Interview with Magnus Carlsen

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Carlsen is the number one chess player in the world, at the ripe old age of 19. This interview with him is quite good. Go read the whole thing. Some of my favorite excerpts are below.



SPIEGEL: You are 19 years old and ranked the number one chess player in the world. You must be incredibly clever.


Carlsen: And that’s precisely what would be terrible. Of course it is important for a chess player to be able to concentrate well, but being too intelligent can also be a burden. It can get in your way. I am convinced that the reason the Englishman John Nunn never became world champion is that he is too clever for that.


SPIEGEL: How that?


Carlsen: At the age of 15, Nunn started studying mathematics in Oxford; he was the youngest student in the last 500 years, and at 23 he did a PhD in algebraic topology. He has so incredibly much in his head. Simply too much. His enormous powers of understanding and his constant thirst for knowledge distracted him from chess.


SPIEGEL: Things are different in your case?


Carlsen: Right. I am a totally normal guy. My father is considerably more intelligent than I am.


***


SPIEGEL: You became a grandmaster at the age of 13 years, four months and 27 days; and there has never been a younger number one than you before. What is that due to, if not to your intelligence?


Carlsen: I’m not saying that I am totally stupid. But my success mainly has to do with the fact that I had the opportunity to learn more, more quickly. It has become easier to get hold of information. The players from the Soviet Union used to be at a huge advantage; in Moscow they had access to vast archives, with countless games carefully recorded on index cards. Nowadays anyone can buy this data on DVD for 150 euros; one disk holds 4.5 million games. There are also more books than there used to be. And then of course I started working with a computer earlier than Vladimir Kramnik or Viswanathan Anand.


***


Carlsen: Chess should not become an obsession. Otherwise there’s a danger that you will slide off into a parallel world, that you lose your sense of reality, get lost in the infinite cosmos of the game. You become crazy. I make sure that I have enough time between tournaments to go home in order to do other things. I like hiking and skiing, and I play football in a club.


***


SPIEGEL: For a year now you have been working with Garry Kasparov, who is probably the best chess player of all time. What form does your cooperation take? Kasparov is the teacher, you the pupil?


Carlsen: No. In terms of our playing skills we are not that far apart. There are many things I am better at than he is. And vice versa. Kasparov can calculate more alternatives, whereas my intuition is better. I immediately know how to rate a situation and what plan is necessary. I am clearly superior to him in that respect.



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The health-care divide

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I first wrote this two weeks ago, just after Obama's health-care summit. The passage of any HCR bill, at the time, seemed unlikely, but things have since turned more optimistic on that front. I give passage maybe a 55% chance now? Regardless, my thoughts on why I'd like to see the HCR bill pass still hold.


James Surowiecki isn't optimistic that yesterday's health-care summit will lead to any meaningful change. He traces this to an unbridgeable gap in philosophies.



...the lack of any real progress was the result of a simple fact: there’s an unbridgeable chasm between what Democrats and Republicans want health-insurance reform to do.


For Republicans, the current health-insurance system works reasonably well—in their minds, it’s a key part of what they kept referring to as “the best health-care system in the world

Could progressives have passed any stronger HCR bill?

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Nate Silver crunches the numbers and says it's unlikely. Using a negotiation model built by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, an NYU political scientist, Silver models a complex negotiation with 12 parties, each with their own end goal, and even adjusting the variables in a variety of ways, the best he could come up with was a HCR bill with a weak public option.



Still, perhaps the most important finding of the model is that the outcome was relatively robust. Although there are a number of things that Democrats could have done a bit better, essentially all of the scenarios that I tested produced a score between a 50 -- a bill something like Senate Finance Committee's -- and a 60 -- a weak public option. It would probably not have been possible to get a strong public option (much less anything resembling single payer) even if a number of variables were changed within reasonable boundaries.


This squares, in any event, with my intuition. No matter how clever progressives and activist groups might have been, they were enmeshed in a complex negotiation that:


(i) necessarily required the approval of a certain number of Blue Dogs;


(ii) featured some parties -- Republicans and lobbyists -- who had limited but nonzero influence and who were actively trying to do undo any settlement;


(iii) was overseen by a series of party leaders (Pelosi, Reid, Obama) who have institutional incentives to broker a compromise, regardless of their (fairly liberal) personal preferences and,


(iv) was constrained by an ambivalent public.


