Audio For Dummies

Tim says,

Copyblogger lays out some guidelines for producing engaging podcasts or other audio recordings. Please note that if you maximize every suggestion, you wind up with a perfect episode of Radio Lab. This seems like a halfway-decent validation of their merit.

Via iLibrarian.

Commenting on Comments

Robin says,

Virginia Heffernan has a blog post up about comments and how generally awful they are, especially on big news websites. I think her observation is fair, and raises a good larger question: What's the future of comments on the web? I think they're pretty broken right now, especially at scale. They're not really conversations at all; they're a cross between an old-school web guestbook (people merely registering their existence) and a black hole (scraps of text flung into the void, never to be seen or heard from again).

But, let's not talk about it here.

I left a comment on the post, and I think you should do the same. Snarkmarket readers know something about commenting; I think we've got some of the best commenters around, and together we have some of the best conversations.

And there's something delightfully meta about this post about bad comments having the best comments ever.

Let's make it happen.

P.S. I believe, broadly, in the value of moderation, but man, it's annoying that my comment is not posted over on the NYT yet. If you don't see it, wait a few minutes. Not a few hours, I hope.

Please, More Literary Theory Radio Shows, Please

Tim says,

If you've got twenty-five minutes to listen to two smart + funny people talk about Marcel Duchamp, Ezra Pound, comparative literature, American poetry, and French philosophy, give this podcast a whirl. It's by two of my teachers (and friends, and readers), the poet Charles Bernstein and literary critic Jean-Michel Rabaté. It's an intelligent and charming interview that could be subtitled "the stuff Tim thinks about all of the time."

The Loss Of Routine Beauty

Tim says,

Wyatt Mason looks at artists' books, and sighs:

Not that long ago, all books were handmade; now, most of the work is performed by armies of cleverly machined presses and binderies. Lost, in that consumptive progression, is not the beautiful book -- for many special books made by machine do manage to be beautiful objects that function well. Lost is the ordinary book being routinely beautiful.

Moving Furniture

Robin says,

Lots of formal photos in this TIME magazine gallery of Obama's first 100 days. But I like this one the best.

Rats, I Ran Out of Words

Robin says,

Speaking of writing: I've been thinking about video, the grammar of video, video-as-writing, etc. a lot lately (as usual), and it really is crazy how lame and limited video editing is at this moment in history.

The analogy to writing (I know it's a stretch): If writing today were like video editing today, you'd have to start by going out and hunting down all the words you wanted to use -- finding them in other books, on posters, on billboards, and cutting them out. Then you'd sit down and paste them together in a different order. And if you ran out? Or realized you needed a word you didn't have? Too bad!

This is why I'm excited for some sort of future "synthetic cinema" -- a super-extrapolated version of machinima. If you're at your video-writing desk at 2 a.m. and something amazing occurs to you, some wonderful turn of phrase (as it were), you'll be able to simply... make it.

Waltz

Robin says,

Just read a random entry on Zoe Finkel's blog about waltzing and getting in over your head. It's amazingly good writing.

On the continuum of writing, there is, of course, bad writing; then there's good writing; then there's really good writing that knows it's really good writing, that telegraphs its mastery ("Aha, did you see that thing I just did? With the words? Of course you did!"); and then there's a kind of good writing beyond that, which sort of punctures the veil and achieves a special kind of ease and grace. I'm pretty sure this is an example.

It also has plenty of what Roy Peter Clark describes as "gold coins" (it's writing tool #19) -- little asides, little moments of delight, not necessarily crucial to the central story. Zoe's image of men dancing with other men, and the allusion to Yale, is an example.

A Public Broadcasting Facelift

Tim says,

PBS is now bringing their game for online video. Not a ton of stuff up yet, but worth watching. Via.

Criminal Incuriosity

Tim says,

How did we get here?

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved -- not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees -- investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans...

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

The process was "a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm," a former C.I.A. official said.

Hilzoy writes:

In general, I wouldn't think it was a problem not to know the origins of a technique, except for political reasons. But not knowing that the SERE program was designed to help soldiers withstand interrogations that had produced false confessions is inexcusable, especially since this was our program. Not knowing that the psychologist who persuaded the CIA to go for this had never conducted an actual interrogation is similarly mind-boggling. The fact that no one knew what the actual interrogators thought of all this is standard for the Bush administration, but it should not have been.

There are all sorts of experts in our government, including experts on interrogation. There's also more than enough institutional memory to inform the administration about the origins of the SERE program. But the Bush administration, typically, did not bother with them. They preferred to make things up as they went along, because, after all, they always knew better.

This is what happens when we stop demanding minimal competence in our Presidents; when we start caring more about who we would rather have a beer with than, oh, who would be most likely to seek out the best advice and listen to all sides of an argument before making an important decision, or whose judgment we can trust. We end up with people who toss aside our most fundamental values because someone who has never conducted an interrogation before thinks it might be a good idea, and no one bothers to do the basic background research on what he proposes.

Nerds Only: Great Java Libraries

Robin says,

This applies only to a small sub-fraction of SMKT readers, but if you're one of them: These Java libraries by Karsten Schmidt, a.k.a. toxi, comprise a sort of Batman utility belt of graphics, geometry, physics, and more. I have used them happily in dozens of dorky experiments -- and now they're freshly upgraded.

Pulitzer for PolitiFact

Robin says,

My usual take on the Pulitzer Prizes are that they're cool and deserved, but in no way useful as a guide for where news ought to go. I'm going to have to modulate that a bit; this year's winner for National Reporting is the St. Pete Times site PolitiFact.

So, to be clear: The 2009 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting went not to a story, but to a reported database presented as a user-friendly website. I actually think one of the tectonic plates that make up journalism's history and culture just shifted a little. Rumblerumblerumble. Very cool.

Where's HBO News?

Robin says,

Hmm. David Simon says hey, wait, HBO charges for content -- and it started doing so in a historical context in which people had gotten all TV for free, free, free for decades. So newspapers should get a clue and start doing the same.

But, this made me wonder: Where's HBO News? Is it the case that HBO just considers news too far from its core area of expertise? Or is it the case that HBO ran the numbers and decided that serious news won't attract the kind of audience they need?

Maybe it's that the market for news is too competitive. Relatively few entities produce engrossing, high-end drama; lots and lots of entities produce news. But, then again, you extend the analogy

and it's like, uh, yeah I would watch that.

Any other theories?

Neomedievalism

Tim says,

Do you know what was great? The Hanseatic League. Do you think we could bring that back, twenty-first century style?:

This diffuse, fractured world will be run more by cities and city-states than countries. Once, Venice and Bruges formed an axis that spurred commercial expansion across Eurasia. Today, just 40 city-regions account for two thirds of the world economy and 90 percent of its innovation. The mighty Hanseatic League, a constellation of well-armed North and Baltic Sea trading hubs in the late Middle Ages, will be reborn as cities such as Hamburg and Dubai form commercial alliances and operate "free zones" across Africa like the ones Dubai Ports World is building. Add in sovereign wealth funds and private military contractors, and you have the agile geopolitical units of a neomedieval world. Even during this global financial crisis, multinational corporations heavily populate the list of the world's largest economic entities; the commercial diplomacy of emerging-market firms such as China's Haier and Mexico's Cemex has already turned North-South relations inside out faster than the nonaligned movement ever did.

Wait -- ninety percent of what, exactly? Innovation units?

Brothers In Arms

Tim says,

Most people who know me well know that I have two brothers, one older, and one younger. We're all oversized, bigbrained, bighearted, redheaded guys with Irish names (Sean Patrick, Timothy Brendan, and Kevin Daniel). Sean's a high school math teacher and football coach; Kevin is a counselor/advisor at a liberal arts college. Sean's two years older, and Kevin's a year and a half younger. They are honestly more like each other than I am like either of them, but since I'm in the middle, I was probably equally close to both of them. Kevin and I shared a room together until I was 16; Sean and I went to college and lived together for three years.

This is a long way to go to say that whenever I read about Rahm Emanuel and his brothers, I smile and smile and smile.

Brand

Robin says,

Steward Brand is so totally cool. A worthy role model. (Thx @EC.)

We Will Learn These Things Together

Robin says,

Oh wow. This just made my week. Jennifer Rensenbrink, author of the New Liberal Arts entry on home economics (which is here and which you'll also be able to get in book form, uh, soon) is writing a new blog about -- you guessed it -- New Home Economics.

My recommendation? Subscribe immediately.

Where's My All-You-Can-Eat Movies?

Tim says,

Farhad Manjoo tries to figure out why nobody's solved the riddle of streaming movies on the internet:

When I called people in the industry this week, I found that many in the movie business understand that online distribution is the future of media. But everything in Hollywood is governed by a byzantine set of contractual relationships between many different kinds of companies—studios, distributors, cable channels, telecom companies, and others. The best way to understand it is to trace what you might call the life cycle of a Hollywood movie, as Starz network spokesman Eric Becker put it to me. We all understand the first couple of steps in this life cycle—first a movie hits theaters and then, a few months later, it comes out on DVD. Around the same time, it also comes out on pay-per-view, available on demand on cable systems, hotel rooms, airplanes, and other devices. Apple's rental store operates under these pay-per-view rules, most of which put a 24-hour limit on movies. The restriction might have made sense back in the days when most people were getting on-demand movies in hotel rooms and the studios didn't want the next night's guest piggybacking on rentals. It doesn't make much sense when you're getting the movie on your MacBook. But many of the contracts were written years ago, and they don't reflect the current technology.

A movie will stay in the pay-per-view market for just a few months; after that, it goes to the premium channels, which get a 15- to 18-month exclusive window in which to show the film. That's why you can't get older titles through Apple's rental plan—once a movie goes to HBO, Apple loses the right to rent it. (Apple has a much wider range of titles available for sale at $15 each; for-sale movies fall under completely different contracts with studios.) Between them, Starz and HBO have contracts to broadcast about 80 percent of major-studio movies made in America today. Their rights extend for seven years or more. After a movie is broadcast on Starz, it makes a tour of ad-supported networks (like USA, TNT, or one of the big-three broadcast networks) and then goes back to Starz for a second run. Only after that—about a decade after the movie came out in theaters—does it enter its "library" phase, the period when companies like Netflix are allowed to license it for streaming. For most Hollywood releases, then, Netflix essentially gets last dibs on a movie, which explains why many of its films are so stale.

I actually think Netflix Watch Instantly is pretty good. It's got the first two seasons of 30 Rock, the complete Monty Python's Flying Circus, some old Woody Allen and Pasolini movies, The Big Sleep, and The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland. It's not perfect, but neither is Showtime.

Bill Reads Books

Robin says,

Enjoyed this post from Steven Johnson on two levels: One, his excitement at having Bill Clinton articulately discuss his book, "The Invention of Air," and two, Clinton's discussion itself.

This bit, from Clinton, made me laugh:

I'm going to make this point later as I wrap up about the importance of books. But the things books do -- I would argue books are more important in the age of blog sites and tweaks and whatever else they call it -- I read a bunch of them -- because there's more information than ever before, but you can have all the facts in the world in your head. If you don't know how to organize and evaluate, construct an argument, get from A to Z, what you know in your head doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

"Tweaks"! Ha!

And the reason I noted the post in the first place is that I myself am about halfway through "The Invention of Air," and loving it so far. Highly recommended.

Digital Democracy (For Real)

Robin says,

This is actually surprising (and heartening) to me:

For the first time, more than a half the country's voting-age population used the Internet to get political news or get involved in the political process in 2008.

And remember, this kind of change is totally nonlinear -- so the internet is just going to get more important, faster and faster, to politics and democracy.

The WaPo's Jose Antonio Vargas has carved out a pretty excellent beat around this stuff, by the way. He's the one to watch if you're interested in the intersection of democracy and technology.

Winner Take All

Robin says,

Wow. Stephanie Meyer's Twilight (and sequels) accounted for 16% of all book sales in the U.S. in the first three months of 2009.

Probably not that unusual in the weird post-Potter publishing world, I know, but still.

(Via @LaunchBooks.)

The File Is Its Own Name (Whoah)

Robin says,

(I know, I know: It's all media, media, media, and files, files, files around here lately. Think of it as a special thematic issue, like when the NYT Mag is all about movies one weekend. Ours is just two weeks long.)

Computer files: a total aberration. I totally agree!

Photography and Citizenship

Robin says,

Really love this argument, which seems to be that photography helps establish the idea of "lots of other people in your society" which, in turn, helps you understand your own role as a citizen. So that raises the question: How did that work before photography? How has our conception of "everybody else in my country" changed?

This image, linked to from the first post, is also terrific.

And it all makes me think of Nick Calcott's writing about photography at On Shadow, which deserves more time and response -- to come!

Conservation Of Outrage

Tim says,

Speaking of the social life of documents -- Clay Shirky shines a light I didn't quite expect on the roman candle that was #amazonfail:

When trying to explain one’s past actions, hindsight is always 20/400. With that caveat, I will say that the emotional pleasure of using the #amazonfail hashtag was intoxicating. There is no civil rights struggle in the US that matters more to me than the extension of equal rights without regard for sexual orientation. Here was a chance to strike a public blow for that cause, and I didn’t even have to write a check or get up from my chair to do it! I went so far as to publicly suggest a link between the Amazon de-listing and the anti-gay backlash following the legalization of gay marriage in Iowa and Vermont. My friend Nelson Minar called bullshit on my completely worthless speculation, which was the beginning of my realizing how much I’d been seduced by righteousness, and how stupid it had made me.

Eye on the Bailout

Robin says,

ProPublica's Eye on the Bailout. Upon first glance appears pretty cool. In particular, I love the minimalist graph at the very top of the page. It's actually a little bit beautiful.

I do wish it had a page like this, though.

Paris Proof

Robin says,

Angela at AdRants blogged the heck out of my session at ad:Tech Paris on Monday -- complete with video!

My part of the session was basically my mini-manifesto for the future of advertising, disguised as a look back from ad:Tech 2019. (I don't know how to tell a story any other way, apparently.) Angela's video snippets are a chance to see Prezi in action, if you haven't yet. And watch the first one around 1:10 for a sneak peek of Apple's breakthrough product in 2011.

Unfortunately, no blog posts have yet been produced chronicling the baguette-eating and boulevard-wandering that has followed.

Thousand-Dollar Steampunk Idea

Tim says,

Teletwitter (or "Twittergraph"): A multiplatform twitter client that pounds out received tweets like an oldtimey telegraph/teletype machine. Morse code optional. Also sheds punctuation formats in telegram style & replaces period with STOP

Leaving Him

Tim says,

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings is so perceptive, it transcends any artifact of professional training and reveals a purity of attention to and sympathy with the human universe. Consider her long post on abusive relationships:

So imagine yourself, in love with someone, on your honeymoon or pregnant, when suddenly this guy just goes ballistic, often for very little reason, and hits you. For a lot of women, this is profoundly shocking and disorienting. There are things that are comprehensible parts of the world, even if they're rare, like having your car stolen; and then there are things that are unexpected in a completely different sense, like having your car turn into an elephant before your eyes: things that make you wonder whether you're completely crazy. Being beaten up by someone who apparently loves you is one of those things.

