I hate posting the last graf of an article, but once again Adam Gopnik leaves me no choice. From his latest piece, on van Gogh and Gauguin:

It’s true that the moral luck dramatized by modern art involves an uncomfortable element of ethical exhibitionism. We gawk and stare as the painters slice off their ears and down the booze and act like clowns. But we rely on them to make up for our own timidity, on their courage to dignify our caution. We are spectators in the casino, placing bets; that’s the nature of the collaboration that brings us together, and we can sometimes convince ourselves that having looked is the same as having made, and that the stakes are the same for the ironic spectator and the would-be saint. But they’re not. We all make our wagers, and the cumulative lottery builds museums and lecture halls and revisionist biographies. But the artist does more. He bets his life.

The phrase that obviously comes to mind is "carpe diem," but at this point in the year, it's worth going to Horace's hows and whys as well. You can't seize the day like a jerk. Reasons via Wikipedia, with edits:

Don't ask (it's forbidden to know) what end
the gods will grant to me or you, Leuconoe. Don't play with Babylonian
fortune-telling either. It is better to endure whatever will be.
Whether Jupiter has allotted to you many more winters or this final one
which even now wears out the Tyrrhenian sea on the facing cliffs
— be wise, drink your wine, and scale back your long hopes
to a short period. While we speak, envious time will have already fled
Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next.

(I seized the day tonight with an Elevation burger. How bout you?)

Adam Gopnik, on cookbooks, gives the graf of the food issue:

The desire to go on desiring, the wanting to want, is what makes you turn the pages — all the while aware that the next Boston cream pie, the sweet-salty-fatty-starchy thing you will turn out tomorrow, will be neither more nor less unsatisfying than last night’s was. When you start to cook, as when you begin to live, you think that the point is to improve the technique until you end up with something perfect, and that the reason you haven’t been able to break the cycle of desire and disillusion is that you haven’t yet mastered the rules. Then you grow up, and you learn that that’s the game.

From the man likely to be the next Canadian PM (emphasis his):

The thing that politics most strongly resembles is being on soccer teams and hockey teams when I was a child. It's not a lonely writer in his den thinking thoughts. You're mostly listening all day long to people, trying to take the measure of their personalities — their strengths, their weaknesses. It's much closer to being a journalist. You sit with other politicians: what does this person really want? You hear what she's saying. But what does she really want? That's a political moment. You're in a town hall with two hundred and fifty people, and you're trying to get a sense of the room, of what makes these people tick. It's a very different skill from being a writer. Isaiah himself was fascinated by the question: what is it that a great politician knows? What is that form of knowledge? Last night, Zsuzsanna and I were watching the Detroit Red Wings goalie, and he knows something: what is it that he knows? What is it that a great politician knows? The great ones have a skill that is just jaw-dropping, and I'm trying to learn that.

They work too hard at educating, a New Yorker story about razors and animal adaptation tells us. No, the story doesn't mention traditional news sites, but I think the evolutionary talk carries over pretty well.

The theory at work is "relaxed selection," where degrees of freedom allow species growth and development — creativity to some extent — rather the Darwinian idea of stress forcing all change. Writes Adam Gopnik, "The early bird races to the worm and, worn out, croaks the same few flat notes as his fathers; the songbird that wakes at ten and ambles to the worm of his choice in a land where worms are cheap has time and energy to get up on a branch and improvise a new song."

Similar cases come out of a broader look at the "lek" in life, taken from a term for animal rituals of "showing off their excesses," as in relaxed selection. And what happens when you chase the concept further?

The Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden, in her new book, "The Genial Gene," argues that the entire notion of sexual selection as a form of self-seeking improvement on the part of each beast is a myth, a make-believe, and that the true state of nature is one of frivolous variation and bisexual flirtation. There's no evidence that peahens actually prefer the peacock with the most splendid tail, she tells us; the evidence is that peahuns choose their mates more or less at random.

Perhaps, she suggests, the peacock struts his tail to impress other peacocks — to get entree to a social clique. What the peacock's tail might really signal is not his strongly selfish genes but his serenely social nature. …

For Roughgarden, superfluidity is the sign of the natural world at its most natural, the path of descent when nothing interferes with it. Why invest in long tails and razors? The answer is: why not? We are, in this view, born to be inherently frivolous aesthetes, who like change for change's sake, oddity for oddity's, amusement for amusement's, art for art's. And, if there is a deeper reason for our liking, it is that such likings help make communities; we find our social selves by participating in the lek.

I can't agree with the stress theory falling off the table entirely, but I like the idea of a spectrum of development. With traditional news sites, it's hard to see a spectrum. The seriousness is nearly 100% — if not in topic, then certainly in tone. (When we break this tone, the results are often more awkward than an average onlooker would produce.) For some reason, the industry sees this as normal. We see reputations at stake and respond the most urgently to complaints in that vein. Even in the game-based area of online media development, traditional news is obsessed with educating and informing. It's weird, in a sense. Info is undeniably valuable, but in what variety of natural communication is it continuously single-minded? We've made up this mode and convinced ourselves it's normal. The viewer, we effect, must always be taught.