The influence of any one group in what is essentially a 10- or 12-way negotiation is liable to be fairly limited, no matter how wisely they select their strategy -- and to suggest otherwise probably reflects a certain amount of self-importance.



The usual caveats apply -- this is just a model, it's not foolproof, Silver's assumptions might not be correct, and so on -- but the result squares with my intuition, also. Those who think progressives could have forced a stronger bill through by being tougher seem to be wishcasting.


And of course, no healthcare bill has passed yet, so even the predicted outcome might be optimistic.


The web version of Mesquita's model, if you want to predict the outcome of your next complex negotiation (will she make me see Bounty Hunter, or can I get her to see Hot Tub Time Machine with me instead?) is here.


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Curation in Journalism

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I don't have any easy answer as to how to save the newsroom, but I agree with Mike Masnick that most traditional newsrooms are underrating the role of curation.



Unfortunately, for the most part, newspapers seem to look down on "curating" as if it's some sort of lesser form of journalism, and this is a sticking point that they're going to need to get past if they want to understand how people engage with the news today. These days, everyone is a curator of the news in some fashion: they share news, comment on it, post about it, etc. But they also look to the "pros" to add more value to it as well. But if the traditional press looks down on this function, they won't do a particularly good job of it. It's sometimes tough for a press who used to want itself to be "the final word" on every story to admit that others may have reported it better/faster, as well as the fact that sometimes it's better to involve the community, rather than treating the community as riffraff waiting for the word from the god-like journalists.



It's telling when you have respected reporters for the NYTimes and other established news institutions taking to personal Twitter accounts or blogs to do curation because their employers won't feature their curatorial output.


The web has long been kind to curation, first in the form of weblogs, now in multiple forms including Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr. Good curators make the web more intimate and interesting and navigable, and value accrues back to the curator even if that's all they do. That traditional newspapers have turned their noses up at this role is one reason they've seemed, at times, like the stodgy grandparents of web journalism.


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Tyler Cowen on Managed Care

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Tyler Cowen's article in this past Friday's NYTimes brings the "unacknowledged monster lurking in the room" to the center of the healthcare debate: managed care.



For all the complaints, managed care does not seem to hurt actual health care outcomes, whether pertaining to life expectancy or recovery from disease, according to a series of papers by David Cutler, an economics professor at Harvard, and co-authors.


It’s time to consider which forms of managed care — relabeled, if necessary — are likely to maintain the flow of innovation while keeping costs under control.


For all of managed care’s problems, national bankruptcy would be considerably worse, and that’s where we’re heading if we don’t rein in health costs.



In EconLog, Arnold Kling makes an interesting comment on Cowen's article.



I think that what is implicit in his view is that we would rather outsource our rationing decisions than make them as individuals or families. Suppose that it is your aging parent who is offered the high-cost, low-benefit procedure and cannot afford it. Do you want to be under pressure to put up the money, or do you want the social norm to be that this decision is up to the managed-care provider?



Some people may be ready to make those tough decisions themselves, but I suspect most people would rather blame an institution than admit to a loved one that they don't want to pay for the hail mary procedure themselves.


Cowen isn't certain we're ready to accept that we have to ration health care.



The real challenge is to change our fundamental attitude toward health care. We live in a world where we can spend virtually everything we have on more and better treatment. The question is not managed care versus the status quo, but which opportunities — and the restrictions that go with them — we are prepared to accept.


When will we acknowledge that our government — or, for that matter, our insurance companies — can’t pay every bill? We’re in denial, and the longer we wait, the more painful the solution will be.



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Gates goes Green

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Alex Steffen calls Bill Gates' speech on climate at TED "the most important speech of the year." Having the world's most powerful philanthropist focused on the climate change problem is undoubtedly important.


But the most interesting part of Steffen's post is its conclusion, in which he offers an improvement to the equation Gates unveiled at TED.



Now we might start with the energy use to deliver those services (E in the Equation). The energy intensity of any given form of prosperity can, I believe, be improved quite a bit; but the idea that E can be dramatically improved without improving the kind of prosperity we're attempting to provide is the very definition of what I call The Swap. The Swap doesn't work.


And we don't need it to. The idea that contemporary suburban American lifestyles (the kind of prosperity most people around the world aspire to, thanks to Hollywood and advertising), the idea that McMansions, SUVs and fast food chicken wraps somehow represent the best form of prosperity we could possibly invent is, of course, obviously ludicrous.


