in this post »

It's unusual for Wittgenstein to appear in my day. I'm no philosopher. So, when Mr. Wittgenstein shows up twice in my day, it's something.

First was the Wittgenstein quote in Calvino, "For what is hidden … is of no interest to us." Then came this passage amid my vacation magazine catch-up, from Wired's March issue, on Google refining its search:

Google's synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. "Hot dog" would be found in searches that also contained "bread" and "mustard" and "baseball games" — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what "hot dog" — and millions of other terms — meant. "Today, if you type 'Gandhi bio,' we know that bio means biography," Singhal says. "And if you type 'bio warfare,' it means biological."

The upshot, to me? Science recommends oversharing.

Alison told me for months that this plate parked at Gannett every day. We wished it was mine! But I never ran into it. So, thank you to her for capturing it and making me even more curious whose plate it could be.

Sheri messaged this classic. Sheri is a Giants fan, which is a personal struggle she'll one day overcome, but we can still hate Dallas together.

More in this post »

As my coffee table and I aren't having the greatest year in keeping up with The New Yorker (every week, Remnick? haven't you heard of the Internet destroying publishing revenues?), I'm clearing my mind today before reading the self-debated "20 Under 40" summer fiction issue.

First, I've just finished reading the short-story collection Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me, the birthday gift from my brother that pretty much makes up for the time when we were kids and he gave me a crossword puzzle book when he was the one who loved crossword puzzles. Rob, consider all the crosswords forgiven.

Here is my favorite passage from that book that isn't totally obscene or the last essay in the book, as I try to stay away from quoting endings. It's from Will Forte's "Beware of Math Tutors who Ride Motorcycles."

… As we got off the phone, I wondered about Steve. Was he some tattooed clubber guy? Was he on a collegiate sports team? Would a representative for a modeling agency approach him on the street and give him their card?

I walked back to the van and, in a jealous mini-rage, slammed the door hard enough to provoke a "Trouble in paradise?" comment from one of the ski teamers. Could be, ski teamer, I thought to myself. Could be.

That night, I slyly asked Michelle all about Steve. I didn't like what I heard. Apparently, Steve was a blond-haired, blue-eyed surfer. He was nice, smart and funny. But nothing scared me more than the information I found out next: Steve played bass for a popular campus band called the Brewmasters. Oh, great, a fucking musician. When pressed, Michelle admitted that she found Steve attractive, but claimed she didn't think of him in "that way." As I went on with my questions, Michelle became annoyed. Didn't I believe her? They were just friends. Steve was helping her with her studies. If anything, he should be thanked — I mean, the more solid grasp she had on her math theorems, the quicker she could do future math theorem homework, and the quick she could meet me for romantic date nights at local taco establishments.

Next, I watched Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears play Get Yo Shit.

Remnick, I'm ready. Right after breakfast. And more procrastinating.

As you know, Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium has entranced me this year. The first essay was "Lightness," and Calvino sought balance between capturing difficult reality and his dreamlike aspirations. The next, "Quickness," explored narrative aerodynamics. Both essays spoke near-directly to my life in the weeks I read them.

In the third essay, "Exactitude," I didn't expect to connect as deeply as with the first two. "Exactitude" was such an anal-retentive word, and a glance at my apartment shouted the opposite. This guess was wrong, of course. While I didn't connect as personally, the depth was there.

Speaking to the topic, Calvino didn't act as a friend. He was a ride. I imagined the space elevator. He telescoped in and out. Exactitude, to him, was a dichotomy in writing. Did a writer use the primacy of words to find form in the world? Or did a writer use the primacy of the world to inspire words to catch up? For as much as a writer could measure actions to try and capture the infinite, the writer could also describe the seemingly finite to an infinite extent. Zooming out, zooming in.

Exactitude, for Calvino, began with precision but lived on exploration.

He raised a metaphor of a crystal and a flame. A crystal appeared to be a rigidly structured object but was only as such because of its life inside. A flame seemed to be wild and uncontrollable but was only as such because of its steady, mathematical, thermodynamic engine.

Putting aside some beautiful extended quotes Calvino used (among them, a meditation on how we observe indirect sun and moonlight), this was the first of two favorite "Exactitude" passages for me:

The fact is, my writing has always found itself facing two divergent paths that correspond to two different types of knowledge. One path goes into the mental space of bodiless rationality, where one may trace lines that converge, projections, abstract forms, vectors of force. The other path goes through a space crammed with objects and attempts to create a verbal equivalent of that space by filling the page with words, involving a most careful, painstaking effort to adapt what is written to what is not written, to the sum of what is sayable and not sayable. These are two different drives toward exactitude that will never attain complete fulfillment, one because "natural" languages always say something more than formalized languages can — natural languages always involve a certain amount of noise that impinges upon the essentiality of the information — and the other because, in representing the density and continuity of the world around us, language is revealed as defective and fragmentary, always saying something less with respect to the sum of what can be experienced.

Here was the second, again dueling with descriptive dichotomy:

There are those who hold that the word is the way of attaining the substance of the world, the final, unique, and absolute substance. Rather than representing the substance, the word identifies itself with it (so that it is wrong to call the word merely a means to an end): there is the word that knows only itself, and no other knowledge of the world is possible. There are others who regard the use of the word as an unceasing pursuit of things, an approach not to their substance but to their infinite variety, touching on their inexhaustibly multiform surface. As Hoffmannsthal said: "Depth is hidden. Where? On the surface." And Wittgenstein went even further than this: "For what is hidden … is of no interest to us."

