Daily Office: Wednesday
¶ Matins: The easy part: Tea Partiers take control of Colorado’s Republican Party nominating process and rewrite Maine’s GOP Platform. (Slate)
¶ Lauds: Joan Ackerman profiles John Williams, one of the giants of film-score composition — and father of some kids down the street when she was growing up in Westwood. (Boston.com; via Arts Journal)
¶ Prime: Are you an Asker or a Guesser? According to Oliver Burkeman — “This Column Will Change Your Life” — It doesn’t really matter, so long as you know which sort of person you, and the people around you, are. Nobody likes to be denied, but Askers are a lot more comfortable with “no” than Guessers are. (Guardian; via Marginal Revolution)
¶ Tierce: What makes some people faithful spouses? Maybe it’s a “fidelity” gene. But we think that Arthur Aron, out at Stony Brook, has the right answer: “self-expansion.” Commitment is not a problem if you feel that you owe your happiness to your partner. (NYT)
¶ Sext: Julia Ioffe profiles Chatroulette inventor Andrey Ternovskiy. He’s a computer genius, of course, but he got his inspirational start from working at a gift shop, aimed at foreign tourists, called “Russian Souvenirs.” Even the fact that Andrey’s uncle owned the shop couldn’t save him as a salesman. (The New Yorker)
¶ Nones: From a BBC Q & A about the United Kingdom’s governing coalition, an outline of “key priorities.” (BBC News)
¶ Vespers: A very agreeable vision of the future of the book is on view at Three Percent, where Chad Post writes about the Cahiers Series, beautifully-made books that ring variations on the theme of translation, “understood in very broad terms.” But enough about the texts; these are books to show off.
¶ Compline: Reputation and Humiliation in the Age of Facebook: at WSJ, Jeffrey Zaslow quotes a consultant who predicts a massive case against an ISP, “for spreading malicious gossip.” Meanwhile, at Indiana University, Lanier Holt beings a course in “The Principles of Public Relations” with a surprise. (via MetaFilter)