We can reinvent what prosperity means and how it works, and, in the process both reduce the ecological demands of that prosperity and improve the quality of our lives. In most cases, this is a smarter approach than simply improving efficiency.


The answer to the problem of cars and automotive emissions, for instance, isn't designing a better car, it's designing a better city. The answer to the problem of overconsumption isn't recycling cans or green shopping, it's changing our relationship to stuff, so that everything we use and live with is designed for zero waste, and either meant to last ("heirloom design" and "durability") or to be shared ("product service systems") or both. The best living we've ever had is waiting beyond zero. What looks like a wall to many people from this side of zero, looks to like a trellis from the other side, a foundation on which new thinking can flourish.


Cities are the tools we need for reinventing prosperity. We can build zero-impact cities, and we need to. Any answer to the problem of climate change needs to be as focused on reinventing the future as powering it.



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Fun with Chat Roulette

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Suggestions on how to improve Chat Roulette.


On the other hand, in its current incarnation, it's a great party drinking game. Open two laptops, set two people against each other with Chat Roulette open. The first person who ends up seeing another guy, uh, doing what I believe the French refer to as a "menage a un" has to down a beer.


Or how about Chat Roulette Roulette? Matt Haughey explains:



ChatRouletteRoulette: Four people in a room with laptops, everyone connects to ChatRoulette, first one to see a cock is out!




Go forth and create

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Another older post I've just left hanging out there forever...


The joy of having your first novel reviewed by the New York Times Book Review quickly turns to horror when it turns out to be a succinct dismissal. Ronlyn Domingue writes about what that feels like.



Although the advice to have a thick skin was well-meant, it is emotionally dishonest. Sharing one’s writing is a naked act not intended for the meek. Harsh words can—and sometimes do—undermine the most confident, successful writers. It’s human. It’s okay. It will pass. Now, my guidance to myself, and others, is to have a permeable skin, one that doesn’t resist or trap the good or the bad. Reviews, critiques, comments come in, then move on. Then there’s space, inside and out, for something new.



Every artist experiences the little deaths that come with work in a creative field. In fiction writing seminars in college, every story you wrote would be read out loud, and then the others in the class would take turns offering their critiques. In film school, the same was done for our scripts, rough cuts, fine edits, final works.


Professors always counsel everyone to be civil with their criticism, to keep it about the work and not the person, but I suspect it's impossible to ever accept even the most even-tempered of criticism of one's work without suffering the smallest of deaths (the French use la petite mort in another sense, of course, but it's always felt more accurate here).


But even if your classmates and peers are respectful and professional, and for the most part I'd say my creative writing and film school peers were very much so, at some point if you're to succeed in your field you'll have to put your work out there for an audience that isn't in the same room with you, that isn't operating under the potential collateral damage of your potential subsequent feedback on their work. Then the gloves come off.


The internet has only accelerated that. It's given everyone a megaphone, and even if they're shouting into the wind (2 followers, one his mother, the other is Candy327, 5 tweets), Google or Twitter is saving their shouts for you to summon with a few mouse clicks. Before the internet came along, the cliche that "everybody's a critic" may have been true, but for the first time we can hear them all at once, all the time, one massive and stern Greek chorus of disapproval.


But whereas the chorus in a Greek tragedy at least spoke in meter, with a certain poetic eloquence, the anonymity of the web has reduced us to our most savage and bitter. We are all cavemen, all id. Civil debate and discourse isn't the norm in any large and open community online. 4Chan bullies prowl the hallways of the web like the high school thugs every awkward teenager dreads running into.


As a creator, you have to balance receptivity to criticism with the conviction of your creative choices. It's not easy withstanding the constant, withering glare of a million critics, but just in taking those steps to cross over from the darkness of the peanut gallery to the bright lights of center stage you've set yourself apart.


As for the millions of judges out there, I urge you, the next time you go to murder someone's book with your poison pen, try to write a book yourself. The next time you leave a movie theater ready to dismiss what you watched for two hours, try to direct your own short movie. What the world needs is not more judges. As the old saying goes, everbody's a critic.


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Dramatizing the digital life

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Virginia Heffernan writes about the challenge of dramatizing the online life.


Anyone who has followed fantasy football or an eBay auction at the office — and gotten away with it — knows that many of our everyday activities now look like work. Typing and scrolling and peering at a computer, you could be doing anything: e-mail, accounting, short-selling, browsing porn, buying uranium, getting divorced.