What this means is that precisely when a woman needs as much confidence in her own judgment as she can muster, the rug is completely pulled out from under her. And it's not just that she questions her judgment because she got involved with this guy in the first place; she questions her judgment because something so completely alien to the world she thinks she knows has just happened.

Yoda Weather

Robin says,

My favorite new adjective is employed in the following sentence:

Today has been a rainy, dark Dagobavian murk.

Except the author goes on to say it's cold, which doesn't seem right. Dagoba was a jungle planet, right? I think we need to take this one head-on. Dagobavian is for steamy, sinister summer nights. Use it.

Fail Fast

Robin says,

MSU student Megan Gebhart writes up a bit more of my talk from a couple weeks ago -- this part about prototyping, iterative development, and the imperative to fail fast.

Megan did a great job drawing out the main points (and made some explanatory graphics to go along with them); overall, I'm think this is probably an improvement on the original! And I like this analogy, which is all hers:

It’s like painting a small section of your wall before you decide to paint the whole house. Instead of sitting around hoping you’re making the right choice, try it out!

And, credit where it's due: I was basically channeling the d.school.

Site-Specific Short Stories

Robin says,

Over at BLDGBLOG, Nicola Twilley writes about a set of short stories just commissioned for the Royal Parks in London. How completely cool: Imagine reading a short story set in a park while walking through it. If I was writing one I'd do the scenes such that you could actually walk the story as you read it -- my characters and your feet keeping pace. They're in the Botanical Gardens. You're in the Botanical Gardens. Walk faster! Read slower!

Better yet if this kind of work isn't commissioned, of course; ideally, you want your site-specific fiction to be organic, to exist entirely because of the irresistible pull of a place on some writerly mind.

But, I'll take work-for-hire in a pinch.

Bet on Cities

Robin says,

Tentative thesis: Cities, not countries, are the true unit of human civilization. Two data points:

• The book Barbarians to Angels, which I tore through whilst SFO-JFK-CDG. The author, Peter Wells, tries to reframe the Dark Ages as not, well, the Dark Ages, but rather as just another period of growth and development. The important bit: Almost all of the important towns of Roman Europe, all the way up into Britain and Scandinavia, just kept on growing during the Dark Ages. There was no great ruin, no abandonment. Just the opposite: There was continuity.
  
  
• And then cross-ref with the percolating potential of this post over at O'Reilly about participatory planning in cities.

Oh yeah, and maybe also:

• Paris

(Got the book recommendation from @bldgblog, and I pass it along to you.)

First Two

Robin says,

I know I promised baguettes, and this is a particularly dorky thing to be blogging from your Paris hotel room, but I think this sort of stuff is important.

Another little data point from Jakob Nielsen about the way people read online: They generally only process the first two words of items in lists. Those could be products, they could be news articles, they could be philosophical arguments, whatever.

Especially if you work professionally on the web -- vs. blogging intermittently -- it's really important to understand just how strange our brains and eyes become when we open up a browser. We turn into these crazed, ravenous info-squirrels leaping desperately from branch to branch.

This is of course not to say that all web writing needs to be

• bulleted lists
• with bold words

but rather, just remember: It's not like a book. It's not like a magazine. In fact, it's barely even like reading. It's more like wayfinding in a foreign city -- something I, after today, know a little about -- and you need to design things accordingly.

I can't believe I just wrote this in Paris. I gotta go.

Off to Paris

Robin says,

OK, I'm off to Paris in a few hours. Expect light posting from me this week. And expect those posts to mainly be baguette reviews.

If you live in Paris, or know somebody cool who does -- drop me a line! Comment here, or email robin at snarkmarket dot com.

Method to Madness

Robin says,

I love the sound of this, and plan to try it:

I remove my glasses, pull a stocking cap down over my eyes, and type the first draft single-spaced on the yellow paper in the actual and metaphorical darkness behind my closed eyes, trying to avoid being distracted by syntax or diction or punctuation or grammar or spelling or word choice or anything else that would block the immediate delivery of the story.

The author uses a typewriter, but this intentional blinding seems even more appealing in the context of a laptop. These things are wonderful, terrible distraction machines, and while you can always subvert technology with more technology, I think a stocking cap over the eyes sounds just about right.

Tokyo!

Matt says,

Something about the Tokyo! trailer seemed pretty Robin-esque to me:

So, Sloan, how's my Ro-dar? Planning to see this? Seen it already?

By the way, I caught this in the trailers before The Class, which is just as marvelous as everybody says it is.

Thanks, Monkey

Robin says,

Even the G20 protesters like Obama:

"He's got good morals," conceded a graffiti artist called Monkey, while helping his friend scale a traffic light and drape a banner: it depicted a grim reaper clutching fistfuls of banknotes.

Prezi Passes the Test

Robin says,

Oh man, you should see my Gmail inbox. It's fully 50% emails to myself with drafts of Snarkmarket posts. There's an avalanche coming. But not yet.

I did, however, want to give a shout out to Prezi. I did my first public prezi-ntation on Wednesday at Web 2.0 Expo. It was projected on a couple of mega-screens (about like this) and wow, it looked great. Really slick and entirely arresting.

The app is open to the public starting next week, and I can't recommend it more highly.

For example: Check out Nina's great prezi about museums and stealing. Seriously, can you even stand to imagine static slides after zooming through that thing? I thought not!

Credit where due: It has been pointed out to me that there's a zoom-y thing in PowerPoint these days. I still prefer Prezi, though, if only because it's so gleefully non-rectilinear. Rotating, twisting, flipping upside down: These things are hard to avoid once you get going with a prezi. I like that.

Tangled Alphabets

Tim says,

Untitled, by Mira Schendel; from a new MOMA retrospective of Schendel and León Ferrari.

The Web Today

Robin says,

Mary Meeker's Web 2.0 presentations are, almost by definition, the ultimate expression of the reigning conventional wisdom about the web. But wow: What an expression. Dense and data-rich: Here's the latest one.

The Age of Ajax

Tim says,

Love this five-year remembrance of the birth of Gmail -- still my favorite thing to use on the web, ever.

So Much News With No Paper To Report It

Tim says,

Auugghh. Gavin at Wordwright links to more bittersweet news about my (and Robin's) hometown:

Maybe once a year, a city has a news day as heavy as the one that just hit Detroit: The White House forced out the chairman of General Motors, word leaked that the administration wanted Chrysler to hitch its fortunes to Fiat, and Michigan State University’s men’s basketball team reached the Final Four, which will be held in Detroit.

All of this news would have landed on hundreds of thousands of Motor City doorsteps and driveways on Monday morning, in the form of The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News.

Would have, that is, except that Monday — of all days — was the long-planned first day of the newspapers’ new strategy for surviving the economic crisis by ending home delivery on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Instead, on those days, they are directing readers to their Web sites and offering a truncated print version at stores, newsstands and street boxes.

We're all going to have to get used to using "news about Detroit" rather than "news from Detroit" more often.

Omission Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

Tim says,

There are a lot of things to recommend Amazon's list of the 100 best indie rock albums ever, but the absence of any albums by The Smiths, Dinosaur Jr., or The Flaming Lips is not one of them.

Look At Your Fish

Robin says,

Love this photo. I keep looking at it and thinking it's a fish. Then I convince myself it's not. But then I glance again and think, "Wait, is that a fish?"

Grade Distortion

Tim says,

Tim Harford at the Financial Times finds le mot juste -- not grade inflation, but grade distortion:

Grade distortion is a serious affair. Students and their teachers are forced to switch to grey market transactions denominated in alternative currencies: the letter of recommendation, for example. Like most alternative currencies, these are a hassle.

Grade distortions, like price distortions, destroy information and oblige people to look in strange places for some signal amid the noise. Students are judged not on their strongest subjects – A grade, of course – but on whether they also picked up A grades in their weakest. When excellence cannot be displayed, plaudits go instead to those who deliver pat answers without stumbling – politicians in training, presumably.

Via Lone Gunman.

Tekkonkinkreet / Plaid

Robin says,

Pretty obsessed with both this title sequence -- apparently it's just a sliver of the whole thing, so I'm definitely going to track down the movie -- and the accompanying Plaid track (near the end of the post).

From East Lansing to Silicon Valley

Robin says,

I was back in East Lansing last week, first talking to journalism students and then giving a speech to the kids who won the same scholarship I had back in the day.

Lots to say about the experience, but my brain hasn't quite recovered enough to articulate it yet.

But check this out: MSU student Megan Gebhart wrote a blog post about part of one presentation. You're going to click the link and laugh at the post title. Yes, it's in the water out here.

Mo' Betta' Maps

Robin says,

I am absolutely not a GIS nerd, but I like the look of cool cartography, and I like it when people eschew the homogeneity of Google Maps and roll their own, e.g. EveryBlock.

So I especially like Stamen's set of new map themes, particularly Midnight Commander, which looks like the kind of map you'd use to plot an assault on your neighborhood.

With NERF guns, of course.

Now This Sounds Like My Kinda News

Robin says,

Matt, this is awesome:

"What should I know about growth and development in this town?"

After a moment of complicated blinking and throat-clearing (code, I figured, for "Is this dude serious?" "'Fraid so."), they begin to speak. What ensues is brilliant -- an hour-and-a-half stream-of-consciousness firehose of names, infrastructure financing mechanisms, development projects, ballot initiatives, and the like. Picture a cinematization of the game SimCity scripted by David Foster Wallace and David Mamet, and you'll sort of get it. I take furious notes, and leave the office to begin assembling what will become more than 800 pages of dossiers on what I just heard.

Change Comes To Manhattan (Brooklyn, Too)

Tim says,

Rents in New York are falling, and credit and other requirements are becoming less strict, even for desirable neighborhoods in Manhattan. The Times even uses the word "bubble" to describe the old world order, which suggests that it's not just the economic downturn but a realistic reevaluation of inflated prices. We've noticed something similar in Philadelphia; people are offering more for less. We might even be able to live somewhere where cabs come, and good restaurants will deliver! Yay.

The story about NYC also includes what I'm pegging as a very artful non-description of a Manhattan brothel: "an acupuncture parlor down the hall that stayed open very, very late and served a male clientele."

You Can't Trust A Man What's Made Of Gas

Tim says,

"The Craziest Space Racists Of All Time" at io9.com offers a decent overview of allegories of race and racism in science fiction -- although apparently racism magically enters sci fi only when it's conscious, explicit, and denounced -- but its real value is its citation of the great Mr Show sketch "Racist in the Year 3000":

A Respectable Format

Robin says,

Alison Bechdel's review of a new memoir in comic format. (Click the image to get the big version.) Superawesomewonderful.

Guest of Cindy Sherman

Tim says,

I love Cindy Sherman, so I'm fascinated by this film; my wife thinks the whole thing is creepy. What do you think?

Death Is Elastic

Tim says,

All you need are signficant differentials in the estate tax.

Young Entrepreneurs

Tim says,

Why can't we buy (and enterprising girls sell) Girl Scout cookies online?

Inanimate Interludes

Robin says,

Via @dsldsl, my new favorite web comic. (For example.) (Also.)

The World Has A New Hegemon

Tim says,

Guess who it is! (And who it isn't, anymore. Maybe.)

English Has A New Preposition

Tim says,

Guess what it is!

Paul Krugman Channels Woody Allen

Tim says,

Blogging for the NYT is a little like writing/directing your own movie:

Via Mark Thoma, Anatole Kaletsky writes:

Smith, Ricardo and Keynes produced no mathematical models.

Now, I have Marshall McLuhan John Maynard Keynes right here. Let’s ask him:

Let Z be the aggregate supply price of the output from employing N men, the relationship between Z and N being written Z = φ(N), which can be called the aggregate supply function. Similarly, let D be the proceeds which entrepreneurs expect to receive from the employment of N men, the relationship between D and N being written D = f(N), which can be called the aggregate demand function...

Brushing the Cat the Wrong Direction

Robin says,

Nico Muhly on grammar:

Anyway, point being, for me, grammar is the opposite of mundane. It's filaments, ligatures, bundles that need to be cherished and played with. Fucking up grammar just seems to me like brushing a cat the wrong direction: is anybody happy then?

P.S. His music is great.

Wounded, They Plan To Prevail

Tim says,

Roger Ebert calls Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart, Chop Shop, Goodbye Solo) "the new great American director." He also tells a great story about Goodbye Solo star Red West:

Souleymane Sy Savané [Solo] is from the Ivory Coast. Red West [William] is from Memphis. We believe it. They fit into their roles like hands into gloves. You look at Red West and think, this man has been waiting all his life to play this role. He is 72, stands 6'2." You may have heard the name. He was a member of Elvis Presley's Memphis Mafia, a friend, driver and bodyguard starting in 1955, who appeared in bit parts in 16 Elvis movies. Since then he has worked for such directors as Robert Altman and Oliver Stone.

"I wanted a real Southerner," Bahrani told me after the film's premiere at Toronto 2008. "I wanted the accent, I wanted the mentality of the South. Red sent a video of himself doing a reading of the first scene. I think I watched it for three seconds; I hit pause and said, this is the guy that I wrote about. This is the guy. I called him; I said, 'Red, can you not point when you do the reading?' And I gave him one other direction, just to see, would he hear what I said and would he do it? He did it, he taped it, he sent it back; he had listened to everything I said. I brought the guy in and, I mean, there was just no doubt about it. He was the man."

Bahrani only asked him once about Elvis. "He told a great story. I think it was Elvis' cousin that was bringing drugs to him in the end, and Red didn't like it, which was one of the big conflicts of their falling-out. He said, the guy brought drugs, and he broke his foot and said, 'I'll work my way from your foot up to your face.'

The other thing you should know about Red West is that he was in Road House, playing a character named Red Webster. That is so bad ass.

The Uses of Silence

Robin says,

Via @howardweaver, James Fallows on the usefulness of silence in interviews.

This is something you always hear at Poynter, and if you've ever had the experience of transcribing one of your own interviews, you know the number one thing you're thinking is: "God, why won't I just shut up? Why am I talking so much?"

It actually takes a lot of self-consciousness and restraint to stay quiet, to draw out silences -- but as journalists (and apparently negotiators, doctors, and pastors alike) will tell you, that's how you get the good stuff.

Everybody in Paris Dresses Like This, Right?

Robin says,

This girl looks like a refugee from the post-global-economic-collapse future. I dig it.

The Real Industry Collapses

Tim says,

Newsprint is dying.

Designers! Always With the Designing!

Robin says,

Forgot to blog this last week: Suzanna LaGasa at Chronicle Books gets great mail.

Flib-flarb

Robin says,

Ah hahahaha. The SuperNews Twitter takedown reminded me that Flib-flarb exists, and that I love it.

