April 2010
2 posts
Test message from Blackberry Tumblr app
This is really nice actually.
January 2010
19 posts
Who is archiving all this stuff?
Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.
Posthumous Hosting and Digital Culture
Offline Book "Lending" Costs US Publishers Nearly...
Well-played:
Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher’s Weekly that ‘publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online book piracy’ comes a sudden realization of a much larger threat to the viability of the book industry. Apparently, over 2 billion books were ‘loaned’ last year by a cabal of organizations found in nearly every American city and town....
Google Gets on the Right Side of History
One night in the mid-1990s when I was working as a journalist in Beijing, I went out to dinner with some Chinese friends. I had just finished reading a book called “The File” by the British historian Timothy Garton Ash. It’s about what happened in East Berlin after the Berlin Wall came down and everybody could see the files the Stasi had been keeping all those years. People...
Amish thoughts on technology
Kevin Kelly:
One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs (yes he knew about them) was that “you got messages rather than conversations.” That’s about as an accurate summation of our times as any. Henry, his long white beard contrasting with his young bright eyes told me, “If I had a TV, I’d watch it.” What could be simpler?
What manhood means in different countries
From feminist-writer Susan Faludi’s Stiffed: The Betrayl of the American Man:
As anthropologist David D. Gilmore demonstrated in Manhood in the Making, his comprehensive cross-cultural survey of masculine ideals, manliness has been expressed as laboring-class loyalty in Spain, as diligence and discipline in Japan, as dependence on life outside the home in the company of men in Cyprus, as...
“There’s an opportunity here to create a web search engine that punishes results...”
– Bob Pritchett: Google destroyed the web (via trenchant)
“When asked his actual name, Ishi had said, “I have none, because there...”
– Ishi | Futility Closet
Never really thought of Jersey Shore and other...
Why shouldn’t kids watch reality TV? Because kids need better role models, right? But that’s assuming kids are stupid.
This from the New York Times on reasons to like MTV’s over-stereotyped Italian-American reality show, Jersey Shore:
3. YOUNG PEOPLE NEED BAD EXAMPLES. Too many children today are reaching their teenage years armed only with a Disney definition of “bad person”:...
“Here’s to books, the cheapest vacation you can buy.”
– Charlaine Harris (via kari-shma)
Whole Foods. Whole Paradox.
Although I informally boycott the place, for nine months I spent nearly every other day eating at the flagship Whole Foods in Austin, Texas. I struggled to understand the place and the Whole experience, but Nick Paumgarten describes it a hundred times better than I could have ever comprehended:
Depending on where you are on the spectrum of epicurean cultural politics, you may consider Whole Foods...
Executive compensation as a multiple of average...
Whether or not “enlightened capitalism” is an oxymoron, this is brilliant:
Mackey [Whole Foods CEO], an outspoken critic of executive overcompensation, pays himself a dollar a year. No one at the company can have a salary more than nineteen times what the average team member makes. (On average, an S. & P. 500 C.E.O. makes three hundred and nineteen times what a production...
"best consumed in silos."
I did a Google search for writers reviewing their 2009 predictions and Ed Kholer made some interesting predictions about social networks:
3. FriendFeed will peak (if it hasn’t already) as people realize some content is best consumed in silos.
4. Tumblr will double in traffic & users as people catch on to how easy it is to find and share really interesting stuff among friends.
Correct....
“Men learn to fall in love with the woman they’re attracted to. Women learn...”
– from Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape
The Tablet →
One of Jon Gruber’s best articles. Love that he posted it on Dec. 31, 2009. Good way to cap a year end’s worth of hubub on Apple’s next Jesus device.
(via vocino)