In his blog, Bryan Caplan makes some amusing and reasonable points about Barbara Ehrenreich’s criticism of some happiness research. My eyes widened as I read. This is so much better than what’s usually in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and other publications. It reminded me of Spy, except the level of thought is deeper. It’s as if blogs allow and encourage intelligent people to say what they really think about stuff. Whereas in any mainstream venue there are tremendous constraints.

On Christmas Eve I wrote there was a lot to be learned from the web comments on newspaper articles and the like that anyone can post. My point was how wonderful this was. Now the New York Times has added a feature that allows the most popular comments to rise to the top (you “show” Readers’ Recommendations) as I hoped. For example. Way to go!

You can also find comments that the “editors” (the sub-sub editors?) recommend (show Editors’ Selections). They tend to be long and querulous. I don’t think I’ll be using that feature much but it is good to have it for when I want long and querulous.

Still no comments allowed on The New Yorker website.

In November, a Tsinghua undergraduate killed herself by jumping out of a building. She kept a blog. After her death, a friend of mine read her blog — as did a few thousand other people — and told me it was full of sadness. My friend, a Tsinghua student, was puzzled that the friends and family of the dead girl had read her blog and done nothing. Will you translate some of it for me? I asked my friend (who translates other things for me). She begged off. I was puzzled: Surely the girl had wanted others to read what she had written, I thought.
I found another translator. After a few minutes of translation I had to stop: It was unbearably sad, maybe the saddest writing I’ve ever come across. I could see why my friend didn’t want to translate it.

Here is one entry. It takes the form of a questionnaire:

Question 1: Which student phase [primary school, middle school, high school, college] do you miss the most?

Answer: High school. Get together with a lot of friends. I know where I should go, even if it turns out to be wrong.

Question 2: Talk about your current life.

Answer: Listless. Feel half asleep. Do not want to wake up. I want to kill the people who wake me up. I love this world. I live for my goal.

Question 3: Do you have dreams? What are they?

Answer: I have many dreams. Make a movie . . . performance art [she was an art major]. Her [she was ga y]. Forgive me. Dream this day will come. Believe.

Question 4: Which kind of friend do you like best?

Answer: Any kind is fine. Understanding me a prerequisite.

Question 5: Could you give up going back to your hometown to be with your parents, to be with your lover?

Answer: No.

Question 6: What do you most want to do right now?
Answer: Sleep, dream. Find her. Just dream, do not want to meet anyone.

Question 7: Up until now, what is your happiest event?

Answer: I didn’t lose my past.

p.s. I don’t want any blessing. [A custom/game among Chinese teenagers is that after you answer a few questions you are “blessed” by your questioner.] Wish everyone happiness. Don’t ask me these boring questions again.

News of the girl’s death was posted on the student forums. What was the response? I asked my friend. Most of the comments were “Bless,” she said. The English word bless. That’s a customary thing to say when you learn someone has died.

From It’s Raining Noodles:

Before the next batch of snapshots and corresponding captions [on a screen at a fast food restaurant in Singapore] were revealed, a simple message against a plain background read, “To all the great and wonderful mothers out there…” as a sort of enigmatic prelude to the marvels to come, and because I am a cynical bitch with a very gloomy worldview, I asked out loud, “What about the other mothers?” To which Maria put on an affected frown as if she’d been hurt that her loved one was being left out by the onscreen message, and gleefully responded, “What about MY mom?”

More. Not to mention this:

The past three hours can only be adequately described by the word SIGH. Thinking that I was taking a step towards improving my relationship with God, no this is not a long preachy thing so please stay with me, I agreed to sit through a session thingy with a very Christian Mrs. In-Law and a very reluctant Neptune. . . . The sharing session was led by a heterosexual couple (why I am highlighting the heterosexual part will become evident later), and it was interesting because they had a different take on the religion from most that I’ve heard. In many ways it felt like a lecture in literature class, and for the most part I enjoyed it because of the different perspectives on the same ol’ concepts. . . . The only revelation for me, though, arrived when the female half of the heterosexual couple went on to preach that God gives up on people who insist on pursuing sin, such as idolatry and YES YOU GUESSED IT, homosexuality. She was all, “YES, HOMOSEXUALITY IS WRONG! God has given up on people like that.”

And I realised in that moment that God had probably just punished me by making me sit through three hours of this thingy thinking that MAYBE I had a shot at heaven when actually? ACTUALLY? NO CHANCE AT ALL. God has abandoned me to begin with right from the start. I’m damned forever. So I looked at Neptune and said, “God has given up on us!” and I was very sad. I find it very difficult to wrap my head around exactly why I deserve to go straight to hell when all I’ve done is fall in love with another person.

Part 1

Irena Briganti is a widely-feared Fox VP of media relations:

Though one of Briganti’s favorite pastimes is leaking to blogs, she’ll come to find that her detractors can do the same thing just as easily. Blogs are far less likely to cower in the face of a threat of “denied access.”

 Part 2

Before I became a blogger, I spent my entire 20′s trying to become an academic (English and critical theory was my focus). While I struggled to produce a handful of conference papers or publishable articles during that decade, in my four years as a blogger I have published about 4,400 articles that have received about 50,000,000 direct page views, 46,000 incoming links, and over 100 Lexis Nexus mentions. Had I stayed in academic, none of this would have been possible, and I would have continued to receive an endless series of rejections from the gatekeepers. The “experts” that Appell describes did not see the same value in my writing huge numbers of other people clearly have.

From Chris Bowers.

Part 3

Yoely made some compromises. He miscalculated, however, when he wired his home with Internet access. “He thought, If I give her this, then she’ll shut up and be satisfied,” Gitty says.

“Once I read blogs from people who had gotten out of places like KJ, there was no turning back. Yoely begged me to stay. It is humiliating for a Satmar man to have his wife leave him. But it was too late,” says Gitty, who would start her own blog, 1 Beautiful Stranger, where she wrote about her misplaced life in Kiryas Joel.

From New York.