Legit Money, Printing Paper

Tim says,

Idris Elba, best known for playing Stringer Bell in seasons 1-3 of The Wire, is now playing Charles Minor, Michael's new boss on The Office. (Which, when you think of it, if David Simon had ever gotten around to telling the story of put-upon postmillennial office workers in America, is essentially the same story.)

Part of Stringer's conceit on The Wire is that he wants to turn drug dealing into a modern business. He wants even his front businesses to run well. But it's still dissonant, to say the least, to watch this Baltimore man-god walk among the paper salesmen in Scranton. Rex and the commenters at Fimoculous cracked me up.

Rex: Yeah, that totally threw me too: Stringer Bell on The Office last night...

kittyholmes: I guess he's finally using all those business classes.

jed: Well, he did run the copy shop.

Rex: HAHAHAHAH!

True.

An Icon Already

Robin says,

The Tata Nano is the cheapest car in the world -- and one of the most striking, too.

I know, I know, a giant swarm of Nanos is the last thing our atmosphere needs... but really, can we deny people a car this slick? Here's a nice slideshow, with factoids, from TIME.

But seriously: The environmental concerns are not insignificant.

King of New York

Tim says,

Nancy Franklin on the not-so-secret geography of NBC's Kings:

Watching the show, you feel a tension as you try to decide whether it's holding a mirror up to the present or whether it's making an argument about where the world may soon be headed. We have already noticed, in the aerial establishing shots of Shiloh, that "Kings" is filmed in Manhattan, and that the city isn't just a film location. It's never stated, but it's clear that Shiloh was New York City, before it was destroyed to the point where even its name disappeared. There are inconsistencies that give you pause: the Time Warner Center is still standing -- in fact, it's the home of the King's court -- but the Empire State Building, I noticed with an actual start, is gone, as is the Chrysler Building. A tall building that resembles the planned Freedom Tower is (thanks to special effects) in midtown. The exterior of the palace is a well-known apartment building, the Apthorp, on the Upper West Side, a block from Zabar's and H & H Bagels. (We don't see those emporiums in the show, but I'm going to assume that they still exist in the world of "Kings"; otherwise, let me tell you, there is real cause for despair in the realm.)

I like the show, but it might be a bad sign for its longevity that even I, who made a point of watching and actually liked the pilot episode, missed the broadcast of episode two last night (and rewatched Lost online with my wife instead). Oops.

The Participatory Panopticon Does Discovery

Robin says,

Wow. The fiery elevator to space, captured from backyards and rooftops, porches and parking lots. (Via.)

New Liberal Arts Mini-Update

Robin says,

Things are cooking along with the New Liberal Arts: Almost all of the entries are done, locked, and looking wonderful. There are just a few more outstanding -- you know who you are. And the design is shaping up, too!

Plus, I've finalized the plan for the secret physical-object surprise -- the little extra that will make the printed book a real treat.

Danger Didion

Robin says,

Fake TV does a White Album mashup, The Beatles vs. Joan Didion.

Mostly an excuse to remind everybody how heart-stopping The Year of Magical Thinking is.

Get Up and Move

Robin says,

Super-interesting article on Russian repatriation in the NYT, mostly because it feels like the setup for a cool novel.

Anyone else get the sense we're about to see a lot more moving around than usual? Global recession, global warming, bursting bubbles, rising powers -- the real map of the world, the map of where people (especially young people) actually live, is about to get re-drawn.

Redesigns

Robin says,

There are about a dozen awesome new businesses lurking in the comments to Jason's question: What could really use redesign?

In particular, I liked the suggestions of the lawnmower and the classroom.

Vocab Quiz

Robin says,

My favorite new (to me) word of 2009 so far: deaccession.

Is This What They Call Cosmic Irony?

Tim says,

You Know It's Bad When ...:

Insurance companies say they have no choice but to honor contracts, and banks are pleading that their assets will be worth more if you just give them a little time.

For anyone, especially in business, who has tried to make those same arguments to insurers and bankers, to no avail, it's painfully rich.

Twelve Angry iPhones

Robin says,

Pretty sure this is what you call a conceptual scoop:

The use of BlackBerrys and iPhones by jurors gathering and sending out information about cases is wreaking havoc on trials around the country, upending deliberations and infuriating judges.

Last week, a building products company asked an Arkansas court to overturn a $12.6 million judgment against it after a juror used Twitter to send updates during the civil trial.

Suuuper interesting. Great work by John Schwartz and the NYT.

The Age of Bespoke Everything

Tim says,

Clive Thompson on Etsy, microbusiness, and personalized aesthetics.

Arise, Father Coughlin

Tim says,

David Frum, Christopher Shea, and Scott Horton look at Glenn Beck and say, yep, here we go.

Machine Man

Robin says,

Max Barry, author of the fun books Jennifer Government and Company, is doing a serial fiction experiment called Machine Man. This is probably worth subscribing to.

Barry, a true nerd, also programmed the web game called Nation States, which consumed approximately 10% of my 2003.

Architect as Spy

Robin says,

@bldgblog summarizes tales of architects as spies after asking this question. Wow, talk about something that's impossible to link to... better click over to his tweet-stream fast, before he posts too much new stuff! It's super-interesting.

Screencasts in Amber

Robin says,

Just a heads up: If the terms "ethnomethodology" and "cognitive anthropology" sound interesting to you (and how could they not??) you should check out Matt Burton's great comment in a recent thread.

In Other News #notsxsw

Robin says,

Matt's been stuck at SXSW, disconnected from the outside world, stuck in an echo chamber of hashtags and open bars. Finally, it came: a cry for help.

Okay, Matt, here are five things you might wanna know about:

1. A space shuttle launched for the first time in a long time, and everybody said it was beautiful.
2. Lotsa people are arguing about AIG bonuses.
3. The chief justice of Pakistan's highest court was reinstated after two years.
4. A coup in Madagascar!
5. Lots of chaos in Bangladesh lately, but the very latest is amazing: After a recording of the prime minister was posted to YouTube, the government decided to... block all of YouTube.

Augmented Reality Toys

Robin says,

Yes, please.

This whole theme is particularly poetic because it plays on what's already magic about kids and toys: There is so much happening that an observer can't see. In a very real sense, toys are already surrounded by layers of augmented reality. But the technology that powers it isn't fancy goggles; it's just imagination.

I remember playing with Transformers and other assorted robots as a kid and being impatient for the "toy fugue state" to kick in. Like reading a book, you know? There's a big difference between the moment after you've just opened a book -- just-reading-each-word-in-order -- and the cruising speed that comes later, when the pages have melted away and something totally different is happening with your eyes and your brain.

The same thing exactly would happen to me as I "got in the groove" of playing with toys. It was sorta like flow for kids! Does this ring a bell with anybody else? Any similar experiences?

Kindle Usability

Robin says,

Jakob Nielsen leaps into action and lays out some tips for Kindle content.

I've been enjoying mine more and more, by the way, but it's interesting to compare it to the iPhone. The iPhone's magic is that it's so flexible, and so good at so many things; the Kindle's magic is that it's so good at one thing (readin' books!) but, honestly, pretty terrible at everything else. I gave up on my Kindle-ized New Yorker subscription, for instance; I found it totally unreadable.

The Ghosts in the Machine

Matt says,

After taking a moment to digest some of the insights from the two awesome panels this morning, this thought is still dancing in my head a bit. At one point, John Mark Josling said (in paraphrase), I want to push the idea of deepening the social aspects of software. What if Photoshop had a sandbox that could enable you to watch designers/photogs editing a photo in real-time, so you could replicate their actions later? What if Fireworks allowed you to view "ghosts" of other editors creating projects?

I'm fascinated by that notion, especially as apps like Photoshop take their place in the cloud. What if you could "follow" Quentin Shih on Photoshop Express, getting notified whenever he was editing an image, and watch his virtual ghost create art in real-time on your screen? Or watch the ghost of Kutiman splicing and editing hundreds of YouTube clips?

This gets back to Robin's notion of the emerging "public artist." It also ties in with my argument about the responsibility of journalists to encode into their work information about how to replicate that work.

The New Haussmann

Tim says,

Nicholas Sarkozy wants to remake "Le Grand Paris":

The challenge however is not to reshape Paris, but rather to extend its inherent beauty to its outskirts, les banlieues -- a web of small villages, some terribly grand and chic (Neuilly, Versailles, Saint Mandé, Vincennes, Saint Germain-en-Laye), others modest and provincial-looking (Montreuil, Pantin, Malakoff, Montrouge, Saint Gervais) and others still, socially ravaged and architecturally dehumanised (La Courneuve, Clichy-sous-bois). And also to link them. But how do you bring together so many different styles and the city's "enormous disparity", as Richard Rogers calls it, into one Grand Paris -- especially when the city is so clearly defined geographically by its gates, shadows of former fortifications, and now le périphérique, the circular road encasing Paris? The simple answer is: by being bold. But also by understanding the fabric of French society and its psyche...

As a Parisian born and bred, I thought the most convincing presentation came from Parisian architect and sometime presidential candidate Roland Castro. He seems the only one to really understand the Parisian mentality, the importance of architecture and politics, grandeur and charm, poetry and citizenship. He not only suggests moving the Elysée Palace to the tough north-eastern suburbs, but also proposes to create new cultural landmarks and governmental buildings, together with a New York-style Central Park on the grim housing project of La Courneuve. The idea is to inject grandeur (as conveyed by the cultural and official institutions) and if possible, beauty, to Paris's many environs.

Via io9.com. You can read about the actual Haussmann here.

Crackle, Meet Sizzle

Robin says,

"Ah, yeah. Nothing like the sizzle of an MP3."

"What's an MP3, dad?"

"You kids and your music clouds..."

This Is Our Media Revolution. Who Will Be Our Manutius? What Our Octavo?

Tim says,

"Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable" - Clay Shirky:

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change -- take a book and shrink it -- was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word, as books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, expanding the market for all publishers, which heightened the value of literacy still further.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn't apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can't predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won't break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren't in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie

.

Also see Shirky ventriloquize our own Matt Thompson: "Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead."

If I Had Invented Music

Matt says,

I'm coming to this late, but hot damn, Dark Was the Night is fantastic. Thanks, Sopheava.

If Robin Had Invented Language

Matt says,

I just ran across Siftables, another Media Lab concept that doesn't suggest any immediate practical applications, but sent my imagination on a little trip. (The closest it got to a destination was this thought: "Wow, our kids are going to have even cooler toys than we did.") "Siftables" lacks poetry, though. Might I recommend "Robinblox" or "Roblox"?

Mr. GOOG

Robin says,

I think Google should use Hal Varian as a spokesman more often. He is awesome. I'm not just saying that because I was an econ major.

Also: Everybody's talking about Google Voice, but don't miss... Google Noticeboard! No seriously, it's cool. Handy app for the parts of the world without 3G. Or dial-up.

Oh Right... Design

Robin says,

Via Kottke, this paste-up of newspaper front pages is really fun, and functional too.

As you know, I am not a fan of the newspaper as a physical format. But I gotta say... Look at those pictures! Look at those fonts! Verdana and Georgia this ain't.

It's arresting how beautiful the pages are -- and how different from each other.

Question to smarter web-heads out there: What's the light at the end of the tunnel for web typography? What technology or standard should I be watching for?

Man, Snarkmarket has been 100% meta-media lately. Will try to change it up a little, I promise.

Beckett in the 1930s

Tim says,

From Gabriel Josipovici's TLS review of Samuel Beckett's Letters (Vol. 1):

In 1929 Beckett had already spent some time in Italy and in Germany, where he had relatives, and, after a dazzling career as a student of French and Italian at Trinity College Dublin, had just settled into a two-year post as exchange lecteur at the École Normale Supérieure where McGreevy, a much older Irishman, had been his predecessor. McGreevy, still living in Paris, had introduced Beckett to many of his friends, including James Joyce and Richard Aldington. The decade that followed was, for Beckett, restless in the extreme. He returned to Dublin, took up and then renounced an academic job at Trinity; wrote a little book on Proust, a great many poems, some of which were published, some stories, including the masterpiece “Dante and the Lobster”, which appeared under the title More Pricks than Kicks, and two novels, the first of which, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, failed to find a publisher, and the second, Murphy, was published as the decade came to an end; tried to settle in London and underwent pyschoanalysis with Wilfred Bion; experienced the death of his beloved father and of a favourite dog; tried again to settle in Dublin; undertook a six-month trip to Germany to study the art in its great museums; and finally settled in Paris, where he met and started living with Suzanne Descheveaux-Dumesnil. Almost at once, war broke out, and in June 1940, along with a large part of the population of Paris, the pair headed south in the face of the oncoming German army. If, at the start of the decade, Beckett was known in Dublin circles as a highly promising academic with an illustrious career ahead of him, by the end of it he was known to a small coterie of Irish and French intellectuals as a bohemian writer of obscure verse and almost equally obscure fiction, a shy, hard-drinking man of remarkable learning and a savage and witty turn of phrase. Had the war engulfed him as it engulfed so many of his contemporaries it is doubtful if we would now be reading his collected letters.

Whew! "The editors have transcribed more than 15,000 letters, written in the course of sixty years from 1929, when Beckett was twenty-three, until his death in 1989. Of these they plan to give us some 2,500 complete and to quote in the notes from a further 5,000." As Beckett said (in one of his letters, naturally) about reading Proust: "To think that I have to contemplate him at stool for 16 volumes!"

The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Typing

Tim says,

James Fallows on technology, tradition, and the simplification of Chinese written characters :

Increasingly, Chinese people don't actually have to write (rite? right?) out these characters by hand. More and more, they key them in with mobile phones or at computers. And when they do that, it's just as easy to 'write' a traditional-style, complex, information-dense character as a streamlined new one. (Reason: you key in clues about the character, either its pronunciation or its root form, and then click to choose the one you want.) So -- according to current arguments -- the technology of computers and mobile phones could actually revive an important, quasi-antique style of writing.

Hmm -- Fallows is definitely one-up on me, since he reads Chinese and I don't, but I wonder whether other considerations (e.g. screen size and corresponding size of characters) might still put some pressure towards some kind of simplification of the character form. A lot of that information-density just turns into noise if it has to be packed into a tiny space.

Alternatively, kids (it's always kids, at first) might start using "abbreviations" that minimize the number of keystrokes required to type useful phrases -- maybe by not choosing the precisely "correct" character but an approximation of it (the root or a related pronunciation or whatever), like our "lol," "brb," "btw," etc.

In short, technology rarely has a purely stabilizing effect on tradition -- it might help block a particular chirographic attempt at reform/revolution, but only to displace it in favor of its own matrix. (And yes, I just quoted Spock from The Wrath of Khan.)

The Future Is Not Just New Ways to Deliver the Same Ol' Stuff

Robin says,

I always love reading about the NYT's talented R&D team, but I'm also always a little disappointed when all of their projects seem to focus on different ways to present and deliver... newspaper articles.