This odd accident of life online — the increasing visual homogeneity of our behaviors — may be a boon to procrastinators, hobbyists and multitaskers. But it has some victims. I don’t mean bosses concerned with productivity (who cares about them?). The crowd truly stymied by the merging of human activities are filmmakers. If fighting now looks like making up now looks like booking travel, as it does when people conduct their affairs online, how do film directors make human action both dramatic to viewers and roughly true to life?


Another anachronism that drives me crazy in the movies is continued reliance on analog answering machines so that either the audience or some other person in a room can eavesdrop on a voicemail meant for another person. Who owns one of those machines anymore? It's a crutch for unimaginative storytellers.


What is the sound of one country screaming?

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Not much happens in the video below, but it's the audio that matters. This is a shot of Vancouver during that moment when Canada won the Olympic men's hockey gold metal game in overtime.








[via Scrawled In Wax]


Though I work at Hulu, part of the vanguard in the transition from linear programming to a video on demand world, I'm not immune to the power of collective experience. Part of me misses those days before DVRs and PPV and HBO and VCRs, when you could only catch movies on network TV live. The other people around the country watching that exact moment with you were invisible but palpable, and every moment of the movie seemed more important because of that.


Thus the huge value that accrues to events that still demand live viewing in this world where synchronous viewing has become so unnecessary. Sports leagues are sitting pretty.


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The geek shall inherit the earth

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This much-blogged article by Garry Kasparov in The New York Review of Books is worthy of the attention. What's fantastic is Kasparov's deeper exploration of the impact of the rise of powerful chess software.



Kids love computers and take to them naturally, so it's no surprise that the same is true of the combination of chess and computers. With the introduction of super-powerful software it became possible for a youngster to have a top- level opponent at home instead of need ing a professional trainer from an early age. Countries with little by way of chess tradition and few available coaches can now produce prodigies.


...


The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn't care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn't good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn't been done that way before. It's simply good if it works and bad if it doesn't. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.


...


The availability of millions of games at one's fingertips in a database is also making the game's best players younger and younger. Absorbing the thousands of essential patterns and opening moves used to take many years, a process indicative of Malcolm Gladwell's "10,000 hours to become an expert" theory as expounded in his recent book Outliers. Today's teens, and increasingly pre-teens, can accelerate this process by plugging into a digitized archive of chess information and making full use of the superiority of the young mind to retain it all.



What's perhaps even more intriguing, though, is Kasparov's recount of the results of a chess tournament hosted by a chess website in which players were all allowed to play against each other with the aid of computers.



The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and "coaching" their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.



Can this result (weak human + machine + better process as superior option) be replicated in other areas of human-computer partnership? While Kasparov is talking about chess in this article, the fact that so many people now carry phones that are more powerful than the earliest personal computers has elevated the importance of human-computer collaboration. We are not yet the cyborgs of sci-fi imagination, but in some aspects of life, we're closer than we may realize.


The gap between those who can work in partnership with computers and those who cannot (for whatever reason, socioeconomic or generational or other) is evident in so many ways. Even among those who are computing-enabled, there are differences in ability. When I'm out with a group of people and we're looking for a restaurant, or directions, the people with smartphones with Yelp and Google Maps are more capable than those without. We can go further and observe that even among those with smartphones, some are better at using them to their full potential than others. Is that a result of superior process, or a stronger human?


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Top movies of the decade

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I enjoyed both Film Comment and Sight and Sound's top movies of the decade lists. Film Comment used a poll of international critics to determine their list of 100, while Sight and Sound's editorial team personally curated their list of 30.


Here are the 18 movies that enjoyed the distinction of making both lists, along with Amazon links where available (all except Colossal Youth were up there, and that one is coming out on a Criterion DVD which isn't on Amazon yet but which I linked to at the Criterion website):


I've seen 11 of these and need to Netflix the rest.
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White liberal guiltlessness (and some stuff about Avatar)

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This is an old link but one I meant to share a while back because I enjoyed it. Giovanni Tiso notes that critical discussion of both Avatar and past injustices against Haiti are being decried as inappropriate, the former because hey, it's just a movie, and the latter because a tragedy is no time to try to hash out our complicity in Haiti's poverty.