I would not be so drastic. I think we are always searching for something hidden or merely potential or hypothetical, following its traces whenever they appear on the surface. I think our basic mental processes have come down to us through every period of history, ever since the times of our Paleolithic forefathers, who were hunters and gatherers. The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.

A week after reading, I love that image. I sit here at the beach, wondering when to be the crystal and when to be the flame.

Yes, Strasburg didn't make All-Star. But consider how far we've come.

Opening Day Nats program, at the fam's house as we beach-prepped:

The first came in a nap during a weekend rainstorm. The next four paired up in twos, on weeknights. Dream, wake, fall back asleep, dream. The fifth was an old dream but one I'd forgotten and never blogged. The sixth was early today, technically my first day in years of being employed by nobody.

JUNE 6 — I worked alone in a plain white room. I sat at a wide folding table with probably my laptop or a notepad in front of me, but I wasn't sure because I had my hands over my eyes, thinking. A door opened in front of me and to the right. An editor stood at the door and began to update me on a mess of projects. I tried to lower my hands and arms, and the light in the room blinded me. I tried to squint and failed. Arms still covering my face, I apologized, embarrassed. The editor paid it no mind and kept talking. The worst part of the dream was I hadn't heard of anything he was talking about. Blind, I couldn't begin to respond.

JUNE 8 — A top executive talks to me with his arms folded. We're on a high floor of an office tower. He leans against a glass wall overlooking an interior courtyard. A window swings open in the wall. The executive moves his arms a little; but he falls backward over the side, saying, "I always knew this would happen to a nice guy like me." I yell and run to find someone. An office admin makes a call and finds the executive had ordered the interior courtyard cleared that night. I see another of the top executives. She's broken up over the news. We hug. I see a boss of mine and try to explain how it's the worst thing I've ever seen. He says he knows but needs to talk to me about a different work matter.

JUNE 8 — That dream was immediately followed by a dream where, using the work travel system, I was going to New England and flexible on my travel dates. The system then booked me on a trip to Paris and London on the Concorde, for just $900 total. My mother or someone else looked at the itinerary and said the price sounded about right.

JUNE 9 — I drove around a mountain town in a RV with friends and a colleague. I sincerely wish I could remember more of this dream.

JUNE 9 — A security guard sees a colleague stumble into the office, flip out and begin shooting. On video screens, I see different scenes of the incident occurring, become upset, and take off down a hallway to help.

JUNE 25 — At my farewell, a colleague reminds me of a work dream I had several years ago and told to him. In the dream, my editor didn't want me on a certain project, so he had a jungle tiger attack me.

JULY 5 — In the dream, USAT held an all-hands meeting, and bosses named me the CEO of the Florida Power utility. The news surprised all, myself included. I didn't know USAT even owned a power company! The meeting let out. I leafed through a folder about Florida Power (with its 300,000 customers), answered confused questions from friends and wondered what the CEO of a large electric company did. I visited the utility's website and found the employees already up in arms over the move. The homepage included a picture of me in a tie, with a diagonal red line over the photo. The picture linked to their letter of protest.

Then I woke up. Rising, I found the utility's official name was Florida Power & Light Company. It had 4.5 million customers, and I was not the CEO. At breakfast, my dad told me his father, who was a banker, often visited the corporation with the other financial analysts, and my grandmother always enjoyed coming with to a Boca Raton resort. So, it had that going for it.

Bring on the crazy NPR dreams, I say. But let's enjoy the beach first?

The first question every one of the cousins asked yesterday was "Did you have to wear a helmet?" And, yes. We did have to wear helmets.

They were required, and helmet speed was exactly how fast we were driving in our high-speed, beyond-the-airport go-karts. Bookending a week that began with a LivingSocial deal for shooting guns, the week ended with a LivingSocial deal for driving these high-speed go-karts.

I'd approached a number of potential drivers with this kart possibility. Alison was the only one who immediately said, yes, let us drive these high-speed go-karts. In fact, she had already been to the facility. Not willing to accept go-kart mediocrity, this was exactly who and what I was looking for. So, prior to Marah rocking Arlington, we raced to outer Dulles, raced in the fun small cars and then charged back to the city.

We did have to wear helmets. And racing suits. And gloves. And head socks under the helmets. Beforehand, there were safety forms and a room with a safety video. On the track, there were three attendants, electronic race times, flags that included black, and the most powerful go-karts I've ever ridden. They had more than lawnmower engines.

The speed and slick track was like nothing I'd ever felt in a kart.

I looked like a dummy in my suit (pictured below); I knew as much. It (the suit) made me feel like Buddy Hackett in Herbie's Love Bug or Don Knotts in Herbie Goes Monte Carlo. I apparently wasn't man enough to feel like Dean Jones. Until I got behind the wheel. Alison and I didn't put up times like the racers after us, whom I captured in the YouTube below. They nailed the roar into the corner and the subsequent power slide. But when we did open up the engines in the turns, accidentally or briefly on purpose, what a ride. It was easy to see why this track had memberships and formal races. Had I grown up near here instead of near Little League fields, my life might have turned out differently.

Quote of the race from Alison: "No pictures. You're not going to put me on your blog in this purple suit." Well played and well raced. Vroom…