If a news organization isn't thinking about entirely new formats, like Matt is, it's not thinking hard enough.

And I would really like to ban the word "content." It's too convenient. It allows us to abstract away all of the really important details, and assume that, you know, content is this constant thing, an element like hydrogen or carbon, and our job is just to find cool vessels to put it in. And that's totally not the case. The real action is redesigning what goes in the vessel.

Op-ed columns as prezis, anyone?

The Wrong Twenty-Nine-Year-Old

Tim says,

I love the headline announcing that The Atlantic's Ross Douthat would be the Times' new op-ed columnist: "A 29-Year-Old Joins Times Op-Ed Lineup." It's like they hired a talking horse, or this kid!

One of the ironies of this is that Douthat is really just David Brooks with a beard -- not necessarily a bad thing, but he's not very "young" at all. If anything, he's maybe too much the natural candidate; it's weird for the Times to make it out like they're reaching here (while at the same time denying that that's what they're doing).

As for the title of my post -- I'm being a little cheeky, because I'm also twenty-nine, but I don't think the Times should have hired me; if they were looking for a young conservative, I think they should have hired Douthat's Grand New Party co-author Reihan Salam, who is genuinely young and weird in addition to being talented and smart. I'll be happy to be wrong, but I predict that Douthat at the Times will try too hard to be gray and lame; Salam would have been offbeat and fun, like Maureen Dowd is allegedly supposed to be.

I Used To Be Able To Get Into These Parties

Matt says,

Steve Marsh might be the second-best writer in the entire Greater Twin Cities Metropolitan Area. And he's written what might be the best introduction to a magazine website party photo gallery this week. It's insider-y and superficial and pompous and awful and I love it. The event being photographed is the third annual Fashion Fight Night, which I'll let Steve describe:

It's fashion photographer vs. fashion photographer, with each ring holding a photographer, a model, and a team of stylists. Each snapper would shoot for three five-minute rounds, and then their results—the photographs—would be projected on a big screen hanging on the wall, and the crowd would hoot and holler, and the judges would cast their votes and come to a decision. At which point the ring announcer, KFAN radio's Dan "The Common Man" Cole, would lift the arm of the winning photographer.

Retronovation

Tim says,

Don't get dizzy now: Jason Kottke picks up on a word I kind of made up in response to one of his posts and runs with it:

Retronovation n. The conscious process of mining the past to produce methods, ideas, or products which seem novel to the modern mind. Some recent examples include Pepsi Throwback's use of real sugar, Pepsi Natural's glass bottle, and General Mills' introduction of old packaging for some of their cereals. In general, the local & natural food and farming thing that's big right now is all about retronovation...time tested methods that have been reintroduced to make food that is closer to what people used to eat. (I'm sure there are non-food examples as well, but I can't think of any.)

No sooner does Jason oh-so-gently throw down the gauntlet than Waxy, who almost certainly meant nothing of the kind, answers the question by linking to an amazing post about a transcript of a story conference between George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan about Raiders of the Lost Ark:

(Key: G = George; S = Steven; L = Larry)

G — The thing with this is, we want to make a very believable character. We want him to be extremely good at what he does, as is the Clint Eastwood character or the James Bond character. James Bond and the man with no name were very good at what they did. They were very, fast with a gun. they were very slick, they were very professional. They were Supermen.

S — Like Mifune.

G — Yes, like Mifune. He's a real professional. He's really good. And that is the key to the whole thing. That's something you don't see that much anymore.

Mining 1930s throwaway serials and 60s genre films to create the blueprint for 1980s blockbusters = retronovation, definitely.

But while we're on the subject, let me say a little about the word itself. I write a lot of things super-fast. But I toiled over this word. "Retrovation"? I asked. "Retrinnovation"? It was Mayostard/Mustardayonnaise all over again. "Retronovation" is the clear winner, not only because it sounds better, but because it's etymologically correct: retro + nova => "backwards new." (Or, "return to begin.") Also, hats off to Jason for omitting the hyphen (i.e. "retro-novation"). Fie on the hyphen! The hyphen is only there to draw attention. In fact, I've retronovatively changed the word in my original post to scrap the hyphen I put there. Vive retronovation! Old is the new now!

Now THAT'S Metadata

Robin says,

I want an iTunes list view that looks like this.

Facebook Sociology

Robin says,

Super-interesting Facebook usage data from Cameron Marlowe. I find it reassuring that even FB users with hundreds and hundreds of connections only maintain reciprocal communications with around a dozen of them. (Via Waxy.)

Hacking Your Own Comfort Level into the System

Robin says,

Oh man, I am super-proud of myself. Yesterday I hacked up a Ruby script that loads my Twitter feed and deletes any tweets more than a week old that I haven't marked as favorites. It's set to run every few hours.

For me, this is perfect: Twitter is now totally ephemeral, a stream of real-time notes that disappear after their utility is spent, instead of piling up like so many 140-character skeletons in the cyber-closet.

It's more like a live conversation than an email exchange, actually! Just words floating up into the night air...

Am I the only one who feels this way? Every time I looked at my tweet tally -- 300, 400, 500 -- I'd think: "Ugh. What is all that stuff back there?"

Deliberately Unsustainable Business Models

Robin says,

Nina Simon on the need to sometimes burn bright:

I once asked Eric Siegel, the Director of the New York Hall of Science, why museums are rarely innovative shining stars on the cutting edge of culture. He commented that as non-profits, museums are built to survive, not to succeed. Unlike startups and rock stars, museums aren't structured to shoot for the moon and burn up trying. They're made to plod along. Maybe it's time to change that.

If you're not reading Nina's Museum 2.0 blog... you should be!

Capitalism and the Clock

Robin says,

Oh, this is just too good. Neil Postman talks about the invention of the clock:

But what the monks did not realize is that the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours but also of synchronizing and controlling the actions of men. And so, by the middle of the 14th century, the clock had moved outside the walls of the monastery, and brought a new and precise regularity to the life of the workman and the merchant. The mechanical clock made possible the idea of regular production, regular working hours, and a standardized product. Without the clock, capitalism would have been quite impossible.

I mean, on the most basic level, imagine a world without clocks. Talk about the fish not being able to see the water anymore. Wow.

It's from a speech Postman gave way back in 1990. And the clock thing is really just an aside; the real subject is computers, information, means and ends, and almost every paragraph is blockquote-worthy.

But I'll pick this one:

Here is what Henry David Thoreau told us: "All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end." Here is what Goethe told us: "One should, each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it is possible, speak a few reasonable words." And here is what Socrates told us: "The unexamined life is not worth living." And here is what the prophet Micah told us: "What does the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?" And I can tell you -- if I had the time (although you all know it well enough) -- what Confucius, Isaiah, Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, Spinoza and Shakespeare told us. It is all the same: There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.

Yeah. The future needs to be more than ease.

The Detroit Unreal Estate Agency

Robin says,

Detroit's glimmer of hope... or its last gasp?

In a way, a strange, new American dream can be found here, amid the crumbling, semi-majestic ruins of a half-century's industrial decline. The good news is that, almost magically, dreamers are already showing up. Mitch and Gina have already been approached by some Germans who want to build a giant two-story-tall beehive. Mitch thinks he knows just the spot for it.

Actually, the real glimmer of hope is the "large, stable Bangladeshi community" mentioned in the op-ed. People! Detroit needs people!

North by Northwest, Then West Some More

Tim says,

New York to San Francisco in one week on an Amtrak sleeper car. My wife forwarded me this email with one sentence: "This is my dream trip."

The Future of Video

Robin says,

Spending the day at IFTF talking about the future of video. Follow along on Twitter and let me know if there's anything you want to ask, or pitch in! I'll be your man on the inside.

Augmented Reality Advertising

Robin says,

It's the next big thing!

The Dow Knows All

Robin says,

Jon Stewart still sometimes hits exactly on the geist of our zeit. Suuuper funny. And yes, he basically agrees with Tim.

Cologne, Drezden, Grozny

Tim says,

The incomparable Eileen Joy, on rebuilding modern ruins:

Some time yesterday afternoon, the six-story Cologne Archives, housing documents dating as far back as the tenth century, as well as the private papers of writers such as Karl Marx, Hegel, and Heinrich Böll, and also all of the minutes taken at Cologne town council meetings since 1376, collapsed as if hit by a missile, only there was no missile, but rather, some sort of structural flaw that caused the building to start cracking and tumbling down. Most visitors, plus some construction workers on the roof, were able to get out in time, although two or three persons may be buried underneath the rubble. Ironically, the Archives contained many documents that had been recuperated from library buildings destroyed by Allied bombing during the Second World War, and a small nuclear bomb-proof room that had been constructed in the basement to house the most rare materials was, at the time of the building's collapse, only being used to store cleaning materials.

Wow the Future Wow Wow

Robin says,

Jason points to ROBOTS!! at the Big Picture. This one is my favorite, hands-down. All of these pictures look like the Future, but this one looks like The Shiny Future.

Get Off the Bus

Robin says,

There are few things more useful than a clear, candid case study -- especially in domains full of talk and theorizing. Case (study) in point: Amanda Michel's CJR post-mortem on the Huffington Post's Off the Bus citizen journalism project, which she led.

Here's a taste:

OTB was the fourth organization I had launched, and I had become a working existentialist: you are what you do. Rather than write manifestos or abstract guidelines, I focused our membership on immediate goals and challenges. Our projects built a culture based on journalistic standards that drew heavily, but not exclusively, from so-called Old Media. We sent back pieces for rewrites and subjected our contributors to different degrees of editing. Deadlines and assignments weren't just practical necessities; they were our best marketing tools. [..]

Stories, not technology, were our best organizing tools.

What I love about this piece is that it's fully "operationalized" -- it's almost a guidebook to running an operation like this. Nicely done.

Oh yeah, and: Amanda is joining ProPublica!

Too Old to Teach

Matt says,

The moral of Paul Tough's stellar Whatever It Takes might be that sixth grade is far too late to start instilling sound learning habits in a student who hasn't had a good educational foundation. Geoffrey Canada's quixotic quest to bring left-behind sixth-graders up to their grade level in reading and math is somewhat heartbreaking. He ends the book still hoping that it's possible to accomplish, but I finished it much less optimistic.

But this Phawker series is a hellish look at what happens after we've stopped trying.

Time and Materials

Robin says,

For my money, this is 10X cooler than Girl Talk: Kutiman makes amazing original songs out of YouTube music clips. I've seen videos sorta like these before, but none this accomplished.

I think my favorite is track six. Wow.

Also, he explains the process.

Via @zefrank.

Inside Bear McCreary's Brain

Robin says,

I'm gonna return to this theme of the new creativity, and the ways we're getting to see inside the creative process these days.

Bear McCreary, who writes the music for Battlestar Galactica, has an epic, three-part series of posts up about the latest episode. The plot hinged on music and music-making:

I admit I wrote these entries for myself, because this episode truly changed my life and my perspective on what music can accomplish in film and television.

It's a lot to read, and probably not, er, penetrable if you're not a Battlestar Galactica fan, but there are some really interesting, nuanced observations to be had if you are. It's like a DVD commentary super-expanded into nine extra dimensions of space and time. Here's part one; part three was my favorite. Via @flyjetalone.

While we're at it: You always wondered what the Sesame Street writing process was like, didn't you?

Note to Self

Robin says,

Do you, like me, send a lot of email to yourself? Links, notes, ideas, to-dos?

If no: Disregard.

If yes: So, in Gmail, you accomplish this by typing "me" into the to: field. And I just figured something out. If you open your Gmail contacts and change the "Name" field for your own address to something quick and unique, you accomplish two things: One, eliminate the risk of sending personal to-dos to friends whose names begin with the letters M-E -- which I have done. (I send a lot of these. And I send them very quickly.) Two, make it quicker to type. For instance, my new alias for my own address is "QQ" -- totally unique, and a lightning-fast double key-tap! Especially on the iPhone.

P.S. Please call me QQ from now on.

New Liberal Arts on Michigan Public Radio

Robin says,

Hey, awesome! Jennifer Guerra at Michigan Radio did a piece on the new liberal arts, keyed to our book project, and it aired this morning. It features me, Gavin, and Emily Zinneman, who teaches creative writing at University of Michigan:

"So much of creative writing -- especially stories -- is about character," explains Zinnemann. "And that's something that the students have a hard time understanding sometimes. But Facebook is a really familiar language that all the students speak. I feel like students are familiar in reading character and picking up on real subtle clues the way that grad students in English might read Shakespeare. They read Facebook in the same sort of way."

I love it!

Anyway, a big thank you to Jennifer. And do check out her story.

And! Another NLA book update coming later this week.

College and University Roundup

Tim says,

A fistful of education-related tabs that have been sitting in my RSS reader, waiting for me to say something insightful about them:

• The Library Web Site of the Future (Inside Higher Ed): "Several years ago academic institutions shifted control of their Web sites from technology wizards to marketing gurus. At the time there was backlash. The change in outlook was perceived as a corporate sellout, a philosophical transformation of the university Web site from candid campus snapshot to soulless advertiser of campus wares to those who would buy into the brand... I was one of the resisters. Now I think the marketing people got it right. The first thing librarians must do after ending the pretense that the library Web site succeeds in connecting people to content is understand how and why the institutional homepage has improved and what we can learn from it. Doing so will allow academic libraries to discover answers to that first question; how to create user community awareness about the electronic resources in which the institution heavily invests." My thoughts: Isn't it weird to have a portal at all? Why not something like Firefox's Ubiquity, that just lets you type "pubmed liver cancer" to connect directly to the resource? (Note: part of the genius of Ubiquity is that it shows you what commands are possible! it is potentially more user-friendly than any drilldown portal.)
• To Keep Students, Colleges Cut Anything But Aid (New York Times): "The increases highlight the hand-to-mouth existence of many of the nation's smaller and less well-known institutions. With only tiny endowments, they need full enrollment to survive, and they are anxious to prevent top students from going elsewhere. Falling even a few students short of expectations can mean laying off faculty, eliminating courses or shelving planned expansions. 'The last thing colleges and universities are going to cut this year is financial aid,' said Kathy Kurz, an enrollment consultant to colleges. 'Most of them recognize that their discount rates are going to go up, but they'd rather have a discounted person in the seat than no one in the seat.'" My thoughts: It's weird. If students don't enroll, we'll have to lay off faculty. So, in order to pay for an increased aid budget, we must lay off faculty.
• In Tough Times, Humanities Must Justify Their Worth (NYT): "As money tightens, the humanities may increasingly return to being what they were at the beginning of the last century, when only a minuscule portion of the population attended college: namely, the province of the wealthy. That may be unfortunate but inevitable, Mr. Kronman said. The essence of a humanities education -- reading the great literary and philosophical works and coming 'to grips with the question of what living is for' -- may become 'a great luxury that many cannot afford.'" My thoughts: Boooooo. This article, like its retrograde view of what the humanities are about, stinks.
• See Also: Siamese Twins (Wyatt Mason/Harpers): "Fowler's Modern English Usage, in any of its incarnations, is pure pleasure. There's doubtless a medicinal value to its entries, but they entertain so deeply and purely that it all goes down very sweetly. Over the years, I'm sure I've read it more for pleasure than with purpose, less in the hope of resolving a confusion over 'pleonasm' than to discover that 'pleonasm' was something at all. Where the New Oxford American Dictionary defines the term as 'the use of more words than are necessary to convey meaning, either as a fault of style or for emphasis,' Fowler's offers a little lesson." My thoughts: I love this.
• Collective Graduate School Action (The Economist): "If you're going to go back to school, now is the time to do it. Not only is the opportunity cost of the time spent extremely low -- wages aren't likely to rise any time soon, and there may not be a job available anyway -- but so to is the opportunity cost of the money invested. What, you'd rather have that tuition sitting in the market right now? Or in a home?" My thoughts: Clearly, it depends on the school and your goals. But not everyone should listen to that siren song. I entered graduate school during the last Big Recession. Now I'm leaving during the next Great Depression. There are no sure-fire ways to ride these out -- and a dissertation can be as much an anchor as a lifeboat.
  
