Hi, I'm Justin

Great new interview in SHARP magazine:

You’re Afraid of Tom Hardy Because You’re Afraid of Manhood

Tom Hardy is sitting in his wife’s rocking chair, talking about his work.

It’s furniture that she will be using a lot in the near future to feed and console their impending baby. But, since the kid hasn’t come yet, Hardy’s there, rocking beside his dog. Maybe the dog is in his lap. He’s calling from England, so I can’t get a clear visual. The point is: there’s a dog. With Tom Hardy, there is always a dog. It’s pop culture scripture at this point, like Michael Jackson and sequined gloves or Johnny Depp and odd hats. Tom Hardy likes dogs.

And dogs like him. Know why? Because, as man’s best friend, dogs recognize that Tom Hardy is someone to latch on to. Basically, Tom Hardy is the Ideal Man. And so, the logic is, the better the man, the better the friend. Dogs sense this kind of thing instinctively. And, while we might not be as good at it as they are, nor as open about it, other men sense this kind of thing, too. There’s something about Hardy that pulls us in, magnetic, but in a decisively un-showy way. Frankly, it’s hard to put your finger on how we reach this conclusion, but some animal part of our brains seems to have decided that Hardy is everything men want to be. Yeah, that line gets thrown around a lot with male actors, but that’s more about an actor’s persona, or the characters they play. As elusive as Hardy can be, there is just something übermensch-y about him.

Yes, it’s a hyperbolic statement, which could easily come off as fawning — something that, ironically, Tom Hardy would never be — and thus, requires some study to back it up. That’s what we’ll be doing here.

It should be said: Hardy would almost certainly disagree with this assessment. While he’s rocking, he’s telling me about the IKEA furniture he had to build recently. And how it was impossible. “It’s like a massive bowl of spaghetti. It’s great at first, but then it keeps going and going, and you’re sure it was light out when you started eating it,” he says. “You start out all positive. But then my wife has to come in and finish it.” The furniture, he means, not the metaphorical pasta.

Which reminds him: “Monkey?” he calls to his wife, “Am I good at anything manly?”

“You’re a good protector,” she says. “I always feel safe with you.”

“There you go,” he says, mock-triumphantly, “I’m a protector.”

When reports came out last month about declining ebook sales, many reasons were offered up, from higher pricing to the resurgence of bookstores to more efficient distribution of paper books to increased competition from TV’s continued renaissance, Facebook, Snapchat, and an embarrassment of #longread riches. What I didn’t hear a whole lot about was how the experience of reading ebooks and paper books compared, particularly in regard to the Kindle’s frustrating reading experience not living up to its promise. What if people are reading fewer ebooks because the user experience of ebook reading isn’t great?

Luckily, Craig Mod has stepped into this gap with a piece asking why digital books have stopped evolving. As Mod notes, paper books still beat out digital ones in many ways and the industry (i.e. Amazon) hasn’t made much progress in addressing them.

The object – a dense, felled tree, wrapped in royal blue cloth – requires two hands to hold. The inner volume swooshes from its slipcase. And then the thing opens like some blessed walking path into intricate endpages, heavystock half-titles, and multi-page die-cuts, shepherding you towards the table of contents. Behbehani utilitises all the qualities of print to create a procession. By the time you arrive at chapter one, you are entranced.

Contrast this with opening a Kindle book – there is no procession, and often no cover. You are sometimes thrown into the first chapter, sometimes into the middle of the front matter. Wherein every step of opening The Conference of the Birds fills one with delight – delight at what one is seeing and what one anticipates to come – opening a Kindle book frustrates. Often, you have to swipe or tap back a dozen pages to be sure you haven’t missed anything.

The Kindle is a book reading machine, but it’s also a portable book store. 1 Which is of great benefit to Amazon but also of some small benefit to readers…if I want to read, say, To Kill A Mockingbird right now, the Kindle would have it to me in less than a minute. But what if, instead, the Kindle was more of a book club than a store? Or a reading buddy? I bet something like that done well would encourage reading even more than instantaneous book delivery.

To me, Amazon seems exactly the wrong sort of company to make an ebook reader 2 with a really great reading experience. They don’t have the right culture and they don’t have the design-oriented mindset. They’re a low-margin business focused on products and customers, not books and readers. There’s no one with any real influence at Amazon who is passionately advocating for the reader. Amazon is leaving an incredible opportunity on the table here, which is a real bummer for the millions of people who don’t think of themselves as customers and turn to books for delight, escape, enrichment, transformation, and many other things. No wonder they’re turning back to paper books, which have a 500-year track record for providing such experiences.

PS. Make sure you read Mod’s whole piece…you don’t want to miss the bit about future MacArthur Genius Bret Victor’s magic bookshelf. <3

And it’s a weird sort of store where you don’t really own what you buy…it’s really more of a long-term lease. Which would be fine…except that Amazon doesn’t call it that.↩