This American Life: "Alien Experiment"
Monday, February 6, 2012
Jack Hitt explores Alabama’s immigration bill, HB56. Great segment.
David Carr: "At BuzzFeed, the Significant and the Silly"
Monday, February 6, 2012
From this NYT look at the evolving Buzzfeed: As the consumer Web has matured, readers have become minipublishers, using social media platforms to share information they think will entertain and enlighten their friends. No longer is it just about so-called sticky content that keeps readers around, or even clicky content that causes them to hit a link; it’s also about serving up content that is spreadable. Hit the right note, and your readers become like bees, stopping by your site to grab links and heading back out on the Web to pollinate other platforms.
Evgeny Morozov: "The Death of the Cyberflâneur"
Sunday, February 5, 2012
An interesting piece published in today’s NYT: As the popular technology blogger Robert Scoble explained in a recent post defending frictionless sharing, “The new world is you just open up Facebook and everything you care about will be streaming down the screen.” This is the very stance that is killing cyberflânerie: the whole point of the flâneur’s wanderings is that he does not know what he cares about. Reminded me a bit of the “serendipity” exchanges from 2006.
Dahlia Lithwick: "Colbert v. the Court"
Friday, February 3, 2012
A sharp summing up. It’s interesting to learn that Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion stated, presciently, that “fiction and caricature can be a powerful force.”
Building a Mind Created in Words
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Two passages, among many, that struck me in William H. Gass’ wonderful new essay collection Life Sentences: Literary Judgements and Accounts: From “The Literary Miracle”: Emerson’s essays build the mind that thinks them. It is that mind that is the miracle that interests me. Did he think the thinker who then thinks his thoughts? “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.
Nicholas Carr: "Why publishers should give away ebooks"
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Kind of. Readers today are forced to choose between buying a physical book or an ebook, but a lot of them would really like to have both on hand - so they’d be able, for instance, to curl up with the print edition while at home (and keep it on their shelves) but also be able to load the ebook onto their e-reader when they go on a trip. In fact, bundling a free electronic copy with a physical product would have a much bigger impact in the book business than in the music business.
Franzen on Books, E-Books, and Permanence
Monday, January 30, 2012
Jonathan Franzen, regretting the rise (and, it seems, existence) of e-books: Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough. For serious readers, Franzen said, “a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience”.
Emily Nussbaum on "Downton Abbey"
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Really liking Nussbaum’s work in her new role as The New Yorker’s TV critic: Like “Luck,” “Downton Abbey” arrives wrapped in the shiny foil of cachet TV (PBS, WWI, tea and corsets!). But the British series, about the aristocratic Crawley family and their titular home, goes down so easily that it’s a bit like scarfing handfuls of caramel corn while swigging champagne. To let us know that we’re safely in the Masterpiece zone, Laura Linney, clad in a black cocktail dress, introduces each episode with a tense grin, as if welcoming us to a PBS fund-raiser, which I suppose she is.