  Comments (0) | Permasnark | Posted: 10:50 AM

The Future, It Will Be So Easy

Robin says,

It's hard not to be stirred by Microsoft's video vision of the year 2019 -- I mean, listen to that music! -- but, really, it's quite empty. To be fair, it's a vision of the future of productivity, so by definition it's all process, no product. But even so... is our high-tech future really just an asymptotic approach to zero effort? Is it only about making things easier than they already are?

I can't decide if that's utopian or dystopian.

Related: If you live in SF... check it out!

Free Books!

Robin says,

My friend Ohad has a bookmarklet that makes it easier to get books from Project Gutenberg, et al, onto your Kindle, via the new-to-me site ManyBooks.

Amateur Antiquaries of the Future

Tim says,

Sarah Werner at Wynken de Worde:

Where are the antiquaries of yesteryear? Do they now collect twentieth century pulp fiction? Classic sci-fi? Modernist design magazines? Is it too expensive to collect earlier works? Are collectors and antiquaries the same thing, anyway?

Part of a longer, typically smart post about amateur scholars' access to materials -- particularly those electronic databases for which colleges and universities pay through the nose. Vive Digital Humanism!

Papier Collé

Tim says,

Jonathan Hoefler on the beauty of collage: Vaughan Oliver (designer for The Pixies et al.), Shinro Ohtake, Eduardo Recife, Chip Kidd, and more.

Above: Joseph Cornell, Untitled Collage.

Junior Boys Feat. Norman McLaren

Robin says,

Wow, two great tastes that taste great together: Junior Boys and Norman McLaren. It was Andrew Simone's recent post that prompted me to do some Norman McLaren searching. All of his videos are on YouTube, but they're also on the National Film Board of Canada's wonderful site in super-lux quality.

The Suburbs Strike Back

Tim says,

Andrew Blauvelt, at Design Observer:

The mutual dependency of city and suburb is both physical and psychological. City dwellers and suburbanites need each other to reinforce their own sense of place and identity despite ample evidence that what we once thought were different places and lifestyles are increasingly intertwined and much less distinct.

The revenge of the suburb on the city wasn't simply the depletion of its urban population or the exodus of its retailers and office workers, but rather the importation of suburbia into the heart of the city: chain stores and restaurants, downtown malls, and even detached housing. If the gift of urban planners to suburbia was the tenets of the New Urbanism, it has been re-gifted, returned to cities not as tips for close-knit communities but as recipes for ever more intensive consumer experiences.

Suburbia has returned to the city just as most suburbs are experiencing many of the things about city life it sought to escape, both positive and negative: congestion, crime, poverty, racial and ethnic diversity, cultural amenities, and retail diversity. At the same time, cities have taken on qualities of the suburbs that are perceived as both good and bad, such as the introduction of big box retailing, urban shopping malls, and reverse suburban migration by empty nesters, who return to the city to enjoy the kind of life they lived before they had kids to raise.

For every downtown Olive Garden there is an Asian-fusion restaurant opening in a strip mall; for every derelict downtown warehouse there is an empty suburban office building waiting to be converted into lofts; the Mall of America is the largest shopping center in the country, but SoHo may be the nation's largest retail neighborhood; and everywhere we have Starbucks.

Blauvelt's exhibit on suburbia, Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, is at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis -- in the Target Gallery. Where else?

Who Is Things?

Robin says,

Just who is behind Things Magazine? Every time a new scattered yet somehow deeply coherent post shows up, I am assured ten new tabs in my browser window. And yet there are so few words, really -- it's hard to get a sense of context or personality. And I can't find a single name on the site.

For now I'm just going to assume it's an A.I.

Chat Catcher

Robin says,

Well huh. Maybe the mythical comment-centralization system, attempted by so many -- see coComment, Disqus -- actually turns out to be... Twitter?

Why this is sorta cool: Instead of existing only within the context of the commented-upon item, comments get to sort of reach out and pull more people into the conversation, too.

Lots of limitations, obviously. But I like the idea.

Procedural Powerpoint

Robin says,

In this presentation from Joshua Davis (it's about how bezier curves work, and cool ways of drawing them), most slides are actually little applications -- they're generating imagery on the fly, and it'll look different on your screen than it did on mine. (Oh, and most of them are pretty gorgeous, too; you should check it out even if you're not, uh, into bezier curves.)

Mash that up with Prezi and try not to let your head explode.

Kindle User Experience Note #1

Robin says,

A nice moment: I am browsing the Kindle store on my laptop. I load things up -- lots of sample chapters, a few full books -- and the Kindle itself (four inches to the left of my hands) flashes in recognition as the material peels off of Amazon's servers and coasts through the Sprint network into my little e-book. Like literally, the whole screen does this funky inversion -- you know the effect if you have a Kindle, or any E-Ink device -- and then, there it is. Hello "Chasing the Flame." Hello "Time and Materials." Neat!

'So You're the Ben Bernanke of Architecture?'

Robin says,

Fun interview with Stephen Ayers, the Architect of the Capitol -- a position nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate! (Via @sarahrich.)

Is It Time to Get Out of Journalism?

Robin says,

This chat, led by Joe Grimm over at Poynter.org, was actually super-fascinating. No startling revelations; no giant macro-theories. Instead, a real sense of individuals grappling with change and thinking about the future. (Really loving CoverItLive, by the way. Some day Snarkmarket is going to be all live chats and prezis.)

Sita Update

Matt says,

That animated movie we've been talking about all month is available online. (Thanks, Waxy.)

Coraline in 1D

Robin says,

I would like to see a stop-motion movie comprised entirely of origami figures. LIKE THIS ONE.

We R From Twitteronia We Connect

Robin says,

I know this is a few days old, but I finally read the Twitterers-meet-Shaq-in-real-life story and I cannot. stop. laughing. It's so weird and sweet.

Northanger Abattoir

Matt says,

Yet another testament to the infinite remixability of Jane Austen:

First, it was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the Seth Grahame-Smith novel due out in May that intersperses Austen's familiar prose with scenes of "bone crunching zombie action," which reportedly already has Hollywood studios vying to acquire its rights. Now comes the news that Elton John's Rocket Pictures intends to produce Pride and Predator, "which veers from the traditional period costume drama when an alien crash lands and begins to butcher the mannered protags, who suddenly have more than marriage and inheritance to worry about."

Pride and Predator! Genius! And yes, I know, Northanger Abbey is already sort of a horror story, or a send-up of one. If you've got a better title idea, put it in the comments.

Welcome to Svalbard, Mr. Bond

Robin says,

Great TIME photo essay on the Svalbard seed vault. Somebody film a movie scene at this place ASAP.

Tiny Art Director

Robin says,

Cute and funny in a completely novel way. Via @asimone.

My New Rock Band

Matt says,

How is it that it's been four whole days and nobody's alerted me to BuzzFeed's Wikipedia Band Name Generator? My band is called Newport Historic District, and our first album is titled, "Cooling Influences of the World." The album cover will be an artful crop of this image.

Stribularity

Matt says,

One eyebrow raises: The Minneapolis Star Tribune published an original article about the Singularity.

Both eyebrows raise: They illustrated the story with this image, by Mark Boswell.

I sort of love this. Thanks, Taylor.

Construction Art

Robin says,

Wow. A real gem in 20x200 today:

Support and Lift by Sarah McKenzie. (Here's more.) For some reason these paintings just seem really correct.

Question: I wanted to contrast these with some other images of urbanity... I'm thinking of those very Modern, jet-liner-sleek, super-dark, moody images of Gotham... monochrome, no people. From the 20s or 30s, I think. Does this ring a bell with anybody? What am I thinking of?

The Indelible Image of Tragedy

Robin says,

Patrick Harten, the air traffic controller who communicated with the US Airways flight that ditched in the Hudson River, was sure the crash had killed everyone aboard the plane.

"Even when I learned the truth, I could not escape the image of tragedy in my mind," he said. "Every time I saw the survivors on television, I imagined grieving widows. It's taken me over a month for me to be able see that I did a good job. I was flexible and responsible and I listened to what the pilots said and I made sure I gave him the tools he needed. I was calm and in control."

Wow!

The Free Arts and the Servile Arts

Robin says,

This new post from Nick Carr resists blockquoting in the most wonderful way. Just go read it. It's a mash-up!

Slytherin, FOR SURE

Robin says,

Wait a sec:

Next to his computer monitor is a smaller screen that looks like a handheld G.P.S. device and tells Emanuel where the President and senior White House officials are at all times.

Rahm Emanuel has a Marauder's Map??

The Era of Doinking

Robin says,

How should one think about the diabolical genie that is the iPhone? Magic Molly enumerates your options, all of which are simultaneously correct.

In Soviet Russia, Light Switches You

Robin says,

Turns out the solutions to a lot of problems boil down to providing better feedback loops.

With that in mind, two Stanford students reinvented the light switch.

(Via.)

Against Friction

Tim says,

John Gruber on reducing friction between thought and expression:

Friction is a problem for software in general, not just programming languages specifically. There’s the stuff you want to do, and there’s the stuff you have to do before you can do what you want to do. People have a natural tendency to skip the have to do stuff to get right to the want to do stuff if they can get away with it. Friction is resistance. Hence untitled document windows containing hours of unsaved work — there’s an idea in your head that you want to express or explore, and the path of least resistance is to hit Command-N and just start working.

I would say that friction in this sense is a problem for a Lot Of Things in general, not just software specifically. But Gruber's take on "Untitled Document Syndrome" is a really good illustration:

Saving a document for the first time is a minor chore, but it’s a chore nonetheless. The avoidance of such a minor chore is not rational; it is neither particularly complicated nor time consuming to hit Command-S and deal with the Save dialog. But we humans are not perfectly rational. We don’t always floss our teeth. We’ll pick the burger and fries instead of the salad. We’ll have one more beer. And sometimes we just don’t feel like dealing with the Save dialog box yet so we’ll put it off.

Gruber's post is part of an ongoing "everything buckets" debate in the Mac blogosphere. It kinda boils down to a debate about writing versus reading, users versus programmers, what's smart for software vs. what's smart for hardware. In short, the eternal dillemas.

The Futurist Manifesto

Robin says,

The Futurist Manifesto was published 100 years ago today.

That's 100 years of being angry that these jerks claimed and corrupted the word "futurist."

The Egg and the Wall

Robin says,

Haruki Murakami in Israel:

If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg.

In the same speech, he says:

There are only a few days in the year when I do not engage in telling lies, and today happens to be one of them.

The pure language of it!

Via Jess.

Hey, Let's Not Be...

Robin says,

...collapsitarians.

(Looking at you, Chris Hedges.)

We're Those Two Guys

Tim says,

So many gems in Roger Ebert's remembrance of his relationship with Gene Siskel. Here's one:

He got his second job, as the movie critic of the CBS Chicago news, because the newscast was bring reformatted to resemble a newspaper city room. Van Gordon Sauter, the executive producer, recruited Gene on the theory, "Don't hire someone because they look good on TV; hire them because they cover a beat and are the masters of it." Gene speculated that was the reason for the success of our show: We didn't look great on TV, but we sounded as if we might know what we were talking about.

The rest you should find for yourself.

Foreign Policy Ascendant

Robin says,

You guys know Foreign Policy has been one of my favorite magazines for a while. Well, I think things are only gonna get better for this magazine as, uh, the world gets worse.

See: The Axis of Upheaval. (+10 snarkpoints to the FP editor who came up with that title. It's sharp.)

That's not even the best part of the new issue. I'm obsessed with this feature on China's leaders. Consider it an update to, and massive expansion of, this post.

If you haven't scoped out their new site, you gotta do it. Really smart all-around, and helpful to the cause of heterogeneity in my RSS reader: If anything, FP is a bit of a conservative voice.

Against Exactitude

Robin says,

The super-smart Matt Jones, writing about location-based services: "I still maintain, perhaps foolishly - that sharing hereish/soonish/thereish/thenish is more interesting than exactly-here/exactly-now."

Jones works on Dopplr. I wish the frequency of my globe-trots was such that I could actually make use of this site, because it seems so clever and well-crafted. But, you don't have to use it to appreciate Dopplr's mission, as articulated by Jones: "optimising the future via the coincidences [it coordinates]."

What a great thing for a product to aspire to. Mostly because it sounds kinda like something that a magic talisman in Harry Potter might do.

Ephemerality and Regeneration

Robin says,

Before reading Rex's interview with 4chan's founder, I didn't realize that those boards were so ephemeral:

The lack of retention lends itself to having fresh content. The joke is that 4chan post is a repost of a repost of a repost. There was a guy who was downloading every image from /b/. He calculated that 80 percent of what's posted has been posted before. So it's survival of the fittest. Ideas that are carried over to the next day are worth repeating. The things that are genuinely funny get carried over.

I actually like that a lot. Reminds me of, er, life itself. DNA getting transcribed again and again. Little mutations along the way.

Now, of course, there's great value to the opposite, to durability and accretion. (See, e.g., Matt's vision for news.) But I wonder if we'll get tired of always leaving a digital paper trail, and if ephemerality will sometimes be considered a feature.

For instance -- am I alone in this? -- I wish I could set Twitter to auto-delete tweets older than a week or so.

That's It, I'm Moving to Canada

Matt says,

Seriously?? When asked, 34% of Americans say they want to live in Orlando, making it the fifth most desirable city in the country? Are these people talking about the same Orlando I grew up in and now assiduously avoid? The country's preeminent symbol of suburban suck? In what the New Yorker recently nicknamed "The Ponzi State"?

And my beloved Minneapolis, with its resplendent lakes and parks and great restaurants and arts and culture and evenforPetessake the Mall of America, is one of the five least popular?! That's just messed up.