Similar backlash occurred after 9/11 in the U.S., when any attempt to analyze whether U.S. policy had contributed to the rise of Al-Qaeda was treated as heartless political pandering. It's just another instance of the tyranny of the OR, where it's assumed one can't be both analytical and sympathetic. I would hope we're able to appreciate that real-life is more nuanced than that, even if we can't tolerate that level of complexity from our mass entertainment.



Besides, I’m a consumer of information just like everybody else, of serious, sometimes cataclysmic front page news that bleeds into entertainment news and back again, a phenomenon made even more pronounced by the design of Web pages and aggregators and by the nature of hypertext if, like me, you get most of your news online.


In that environment, it is quite natural that James Cameron should accept an award in the name of a people that is indigenous only to his head, and that it should be greeted at best with a collective smirk or shrug or guffaw, since after all it was done in the spirit and logic of the times, while actual political statements of demonstrable historical urgency, like Peter Hallward’s, attract offense and derision. And this same spirit and logic will dictate that an immense human tragedy that weighs on the shoulders of the international community should be consumed as an act of God, outside of history, in the same present tense as entertainment, asking of us only that we fill that void with as many random quick fire donations - think of the convenience of texting for relief - as we can fit in the course of our normal activities and in the time allotted for caring for such things.


There is only one thing worse than white liberal guilt, and it’s white liberal guiltlessness, demanding that history not be ‘brought into it’, that memory be erased. We must fight that. And, yes, give, and give discriminately.



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Esoteria

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Lindsay Beyerstein defends Y Tu Mama Tambien from a detractor who implicates the movie's female lead Luisa as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. What is a MPDG?



Onion AV writer Nathan Rabin coined the term to describe Kristen Dunst's character in a scathing review of Elizabethtown: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family.



Natalie Portman is usually trotted out as Exhibit A in MPDG litigation.


I liked Y Tu Mama Tambien and endorse Beyerstein's defense against said charges. But I also enjoyed adding MPDG to my vocabulary.


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A touching Roger Ebert story. No, not that one, though that is a great one that's gotten a lot of coverage recently, and deservedly so. In losing his voice, he found a new one in his online journal (his output has expanded into Twitter as well). I have my own Roger Ebert stories from having chatted with him a few times at Sundance, but I'll share those another day.


I DVR'd Ebert on Oprah today, but I'm not sure tonight is the night to watch. I must brace myself for the emotional impact.


***


"All the Good Stuff Always Happens in the Ladies Room" by Paulina Porizkova


It's a funny read, honest and not ironic. It evokes my sympathy when I read about her "frequent bouts of self-doubt and the occasional humiliation of being a celebrity past her prime" and I don't often feel sympathy for supermodels, the title granted her in her byline.


I link to it mostly because it reminded me that we live in an odd age when celebrities are writing at us in an unmediated fashion more than I can ever remember. Celebrity Twitter accounts, blogs, websites, and iPhone apps. I'm not sure what I should feel when a celebrity tweets from their high life: what other celebrity they just ran into, what it's like on the red carpet or on the movie set or the exclusive party they're at. It seems like vanity, or perhaps insecurity, or maybe they have nothing else to write about because their lives are really one long string of parties punctuated by an occasional gig that resembles work. I'm not sure how I feel about this other than it should be the subject of a Chuck Klosterman essay.


***


Shawn Blanc makes his plea for a good iPhone feed reader. I made a similar wish earlier this month.


I use three newsreaders on my iPhone today: Byline, Reeder, and NetNewsWire. Use might not be the right word. I bounce between them depending on my mood, but none of the three thrill or delight me yet.


I differ from Shawn a bit in my primary complaints about the three. Byline is the fastest of the three and allows offline reading which I love, but a few things about its UI irk me. One is that after loading its initial set of items, you have to click a link at the bottom to load more stories from your feed. But that link is placed right below a Mark All As Read link which I hit by mistake all the time. The second is the inability to select stories from an individual feed. Sometimes I don't want my full newsfeed, I just want the latest from one feed. I'd also love the option to save state the way Tweetie does so i can start browsing forward from the last article I was shown in my previous Byline session.


Reeder allows me to select individual feeds, but it doesn't save state. The worst problem is that it chokes on syncing all the stories from all my feeds. I spend a lot of time waiting for Reeder to register my screen gestures as it syncs; those long delays drive me crazy. I can't tell if my iPhone has frozen or if Reeder is just constipated (I have syncing turned on at startup so every time I launch the app I'm waiting around for something to happen). I've had to all but turn Reeder syncing off to use the app which is too bad because it has a lot of other features I appreciate.