Why? Let's look at the original American newspaper model, combining key elements of information, entertainment, community connection and facilitation of commerce. The pieces drop off one by one. The post-war newspaper cedes media joy to TV, the first sign of printing presses as the silent enemies of productization. Monopolization knocks off papers' need to pursue commerce beyond streams we're already facilitating. With community connection, immigration and integration slowly push societal diversity into cultural diversity, and everyone spends decades trying to grow up, get their hands around the actual American ideal and reconnect. By the time the Internet comes around, newspapers are down to just one of their four original elements. Which puts them in great shape to get on the Internet — bring your shovel! — but in awful shape to compete there. All of the original media elements are once again in play, and we've long lost track of most of them.

Back to the biology. Steady work with online communities attracts me to one particular part of the New Yorker story. More than any other part of traditional news' pursuit of digital life/growth, community-building has highlighted the industry's single-mode obsession with educating. When viewers can talk back, they show how different their modes can be. They joke. They vent. They chat. They show off. They recommend or criticize. Something I've argued since we began Network Journalism is how very young online communication management is, how basic it remains compared to real conversations or interactions. No wonder this communication feels more like miscommunication. The inability to handle a mix of modes is problem to be solved across industries.

But I don't worry about most industries here, and I do worry about newspapers and traditional news sites. If, out of reputation fears, our own communication and human messaging is stuck in one mode, how are we going to play a role in the social evolution of everyone else? Human factors design is a step there, but humanity is a prerequisite.

Falling off the wagon of regular reading for a month, I'm probably feeling the effects or, more likely, misjudging them and feeling that. But a pairing in the March 17 New Yorker helps me back on for a moment.

The first passage comes from Adam Gopnik's "Modern Magic and the Meaning of Life," a sleight-of-hand personal narrative, unfortunately not online, with a moment of an experienced magician watching a newcomer's try.

"He was appealing — he did have a nice persona," Swiss said, leaning into the table. "He could do the moves. But he tore the dollar up slowly, like this." Swiss replicated the young magician's careful, studied action. "Why? Why would you tear it up slowly? Nobody tears a dollar bill up in the first place, but, if you're going to tear up a dollar bill at all, you'd tear it up quickly, in a sudden fit, zip-zip-zip." He demonstrated. "The only reason you would tear a dollar bill up slowly is if you were doing something else to it at the same time — if you were doing a goddamn magic trick. So right away we're off in the magic land of 'I have in my hand an ordinary deck of cards.' But, O.K., let's live with that. Why are you tearing it up? Are you doing it angrily? Gaily? Why are you asking me to watch you tear up a dollar bill? The method is not the trick. The method is never the trick. Once you've mastered the method, you've hardly begun the trick."

Right after Gopnik comes John Burnside's "The Bell Ringer" fiction.

The bell ringers were continuing a tradition that had once been central to the life of the community, and she liked to think that only a generation ago, whenever these bells had rung out over the fields and the streets, everyone had known what they were saying. A call to worship; a royal wedding; an armistice; an enemy attack. Everyone would have understood those signals, because those were the public events, those were the facts. Yet surely there had been something else, another music inside the public proclamations, and there must have been those who could hear more than the facts, gifted listeners who could pick out the subtleties in the way one bell worked against the others, say, or in the pauses when one ringer stopped, weary or undecided, or touched with the knowledge of imminent mortality. Now the bells were nothing but background — pure atmosphere, a little local color –but perhaps there were still souls in this very parish who could decipher the inner workings of a bell ringer's mind, just by listening. … With every pull on the bell rope, she might be confiding everything to some old man in the almshouses at the far end of the village, or to some dying woman in one of the cottages out by the woods; some seasoned listener who would set aside a book or a pile of darning and listen awhile, wondering who it was that was giving herself away.

Bells, chalkboard, why anyone asks anyone to watch. "The Bell Ringer" considers the ties, probably worthless and detrimental, between stuck-on-signal and stuck-on-listen.

"My memory is proglottidean, like the tapeworm, but unlike the tapeworm it has no head, it wanders in a maze, and any point may be the beginning or the end of its journey." So begins "The Gorge," by Umberto Eco, in the Mar. 7 New Yorker issue. Throwing a ridiculously word into the first sentence like that … I don't like it, but I look it up anyway. Here. The rest of the story is great.

Pages earlier, there's a cartoon more my speed. A bored-looking boss tells a too-smiley interviewee, "What the hell? We could use an idiot."

Adam Gopnik toes the intellectual line in the back of the book. Voltaire, Gopnik writes, was "thrown into the Bastille twice for being generally annoying."

When the topic gets to religion, we go pop: "Voltaire was in favor of a benign, supervisory God in the way that British leftists used to be in favor of the Queen, or in the way that Yankee free agents are in favor of Joe Torre; it's nice to think that someone genial is overseeing things."

More? The watches of the watch company Voltaire began "became the Ben & Jerry's ice cream of the later Enlightenment, a luxury good that was also a sign of progressive values."

Measure for measure, Nancy Franklin writes about a new TV series and describes one character as "SpongeJoe KhakiPants."

The referencing is thankfully absent from the key lines in Talk of the Town: "Hunter S. Thompson, who killed himself last week in his house in Woody Creek, near Aspen, Colorado, was a high-strung, thin-skinned, programmatically dissipated workaholic, inveterately suspicious of authority, perpetually worried that his best days were behind him, and unable to deal with the attention and success that he scrambled and sweated for many years to achieve. In other words, he was a magazine writer."