Clive Thompson, Gay Talese, and Laundry Board

Robin says,

Two reasons to love this post over on Clive's blog:

1. Ruminations on writers' tools and processes
2. WTF is "laundry board"??

Scary Graphs About Japan

Robin says,

Trying to understand how the economic crisis is playing out in places other than the U.S. Here's Japan. Man, those graphs are all going in the wrong direction.

Modern Music

Robin says,

Love it. Via.

Demoralizing

Robin says,

Enjoyed Barry Schwartz's latest TED talk. It's not as full of presentational pyrotechnics as some of the TED classics, but the message is solid: He argues for a renewed focus on practical wisdom. (That's phronesis, if you took Martin Benjamin's freshman philosophy course like I did.)

But I mention his talk specifically because I liked his use of the word demoralize. He uses it in both a familiar sense -- one can lose morale -- and an unfamiliar sense -- an activity is drained of morality.

To surround ourselves with clever incentive schemes that bend our selfish desires towards good seems appealing; it's certainly the focus of a lot of public policy and social entrepreneurship lately. But Schwartz says it's ultimately demoralizing and destructive. Rules and regulations never account for all the edge cases, and it's precisely those edge cases that truly test us. To handle those, we need more than algorithms. We need wisdom.

You can talk about professions being demoralized, in both senses of the word. Medicine is a deeply moral profession, but have the incentives (and disincentives) of the medical-industrial complex been chipping away at that foundation?

Banking once had a moral dimension. Is that even detectable anymore? Are there bankers at Citigroup who still see themselves fundamentally as stewards? Or is that species extinct?

Journalism is a hold-out, I think, but one of the worries with all the upheaval lately is that we'll emerge with a news business reconstituted, revitalized, but somehow demoralized. Swap out strands of the American newspaper tradition, swap in strands of web business culture: You might end up more materially successful, but you might also end up quite a bit less wise.

Kitchen Sidecar

Robin says,

Psst. Hidden gem alert. I'm not even really into food blogs (or food in general) and I love Kitchen Sidecar.

The latest epic: Kitchen Sidecar makes a wedding cake. I love the photo treatments. It's kinda like Perez Hilton meets the Food Channel, you know?

It's All About the Abrahams

Matt says,

Discussions around the consequences of a truly connected planet have been going on for some time in our organisation, and maybe also in yours. Fivedollarcomparison.org is a small step to broaden the discussion and explore how the impact might vary across cultures and contexts by asking a simple question: What can you buy for five dollars?

For five dollars, you can buy a giant bucket of potatoes in Peru, park a bike in Montreal for two hours, or get a pound of licorice in California. On the one hand, this is a vivid representation of costs of living across the world. On the other hand, I'm hungry. (Via Bruno Giussani.)

Diagramming Obama's Sentences

Robin says,

No surprise: They're wonderfully-constructed. "Turn it on its side and it could be a mobile."

Medicine For Melancholy

Tim says,

It's not playing in Philadelphia, and I don't have cable/IFC, alas -- but Medicine for Melancholy looks terrific.

(See also A.O. Scott and Dennis Lim in the NYT.)

Pretty Sure This Couldn't Be Any Cooler

Robin says,

We've been tracking the new charter school in NYC built around game design and systems thinking. Now it has a website, and a name: Quest to Learn, the school for digital kids. You gotta see the about page; it's sublime. Talk about new liberal arts.

Residential Rigidity

Robin says,

Richard Florida, writing about the economy and home ownership, makes an important point (emphasis mine):

As homeownership rates have risen, our society has become less nimble: in the 1950s and 1960s, Americans were nearly twice as likely to move in a given year as they are today. Last year fewer Americans moved, as a percentage of the population, than in any year since the Census Bureau started tracking address changes, in the late 1940s. This sort of creeping rigidity in the labor market is a bad sign for the economy, particularly in a time when businesses, industries, and regions are rising and falling quickly.

I feel like super-flexible, low-hassle housing in big cities is going to be a growth industry. Why can't I just go and live in New York for six months? I realize that extremely rich people flit around like this all the time. How about something for everybody else? Something like a housing system with buildings in big cities such that it's easy for you to "swap" your studio in San Francisco for a studio in London.

Zadie Smith, Barack Obama, and Cary Grant

Robin says,

Oh this is wonderful:

[...] What did Pauline Kael call Cary Grant? "The Man from Dream City." When Bristolian Archibald Leach became suave Cary Grant, the transformation happened in his voice, which he subjected to a strange, indefinable manipulation, resulting in that heavenly sui generis accent, neither west country nor posh, American nor English. It came from nowhere, he came from nowhere. Grant seemed the product of a collective dream, dreamed up by moviegoers in hard times, as it sometimes feels voters have dreamed up Obama in hard times. Both men have a strange reflective quality, typical of the self-created man -- we see in them whatever we want to see. "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant," said Cary Grant. "Even I want to be Cary Grant." It's not hard to imagine Obama having that same thought, backstage at Grant Park, hearing his own name chanted by the hopeful multitude. Everyone wants to be Barack Obama. Even I want to be Barack Obama.

It's Zadie Smith on voice. Really good, fun read. Via @mgorbis.

A New Face

Robin says,

Wow. The world's first face transplant. Via (and by) @alexismadrigal.

House Party At The Drop Of A Hat

Tim says,

The Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique, twenty years later:

Paul's Boutique is a landmark in the art of sampling, a reinvention of a group that looked like it was heading for a gimmicky, early dead-end, and a harbinger of the pop-culture obsessions and referential touchstones that would come to define the ensuing decades' postmodern identity as sure as "The Simpsons" and Quentin Tarantino did. It's an album so packed with lyrical and musical asides, namedrops, and quotations that you could lose an entire day going through its Wikipedia page and looking up all the references; "The Sounds of Science" alone redirects you to the entries for Cheech Wizard, Shea Stadium, condoms, Robotron: 2084, Galileo, and Jesus Christ. That density, sprawl, and information-overload structure was one of the reasons some fans were reluctant to climb on board. But by extending Steinski's rapid-fire sound-bite hip-hop aesthetic over the course of an entire album, the Beastie Boys and the Dust Brothers more than assured that a generally positive first impression would eventually lead to a listener's dedicated, zealous headlong dive into the record's endlessly-quotable deep end.

With no other album did I spend as much time transcribing and deciphering lyrics, beats, ideas -- staring at the radio, staying up all night.

Looking Back on 2009

Robin says,

One of the new liberal arts is the art of the counterfactual. We cribbed the idea from Niall Ferguson; here's a new one from him:

It was not that Obama's New New Deal -- announced after the Labor Day purge of the Clintonites -- produced an economic miracle. Nobody had expected it to do so. It was more that the federal takeover of the big banks and the conversion of all private mortgage debt into new 50-year Obamabonds signalled an impressive boldness on the part of the new president.

The same was true of Obama's decision to fly to Tehran in June -- a decision that did more than anything else to sour relations with Hillary Clinton, whose supporters never quite recovered from the sight of the former presidential candidate shrouded in a veil.

(Via Kottke.)

Sasha Fierce-Jones

Matt says,

We can agree to disagree about Sasha Frere-Jones. David Remnick and I like him, and I'm increasingly convinced we're alone in that regard. But few critics derive as much pleasure from discussing pop trifles, or do it with as much pizzazz. Clearly I was not about to let his paean to Beyonce go unremarked. Best observation: "'Single Ladies' is an infectious, crackling song and would be without fault if it weren't the bearer of such dull advice. The wild R&B vampire Sasha is advocating marriage? What's next, a sultry, R-rated defense of low sodium soy sauce?"

Low-sodium soy sauce! Swish!

Google Blank

Tim says,

Google buys a defunct paper mill, which it's turning into a data center. I can't help but think of the missed opportunities:

1. Google Blank: DIY Search and Document Creation.
2. Okay, that was too cute. How about Google Paper Services for Enterprise? Google sells you its Apps suite, tech support, AND the paper you print your documents on. And everything you photocopy ends up in a Google search engine.
3. Google File: (im)personal archive services.
4. Google is going to print its own money.
5. New team-building exercise: all Google employees to collaborate on a five-act play with at least 500 speaking parts.
6. Google Airplanes.
7. Googlegami.
8. Google Trading Cards: collect all your top searches!
9. Google Direct Mail: We store your documents, email, and contacts, AND will send your letters for you!

So many possibilities.

Comments (9) | Permasnark | Posted: 11:26 AM

Sita Sings the Blues

Matt says,

Oh, why not. She had me at the paisley fire. This video for this movie was shown at O'Reilly's Tools of Change for Publishers conference today:

A synopsis might help:

Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by email. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as "The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told."

Comenius Would Have Approved

Tim says,

Dan Visel at if:book, in a post titled "Wikipedia Before Wikipedia," looks at the Trictionary, a grass-roots trilingual dictionary (English, Spanish, and Chinese) created between 1978 and 1981 by high school students on New York's Lower East Side.

Here's some text (from Tom MacArthur's 1986 book Worlds of Reference):

The compilation was done, as The New Yorker reports (10 May 1982) "by the spare-time energy of some 150 young people from the neighborhood," aged between 10 and 15, two afternoons a week over three years. New York is the multilingual city par excellence, in which, as the report points out, "some of its citizens live in a kind of linguistic isolation, islanded in their languages". The Trictionary was an effort to do something about that kind of isolation and separateness.

PaperCamp

Robin says,

This happened a little while ago, but if you're interested in the discussion of paper, books, durability, the Kindle, new kinds of media, etc. that we've been having here, you should read this write-up of PaperCamp, which was somehow related to BookCamp.

You gotta see Spot Nocturnal Animals: "In daylight, the cover is blank and inside the viewer can only see animals' footprints. When lit after dark, the title and explanations of each animal will come into view as they are printed with glow-in-the-dark ink.

PaperCamp US, please. Maybe we should help organize it? (After we finish this book, of course.)

Update: Oops, just missed it. But... Albany?

Everything I Know About Life I Learned from My Search Engine

Matt says,

An intriguing aside from a long Silicon Alley Insider article:

I do wonder whether Twitter's success is partially based on Google teaching us how to compose search strings? Google has trained us how to search against its index by composing concise, intent-driven statements. Twitter with its 140 character limit picked right up from the Google search string. The question is different (what are you doing? vs. what are you looking for?) but the compression of meaning required by Twitter is I think a behavior that Google helped engender. Maybe Google taught us how to Twitter.

I'm not sure if there's enough evidence to make the claim that Google taught us how to Twitter (did it then also teach us how to text?). But I wonder what else Google might have taught us. Has the nature of our Google queries changed over time? Do we type fewer words? More? How does our use of Google compare to the first generation of search engines?

The New Creativity

Robin says,

Have people always talked about creativity this much? I mean the details of it -- craft, process, practical wisdom. My memory says "no," but then, my memory is short.

Everybody's been pointing to Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk on the culture of creativity and genius.

Ze Frank has been thinking out loud about creativity and collaborative projects.

Imogen Heap sits in her home studio in vlog after vlog and talks you through her creative process -- insecurities and all. (This is my favorite example because it's not just reflective, it's real-time.)

Argument: It is the responsibility of the artist in the 21st century to speak and write like this. Sure, you can still lock yourself in your studio and indulge in the agony and ecstasy of isolation if you want, but that's sooo 20th century. The new world favors the public artist, the artist brave enough to speak plainly not only about ideas and inspiration, but about fear and hesitation as well.

Classical Mechanics in the Grocery Aisle

Robin says,

Brand gravity.

Note that this makes no actual sense. Mostly it's just that I like imagining those now-omnipresent Pepsi spheroids as a kind of meteorite debris, the remnants of a brand collision in deep space now gently sprinkling the earth.

Sleepwalking

Matt says,

Does This Count As Slow Food?

Matt says,

I've been rediscovering my slow cooker. While my boyfriend was visiting over the last week, we made bananas foster, chicken and dumplings, and sloppy joes, all in the crockpot. (Let's just say it was not a week of healthy eating.) Given the effortless deliciousness that came out of the crockpot after a few hours of cooking, I started to wonder if anyone had made a blog devoted purely to slow cooker recipes. Did I even need to ask?

Interdiscipline

Robin says,

Here's a visualization of cross-disciplinary citations in scientific papers. And here's another one that I didn't appreciate at first; after clicking, I like it best. Really inventive.

I found this one the least revelatory, but the motion is pretty.

But the takeaway? Economists need to get out more.

Radio Lab How-To

Robin says,

I have to admit: I haven't been keeping up with Radio Lab. I am genuinely ashamed of this, because I feel like Radio Lab is probably the best and most inventive media being produced anywhere right now. It's just... the episodes... they're so long!

But I did just listen to this: Radio Lab at the Apple store, explaining how they make the show. Some neat demos and examples of audio before and after "the Radio Lab treatment."

The Radio Lab secret to storytelling is simple: Make it musical.

Yeah, Everybody at the NYT Reads Snarkmarket

Robin says,

Conrad de Aenlle in the NYT expands on something we've been talking about: Digital Archivists, Now in Demand.

(What a wonderful name, by the way. How do you suppose you pronounce "Aenlle"?)

Design as Performance

Robin says,

Oh, this is good. There's something in this. Chip Kidd on Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man:

When, in the film, Stark/Downey is creating his Iron Man suit in his lab and figuring things out, it doesn't seem like he's acting. The impression is that in another life this is what Downey the real person would have actually wanted to be and do. It's design as performance.

This from Kidd, the designer who composed his terrific novel, The Cheese Monkeys, in QuarkXPress instead of Word, designing as he wrote. How do the words fall on the page? Where should the typeface change?

Design as performance. That is a chewy nugget of an idea.

The Kid-Saving Business

Matt says,

After gobbling up last week's stellar NYT Mag cover story from David Leonhardt, I Kindled Paul Tough's book about the birth of Harlem's Promise Academy, Whatever It Takes. The book is stellar. Tough's NYT Mag piece from 2006 gives a nice intro, but it ends by recounting the successes of KIPP charter schools. Whatever It Takes is in many ways a chronicle of the academic underworld, the students beyond KIPP's reach. And it's a fascinating primer on how education in America is transforming.

Self-Portrait Portrait

Robin says,

The art of the social network self-portrait has been widely-commented-on, but I still think this is pretty great:

Matt Held paints Facebook profile pictures. The technique is pretty excellent: He's created a Facebook group that anybody can join; he picks portrait pics from the group to paint.

But then there's a Heisenbergian observer-affects-the-observed kinda meta-thing going on here, because of course the people who he paints instantly use their new portrait as their profile picture. I think that's the genius of the project.

Profile and portrait above both of Caroline Giegerich, who writes the terrific Daily Marauder blog.