As for NetNewsWire, on the iPhone it is essentially unusable for anyone with any healthy number of feeds. It feels as if my phone has just frozen.


My hope is that someone solves this on the iPad because that has the potential be a fantastic newsreader device, especially as the Kindle is not great in that area. An iPad with a great Google Reader app and access to browsing all the usual news websites through mobile Safari and a great ebook reader would be something I spend a lot of time with on the toilet. Did I say toilet? I meant "around the house."


***


Is this the same old woman who looks like a little girl from Orphan?


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A new photography

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A beautiful, curated set of photos from Google Street View, as well as an assessment of its artistic sensibility. Google Street View deserves an exhibit at MOMA, the Google Street View camera more analysis from photography blogs and review sites.


[linking to an article that is several months old feels embarrassing for a blog, it's like receiving the "Microsoft will donate $1 for every copy of this e-mail that is passed on" from your parents, but I'll do it when it's good.]


On the topic of photography, it's long been said that an artist's tools affect the art created by it. What has been the impact of the last decade of photography technology on that field? Looking at some of the major technology changes.



  • Digital photography, with its use of Photoshop and computers for post-processing - HDR? Photographic forensic analysis? Perhaps the greatest impact was on the idea of a photograph, now mutable, ephemeral, but in its ghostliness, infinitely more mobile. And it will only increase as cameras allow us to upload photos directly to Facebook or Flickr, or to send them directly from the camera into e-mail and out to the world.

  • Digital SLRs - in a way, digital SLRs introduced a new generation to the advantages of the SLR as a camera form factor over the digital point-and-shoot. Back in the heyday of film, far fewer amateur photographers saw the need to upgrade to an SLR. Ironically, it was the ubiquity of the digital point-and-shoot that may have dragged digital SLR sales up. The poor quality of digital point-and-shoot photos (small sensors and slow lenses not allowing for shallow-depth-of-fields, long lag times between button presses and photographs, poor color rendition, among other problems) coupled with a huge upsurge in the desire to shoot and share meant a huge new consumer base interested in how to take better-looking photos. Whether right or wrong, for most people that meant upgrading to an SLR. As with all movements, it's both good and bad. Many more people took an interest in the possibilities opened up by an SLR. I've had more people ask me about what model of SLR to get than ever asked me about my film camera. But for most, the interest is shallow, with few actually caring to learn the fundamentals of photography that enable them to capture the full potential of the SLR. If you still shoot 100% of the time in Program mode on your SLR, you're like the hack golfer who spends $400 on the latest golf driver instead of taking golf lessons.

  • Digital point-and-shoots - see above under digital SLRs. Overflashed portraits is one obvious outcome of the explosion in digital compacts. If I never get another link to a gallery of one hundred portraits taken by a photographer holding a camera out and pointing it back at themselves and the person they have their arm around, I'll be happy, though I have long thought that some photography museum should mount an exhibition of just such a set of photos, its aesthetic is so widespread now. We've always had portable cameras, disposable cameras, but pair them with websites that allow for instant uploading and sharing and we're now inundated by a photographic tsunami from amateurs who have yet to learn that curation is part of the professional photographer's craft.

  • The shitty iPhone camera - you can lump all mobile phone cameras into this category, though I pick on the iPhone for its prominence as the predominant "smartphone" in mindshare. Make no mistake, I love my iPhone, it is still a miracle to me how much better it was than all phones to come before it, but the camera is undeniably lousy. Its primary virtue is its integration into a device I have with me all the time. I've learned to embrace its terrible quality, though, and in that way it's the digital successor to earlier generations of low-quality cameras with quirks, like the Lomo or Holga. In fact, more often than not, I use one of the iPhone apps (ToyCamera, Hipstamatic, e.g.) that simulates those old cameras to give my iPhone photos a random look that masks the cameras deficiencies by embracing them. That in itself can be a mannerism, but the photos are generally more interesting.


As for what's on the horizon, I predict that in time, with storage space cheap and video sensor resolution growing every day, we'll just all shoot video and extract the stills we want. It removes the burden to capture the decisive moment, as Cartier-Bresson termed it, and that's something most amateur photographers struggle with. We already have magazine covers like the Megan Fox Esquire cover which were shot this way.


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