Brené Brown: The power of vulnerability. 99% Invisible. Silver And Black Pride, an Oakland Raiders community. NPR : National Public Radio : News & Analysis, World, US, Music & Arts : NPR. Sherry Turkle: Connected, but alone? McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Volkswagen: Engineers of Emotion. Apple - Designed By Apple - Intention. Beautiful Pixels. Mobile Web Design | Best Mobile Websites | Mobile Website Gallery. BLDGBLOG. David Foster Wallace uncut interview (11/2003) Our Psychic Living Room - The Common Review. Why It's Particularly Important to Read David Foster Wallace Two years have now passed since the death of David Foster Wallace in the fall of 2008.
His legacy as a writer has been the subject of nonstop debate since the day of his suicide. I’ll cut to the chase: I believe he was, in his own way, a literary genius. Let me explain why. You may have opened Harper’s or Rolling Stone back around the turn of the century and read a really funny essay by a chatty, neurotic writer who had Rain Man–like abilities to recall and describe experiences as diverse as attending the Illinois State Fair, playing tennis during a tornado, and following John McCain’s presidential campaign.
You may have found the essays hilarious, or quite brilliant. You may have gone so far as to say, as the critic Michiko Kakutani did in the New York Times, that they described modern life with “humor and fervor and verve,” and you may have wanted to read more of them. The Hyper-Articulate Tin Man Soma and the American Life. A speech by the late David Foster Wallace. There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water? " And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?
" If you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.