The Inevitability of Electronic Reading

Tim says,

Many of you have probably read John Siracusa's insightful, entertaining, and long anecdotal history of e-books at Ars Technica. Still, with Amazon set to make a big Kindle-related announcement early next week, it seems like a good time to highlight this sample:

In 2003, Apple started selling music for the iPod through its iTunes music store. Apple sold audio books as well, through a partnership with Audible. Perhaps unknowingly, Apple had just positioned itself perfectly for e-book domination.

It was all happening right before our eyes. First the device, already far past the minimum threshold for screen size and legibility, and rapidly gaining market penetration. Then the digital distribution channel, accessed via a desktop application used by every iPod owner. Then the deals with content owners—not just the independent labels or the scraps from the big table, but all the top record labels, and for their most popular content...

The e-book market was Apple's for the taking.

And then a funny thing happened: Apple never took it... The iPod sold in numbers that made the PDA phenomenon look quaint. And still Apple didn't move. No one moved. The entire e-book market was stalled.

These were the dark times for the e-book market, akin to the five years during which Internet Explorer 6 had over 90% market share and received no major updates. Here was this technology that had so much potential but was not making any substantial progress in the market because the players who were motivated to drive it forward had failed or been rendered powerless by larger forces.

If This is Flash, Then I Don't Wanna Be Right

Robin says,

I hate swoopy portfolio sites as much as the next guy, but... there are exceptions. And this is pure joy. (Via.)

Stuff That Lasts

Robin says,

This answer from Gary Hustwit really resonates with me:

How has making [the film "Objectified"] changed the way you look at everyday objects?

I really think about what I buy now: (A) Do I really need this? (B) What if this is the last of this object that I ever buy? I don't want to buy chairs I'll be sick of in five to ten years.

I'm trying to get better at finding, and buying, things that last. Ten years seems to be the magic number. Most things I own right now are more in the, uh, ten-week range.

So far, I'm amazed at the durability of my Cole Haan shoes; I've got a pair that are five years old and going strong. Russell Davies pointed out a new micro-brand that guarantees it jackets and bags for 10 years, which is pretty cool. I have a feeling my Mission Bicycle is gonna last.

Any recommendations for brands, or specific products, worth investigating? Any good experiences you've had?

Ah, Movable Type

Robin says,

Ha ha, it's official: Single-threaded comments don't scale. We'll definitely install Intense Debate or something similar on the new WordPress-ized Snarkmarket -- which is coming soon!

But, there's a lot of good stuff in the new liberal arts comment thread -- so give it a look if you haven't yet, and consider pitching in an idea of your own.

More book details coming later this week.

Snark/Riff

Robin says,

Hey guys, maybe we should investigate some sort of joint-venture opportunity with Riffmarket. Rex just pointed to one of his posts. This is my first exposure, and his voice is terrific: sharp, fluid, fair.

I admit it, I'm really only linking because it's called Riffmarket.

Cut the Crap, Guys

Tim says,

Howard Weaver brings it:

People who wish some billionaire would endow newsrooms so they don't have to change -- you know who you are -- have the musty smell of the mausoleum all about them. They move through twilight, walking stiffly toward a setting sun. They will find no pot of gold there.

Yet the digitalistas who suggest those newsrooms can be readily duplicated or replaced act like willful children, unmindful that substance, craft and capacity matter in the real world, that no group of 10,000 monkeys has ever written Shakespeare, that 98 of the 100 most important pieces of public service journalism last year flowed from professionals in the newsrooms they recklessly disregard.

This is a fool's game. It's time for grown-ups to intervene, to end the debate and move beyond the empty calories of nostalgia and the masturbatory fantasies of a theory-based future. A long-deceased, much missed colleague often referred to people with mature judgment and a steady hand by saying, "She knows where babies come from." Those are the folks we need on the case now.

Really, what else is there to say? Howard's style here reminds me of Ezra Pound at his caustic, humanistic best. And yes, that's a compliment.

De Monsters

Robin says,

Now this is my kinda augmented reality.

I like this one a lot.

This one, too.

But this one probably takes the cake.

(Via.)

Smart Growth vs. Dumb Growth

Robin says,

I'm a sucker for a big reframing, and this is about as big as they come: Umair Haque says everybody's wondering how to re-ignite economic growth, but that's the wrong question. We need to be wondering how to re-invent economic growth.

Here's his pitch.

(Via.)

The After Party

Robin says,

Joshua Cohen -- philosopher, thinker on global justice, occasional blogging head, and co-editor of the super-smart Boston Review -- writes about the difference between liberals: the "classical liberals" that are now (more or less) called libertarians and the "egalitarian liberals" that are now (more or less) called progressives.

Mostly I link to it for his (almost snarky?) conclusion:

With respect, classical liberals were in the rearguard in every one of [the great achievements of democracy in the 20th century]. And for a simple reason: in each case, the struggle depended on a willingness to fight against inequality, subordination, exclusion through political means, through the dread state. And if you mix your classical liberal values with the classically conservative predisposition to think that politics is at best futile, at bad perverse, at worst risks what is most fundamental, then you will always celebrate these gains when the fight is over: always at the after party, inconspicuous at the main event, and never on the planning committee.

Book-Cuddling

Tim says,

This is great: a librarian identifies curiously common references to "cuddling" in newspaper discussions of print and electronic books. As in, nobody is ever going to use an e-book reader because you can't "cuddle" (up with) it.

Preferably, it appears, by a fire. Because apparently everybody's got a fireplace that they read in front of, and without a proper fire, chair, smoking jacket, and appropriate analog print media, there's no reason to spend hard money on a book, magazine, or newspaper.

My favorite rejoinder is the one outlier: "Forget about the warmth a real book offers when you cuddle up with it by the fire. People spend so much time on buses and planes, in boring meetings, or at kids' soccer practices or hockey games."

I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about sites of reading and the different physical relationships to text they require. It's fascinating how particular sites and ways of reading crowd out others -- often to make a new activity seem MUCH more new than it really is.

Shut the F--- Up, Piano Man

Tim says,

I love Ron Rosenbaum's takedown of Billy Joel; you really have to dislike someone to go to the lengths taken by Rosenbaum to document, distill, and identify what makes them so bad.

My favorite part, though, is Rosenbaum's side-snipe at Jeff Jarvis:

Besides, some people still take Billy seriously. Just the other day I was reading my old friend Jeff Jarvis' BuzzMachine blog, and Jarvis (the Billy Joel of blog theorists) was attacking the Times' David Carr. (Talk about an uneven fight.) Carr was speculating about whether newspapers could survive if they adopted the economic model of iTunes. Attempting a snotty put-down of this idea, Jarvis let slip that he's a Joel fan: As an example somehow of his iTunes counter-theory, he wrote: "If I can't get Allentown, the original, I'm not likely to settle for a cover." Only the hard-core B.J. for Jeff! ("Allentown" is a particularly shameless selection on Jarvis' part, since it's one of B.J.'s "concern" songs, featuring the plight of laid-off workers, and Jarvis virtually does a sack dance of self-congratulatory joy every time he reports on print-media workers getting the ax.)

See, this is the thing: there's a weird way in which the entire attack on Billy Joel just allegorizes Rosenbaum's frustration with Jarvis. Read RR's December article, "Is Jeff Jarvis Gloating Too Much About the Death of Print?" if you're not convinced.

Pay What You Want

Robin says,

Three businesses near Frankfurt -- a buffet, a movie theater, and a deli -- experimented recently with pay-what-you-want pricing, a la Radiohead.

The bad news? In the buffet, customers paid,on average, 20% less than the previous posted price.

The good news? Overall traffic to the buffet increased 30% -- leading to a net gain in revenue.

Well, well, well.

(Via.)

The Places We Live

Robin says,

Striking photo project showing slums around the world. I know you probably feel like you have seen a "striking photo project showing slums around the world" before, but honestly, this one is better. Sharper, more human.

Argh, I wish I could deeplink -- trust me, you gotta skip intro, click on one of the cities, then click on one of the "household" icons. They lead to wonderful little 360-degree panoramas, each with wonderfully-translated narration. It's completely engrossing.

I totally just spent all my recommendation points on M. T. Anderson, I know... but this is really great, too.

The New Frontiersman

Robin says,

This will only be interesting to you if you have read Watchmen. But if you have, look out: The New Frontiersman on Twitter, with links to crazy realizations of documents and media from the Watchmen world. (For instance.) Super-nerdy fun.

Publishing 2008 (Also: The Rumpus)

Robin says,

The Rumpus points to this crazy map of publishing trends in 2008 drawn in, er, the style of a subway map.

Alas, I think design may serve to obfuscate, not elucidate, in this case.

Mostly I just wanted an excuse to link to The Rumpus, which is new, and seems kinda fun and kinda snooty, and therefore I think I like it.

For instance, I've been waiting for somebody to make this list.

Retro Book Cover Delights

Robin says,

Beautiful! There are more. (I like this one.)

The Page is a Screen, the Screen is a Page

Tim says,

Clusterflock: Paper is the New Internet.

Cf.: The Printed Blog, Things Our Friends Have Written on the Internet, Meet the New Schtick.

First Dance

Robin says,

I love the first comment on this Huffington Post page: "That was the most memorable moment on TV - EVER.......... the end." (Via.)

The Birth and Death of the American Newspaper

Tim says,

Not the internet, silly; Jill LePore is talking about the first Death of the American Newspaper, i.e., the Stamp Act and the American Revolution. I love the story of Boston Gazette printer Benjamin Edes:

In 1774, a British commander gave his troops a list of men—including John Hancock and Sam Adams—who, the minute war broke out, were to be shot on sight, and he added a postscript: “N.B. Don’t forget those trumpeters of sedition, the printers Edes and Gill.”

By then, there were forty newspapers in the colonies. War came, to Lexington and Concord, on April 19, 1775. That night, in Boston—a city held by the British—Edes and Gill hastily dissolved their partnership. Gill went into hiding. Under cover of darkness, Edes, alone, carted his printing press and types to the Charles River, where he loaded them onto a boat moored at the bank, and rowed through the night to escape the siege. In a nearby town, he set up a makeshift printing shop, and, within weeks, managed to resume printing the Gazette, on lumpy paper, with gunky ink. In besieged Boston, British troops searched for Edes but, failing to find him, made do with his nineteen-year-old son. Peter Edes spent months as a prisoner of war. He watched from the window of his cell while a fellow-prisoner, a Boston painter, was beaten until, broken, he finally called out, “God bless the King.”

Peter Edes survived. He became a printer. The war ended. It took some time to figure out what, in a republic, a newspaper was for.

Index Freely

Robin says,

Ha ha! I love this: Kottke finds resonance in our new national robots.txt.

Care, Without the Routine Cruelty

Tim says,

Atul Gawande, lucid and humane as ever, talks health care reform and the virtues of pragmatism in The New Yorker.

Bonus points to Gawande for employing my favorite social-scientific concept: path-dependence.

Cliched Image of Americana

Robin says,

I don't care. I like it.

Memphis Machiavellis?

Matt says,

Did anybody notice this ingenious little political maneuver in Tennessee last week?

Republicans stood poised to take control of the Tennessee General Assembly for the first time in nearly 140 years. Even Gubernatorial candidate Zach Wamp roamed the halls. ... When lawmakers returned from break, now an hour into session, they tackled the Speakers position. Representative Jason Mumpower of Bristol received the first nomination. Republicans hoped to end the nomination process there, but after more political wrangling, allowed Democrats to submit a candidate.

What happened next some may describe as the political play of the decade as all 49 Democrats backed Kent Williams, a Sophomore Republican from Carter County, a district just miles from Mumpower's hometown.

Found at Political Animal.

Meme Engineering, Or, I Am a Conceptual Bro

Robin says,

Cross-reference with Tim's post: Hipster Runoff asserts that Animal Collective is a Band Created By/For/On the Internet.

Several people have pointed me to Hipster Runoff as this sort of mad savant of internet culture. Don't let his language fool you; this is some trenchant analysis:

I remember when I saw [Animal Collective] live in the post-Strawberry Jam world, it was swarming with entrylevel alts who were looking for a more meaningful experience than just a 'marginally dancey Cut Copy show.' At Animal Collective concerts, people are willing 2 unite, kind of like meaningful core during its peak days (ie the DeathCab TRANSATLANTICISM era).

He's created a whole dictionary and taxonomy for himself. And after you read him for a while, it starts to make sense.

More:

There is nothing more annoying that Conceptual Artists/Bands who have allegedly garnered mainstream praise. For example, the Radioheads. Or maybe the zany broad BJORK. Maybe Sigur Ros or Arcade Fire (those 2 are a lil different/smaller). I think the main gimmick behind these bands is convincing yourself that their 'product' stands for something more than most music. They are pretty much a lifestyle brand for every sort of alternative ideal possible: social change, innovative instruments + recording techniques, reflections on humanity, usage of performance + visual art during the live show, environmental awareness, anti-War, embracing technology, innovative/meme-able music videos, having opinions on politics, and stuff like that which makes the band interesting/easy to write about.

Band as lifestyle brand! I don't know, I guess it's obvious on some level, but the way he articulates it is really sharp and refreshingly harsh. And the package matters: His bizarro blog dialect and earnest inline images are part of the argument, too.

You gotta read the whole post. Seriously. Even if you hate it. Especially if you hate it.

(Via.)

P.S. I found an Animal Collective track that I like.

Go Christof!

Robin says,

Current's Christof Putzel wins a duPont for From Russia With Hate!

This is, honestly, what I love most about Current: social news on one end, duPont-winning international reporting on the other. You don't have to choose.

A Band of Mechanical Minstrels

Robin says,

Matt, you take the Nintendo DS. Tim, you're on iPhone. Me, I'll play Electroplankton.

The gadget orchestra.

Musical Redoubt

Robin says,

"What is in this fortress, you ask? Seven live musicians."

Nice!

Conjures memories of pillow forts, somehow.

Narrative and Database

Robin says,

More on narrative from Lev Manovich, circa 2001:

Regardless of whether new media objects present themselves as linear narratives, interactive narratives, databases, or something else, underneath, on the level of material organization, they are all databases. In new media, the database supports a range of cultural forms which range from direct translation (i.e., a database stays a database) to a form whose logic is the opposite of the logic of the material form itself -- a narrative. More precisely, a database can support narrative, but there is nothing in the logic of the medium itself which would foster its generation. It is not surprising, then, that databases occupy a significant, if not the largest, territory of the new media landscape. What is more surprising is why the other end of the spectrum -- narratives -- still exist in new media.

That's a better articulation of what (I think) I was trying to get at: You can map narratives onto our weird web-world, but it's something fundamentally different underneath.

From The Language of New Media via Kasia.

Farewell, President Gore

Robin says,

Sublime satire:

And Gore's decision to single-handedly venture into a flattened house in Mississippi and free a trapped two-year-old showed him to be an irresponsible showboat. Sure, President Gore knows CPR, hears like a German shepherd, and has the strength of 10 men -- but we didn't need to see it.

Read the whole recollection.

Chloé Mortaud, Miss France 2009

Tim says,

I love France, I love beauty pageants, and I love interracial families, and so it follows quite naturally that I love Chloé Mortaud, the new multinational, multiracial nineteen-year-old Miss France. Hassan Marsh at The Root has a great write-up here, and chloemortaud.com has plenty of good stuff too (the link goes directly to a video featuring her family and hometown, a small village near the Pyrenees). Also, slick design on that webpage -- very much that of a 21st-century beauty queen.

Prison Tycoon

Robin says,

I saw this game at Target over the holidays and it freaked. me. out. BLDGBLOG has the whole story, complete with screenshots.

Renegaaades!

Robin says,

This New York mag story is double-awesome: It's written by the terrific Emily Nussbaum, and it features a big, bad-ass black-and-white photo of Snarkmarket pal Andrew DeVigal (and colleagues)! News-nerds triumphant!

Now This Is Civilization

Tim says,

I'm typing this at the airport in Denver, at an open kiosk and charging station (!) and using free, ad-supported wi-fi supplied by the airport, while waiting for my connection. I've got my phone plugged in, too -- there's even a USB outlet to charge iPods or digital cameras.

This, friends, is genius. This is what we should have at every airport, train station, hotel, library, or other public gathering place where people come whilst in transit. Every place where you currently see a fifteen-year-old cluster of pay phones, you're going to see one of these.

It'll have internet-equpped voice and video calling too. There will be a touchscreen where you can get directions around town or order food. (Probably not at the library.)

What else will we find in the media carrels of the future?

California, for Warmer Weather

Tim says,

Not to jinx anything, but I'm giving a job talk on Monday.

Please, please, please, let my plane get out of Philadelphia tomorrow. (They're predicting snow.)

Characters With Character

Robin says,

I agree with Khoi: This new typeface MEGalopolis Extra has an insane amount of style. And it's free to download!

Waltz With Bashir

Robin says,

I saw the animated sorta-documentary Waltz With Bashir a while ago at the San Francisco Animation Festival. It was amazing, and packed with indelible images; here's the trailer.

It's worth seeking out if you're watching all the horror in Gaza and feeling (again) that need to attend, somehow, to what's happening.

Lebanon -- the subject of Waltz With Bashir -- isn't Gaza, and of course all war in the Middle East isn't the same, but even so, this movie has a lot to offer, especially right now.

(Via Kasia.)

(Um. Take a minute before you read the next post or your brain will explode from the sudden shift in gravity.)

This is My Milwaukee

Robin says,

I recommend a ten-minute video with some trepidation, but honestly, this is really funny and sort of preposterously well-done. It's apparently the kick-off video for an ARG, but even if it wasn't, I'd be a fan.

(There's a science-fiction story hiding here, though it isn't evident in the first few minutes. Hang in there.)

A Look Back at Looks Ahead

Matt says,

Even more fun than reading predictions for 2009: reading predictions for 2008. NYMag's predix for the biggest business stories of 2008 royally missed the mark (e.g. Goldman Sachs will end the year at $300/share ... ouch). ReadWriteWeb's predix mostly bombed (Hakia goes mainstream? massive Facebook/Google decline? Twitter and Tumblr acquired?).

(I found this by searching Fimoculous.)

Solvitur Ambulando

Robin says,

Ooh, here's a good one from Daily Routines: Erik Satie.

He did a lot of walking:

On most mornings after he moved to Arcueil, Satie would return to Paris on foot, a distance of about ten kilometres, stopping frequently at his favourite cafes on route.

And I love this:

Roger Shattuck, in conversations with John Cage in 1982, put forward the interesting theory that "the source of Satie's sense of musical beat -- the possibility of variation within repetition, the effect of boredom on the organism--may be this endless walking back and forth across the same landscape day after day ... the total observation of a very limited and narrow environment." During his walks, Satie was also observed stopping to jot down ideas by the light of the street lamps he passed.

Intelligent Life in the Universe

Robin says,

Magic Molly with an appealing recommendation:

This quarter's American Scholar contains, among other treats, a list of Fifteen Cosmological Questions compiled by an astronomer. It's like a Seventeen quiz, only it exercises the imagination instead of the ego.

American Scholar you. are. killing. me.

Did you guys know it's the International Year of Astronomy? (I found out from signalnoise.)

Holger Pooten

Robin says,

I love Holger Pooten's images of snack cascades and exploded electronics. And, I think the images are posted in exact order of interestingness, from top (most interesting) to bottom (least). Almost logarithmic!

I Hardly Know Her

Robin says,

Slick, minimal way to show off your Flickr photos.

(By JSTN.)

Ze Frank Rides Again!

Robin says,

He's blogging at great length.

Yo Matt: I'd love to see this post blended with some Newsless juice. What's the central personae of a community newsbank of the future? Is there one?

Hype Machine Hype

Robin says,

All right. So. Everyone tweeted and linked to Hype Machine's 2008 music zeitgeist simultaneously.

And wow, seriously, this is a neat set of web pages.

Something about the whole presentation is just really clean and... correct, you know? It all actually motivated me to create a Hype Machine account. And let me tell you: I do not create accounts on websites anymore.

This might be the future of all media, yeah? Can we get a Book Machine running on our Kindles already?

O Sweet Verse

Robin says,

There's a poem in the New Yorker. It's called Alien vs. Predator. Reads like nerdcore hip-hop bluster run back-and-forth through Google Translate too many times. I like it:

That elk is such a dick. He's a space tree
making a ski and a little foam chiropractor.
I set the controls, I pioneer
the seeding of the ionosphere.
I translate the Bible into velociraptor.

More from the poet.

(Via.)

Sometimes a Phrase Is All You Need

Robin says,

Adaptive reuse of crashed starships.

Lake Michigan Stonehenge

Robin says,

The substance of this post over on BLDBLOG is interesting -- prehistoric ruins on the floor of Lake Michigan?? -- but honestly, it's the images that get me. Just the pure graphic characteristics of them.

They look like transmissions from another planet.

A GHOST PLANET.

Kevin on Rex

Robin says,

Like the global financial system, my personal media world is imploding. Kevin Kelly hyper-recommends Rex's list of 2008's notable blogs.

Anyway, I'm really only posting it to repeat this line:

First of all, Sorgatz apparently reads all blogs so his perspective of the landscape is stunningly broad.

Games, Art, the Usual

Robin says,

John Lanchester in the LRB does what I thought was impossible: advances the state of the conversation about games and art a bit. He's quite tough on video games, but reading his piece, you also get the sense that he actually plays lots of them. He knows his Fallout 3 from his LittleBigPlanet.

I like this line:

Miyamoto has, throughout his career, engaged with the question of arbitrariness by making his games more arbitrary, more silly -- by making that silliness part of the fun.

And this seems like a fair verdict, for the time being at least:

Not all games are cynically, affectlessly violent, but a lot of them are, and this trend is holding video games back. It's keeping them at the level of Hollywood blockbusters, when they could go on to be something else and something more.

I've gotten a bit bored with video games and meta-video-game commentary alike lately. I think my problem is so much of the innovation and excitement at the moment is around clever mechanics: the Wii, the iPhone's touch controls, games like World of Goo and (see below) Zen Bound. And I am bored with that stuff. I want to see games with different content -- and that's why I like Lanchester's piece.

(Via Matt P. and Rachel.)

Zen Bound

Robin says,

This iPhone game looks bananas. Like... I don't even know if I want to play it. It's beautiful and evocative, but beautiful and evocative in the way that the first phase of some dark ritual would be, ya know?

The Happening

Matt says,

This really is Lovecraftian:

In an alarming yet little-noticed series of recent studies, scientists have concluded that Canada's precious forests, stressed from damage caused by global warming, insect infestations and persistent fires, have crossed an ominous line and are now pumping out more climate-changing carbon dioxide than they are sequestering.

This fact might be the best illustration I've seen of the unexpected consequences of climate change. "Inexorably rising temperatures are slowly drying out forest lands, leaving trees more susceptible to fires, which release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere." What a catastrophic chain of events. How frightening to imagine that global warming is powerful and sinister enough to co-opt the very forces that ordinarily keep it in check.

Year of the Ox

Robin says,

Hello, 2009! Year of the ox! Year of work! Year of staying up late and getting up early. Year of nights and weekends. Year of noses and grindstones. Year of always produce. Year of there's no wind out here, so we'd better row.

Hello, 2009. I'm making you a mixtape. Here's the first track:

robinsloan.com - year of the ox

A Spin Around the Sun

Robin says,

This is what a year looks like -- only 40 seconds long!

As you watch, if you breathe in reaaally slowly, and exhale just as slowly, you can make it feel like the planet, too, is just taking a breath. (I mean, not that slowly. Don't pass out.)

Weird Democracy

Robin says,

Tim reminded me that Bangladesh is having elections again after a long hiatus from democracy.

Ah, Bangladesh. The candidates this time around are the same two candidates they've had for about 20 years: one the daughter of a murderer Bangladeshi politician, the other the wife of a murdered Bangladeshi politician, each now a titan in her own right.

It'd be great real-life Shakespeare if it wasn't such a drag for Bangladesh: Neither has proven to be much good for the country.

Can somebody put BRAC in charge already?

I'm Taping This Right Now

Matt says,

Rob Spence wears a prosthetic eye. It's the 21st Century. Ergo, Rob's new eye is going to include a video camera.

Unnerving Story of the Day™ is sponsored by Ratchet Up and the letter Um.

"Goo-goo-ism?" Seriously?

Matt says,

Was it Write Like Tom Friedman Day at the NYT on Christmas, Paul Krugman?

Just didn't want to let that one go unremarked.

Searching for Bobby Fischer

Robin says,

Wonderful remembrance of Bobby Fischer in the NYT Mag. The writing is just about as striking as Fischer's playing.

'The People of a Tough, Long-Lasting World'

Robin says,

This is the best sentence I've read all week. It's about the sun:

Eight minutes downstream at the speed of light, part of this extraordinary flux crashes down on the Earth in a 170,000-trillion-watt torrent.

And it's part of the best op-ed I've read all month. Aw heck. All year.

New Chapters

Robin says,

What feels like a million years ago, I wrote a piece for Poynter.org about the sneaky practice of releasing big news over the holidays. My list dates itself (Harvey Pitt? Wha?) but I've got a new one for you:

Howard Weaver announces he's retiring as VP of news at McClatchy.

If you're not a news industry watcher (Romensk-who?) and/or not already a fan of Howard's, I really urge you to check out his post. It is, among other things, a practical, forceful, and graceful summation of where journalism finds itself today. It's pretty McClatchy-specific, given the context, but I think a lot of it can be generalized. And either way, it's a joy to read.

Then, you probably ought to tune in to whatever Howard gets up to next. Here's a tip: I find his Twitter feed is among the best -- and most poetic -- on my screen.

And of course, with any luck, you'll still be able to find his comments here on Snarkmarket.

Congratulations, Howard.

Poems from 1914

Matt says,

A comparative media studies class at MIT has published Des Imagistes, Ezra Pound's out-of-print poetry anthology, as a website. And it's sort of beautiful. (Bookslutty.)

Things That Are Beautiful

Robin says,

These ink-bubble drawings.

This (non-Google) map of the Bay Area by Mike Migurski.

These shoes! (Like product placement in some near-future sci-fi movie, you know?)

These mattresses. Reminds me of how we used to roll down the stairs in boxes filled with blankets and pillows.

This movie title sequence!

The fifth side of this cube.

Portraits of Autoworkers

Robin says,

Terrific gallery from TIME. My impression: Wonderfully normal people working in the belly of a giant machine -- almost Matrix-like in some of these shots! -- that is slowly grinding to a halt around them.

Happy Holidays

Robin says,

Hang this on your virtual tree:

RSS readers: I haven't figured out how to make these embeds show up properly in the feed yet, so click through if you want to see it.

Hot Chip's Vampire Weekend

Robin says,

Oh boy, it's a late entrant, but this gets my nomination for cover of the year. Hot Chip does Vampire Weekend's "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa," with vocals by Peter Gabriel.

Prediction: In two years, no one will listen to Vampire Weekend. But they will listen to this song. And they will be like, "Wait, that's a cover?"

(Via.)

No Shortage of Beauty

Robin says,

Psst: My mom just redesigned her blog.

Nation Without News

Robin says,

Thoughts on the collapse of the news:

We tend to get all holier-than-thou when we look at countries without free press. We think their lives must somehow be more pathetic or sad. Needless to say, this attitude makes us feel better. But people go on. They know, or at least suspect, that they are being denied something, but they maintain hope and optimism. They don't go around moping. They get on with their lives, and sometimes, at least now and then, feel like maybe the censorship doesn't matter all that much. There are still reasons to be cheerful.

The author? Why, David Byrne, of course!

I don't agree with his analysis -- I think it's quite Golden Age-ist, and silent on all the new possibilities for news -- but I really enjoyed reading it.

The Last of the Four Horsemen

Matt says,

This feels like a significant cultural artifact. So disturbing it's impossible to look away. I'm about to go wash my eyes out with soap.

(If you're looking for someone to blame, blame Taylor.)

Happy Birthday, Robin

Matt says,

I do agree that Facebook takes all of the honor out of remembering your friends' birthdays. But it also averts all of the drama of forgetting them. So ... net win. Post a review of the Prelinger film. And if you get to speak to Rick Prelinger, tell him he better put that sucker up on archive.org under a Creative Commons license. And it better be better than this.

For your birthday, I'm getting you a Facebook gift.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Bloggers

Robin says,

I missed Matt's comment on (and defense of) the Atlantic bloggers, so maybe you did, too. He prompted me to subscribe Ta-Nehisi Coats and re-subscribe to Ross Douthat. And in fact, I didn't even know Jeffrey Goldberg was blogging at all.

Obama As Writer (Well, Co-Writer)

Tim says,

I'm fascinated by Barack Obama's conception of himself as a writer, and doubly fascinated by his partnership with younger-than-me speechwriter Jon Favreau. This Washington Post article by Eli Saslow ("Helping to Write History") indulges both fascinations to the hilt. Enjoy.

Cocktailiana

Robin says,

My friend Paul has been writing a terrific cocktail blog. Teaser: His latest post includes the phrase "Indian-cocktail rosetta stone."

Like Google Apps, Except Fun

Robin says,

The web-based creative apps at Aviary are out of private beta!

Go check 'em out -- it's Adobe Creative Suite in the cloud.

My favorite of them is actually the simplest: Toucan, which helps you make color swatches. More and more I realize the key to great images is color -- awareness of it, attention to it. Usually I just jack a palette from Kuler but this app makes it easy to build one from scratch.

Two Paths to the Same Place

Robin says,

Summary of scientific journal article or Zen koan?

To ask how life started

would be the same as to ask

when and where did the first wind blow

that quivered the surface of a warm pond.

The answer. (Bottom of the page.)

(Via the flock.)

Show Me the Bones

Robin says,

Rex is right: I never want to just listen to a mashup again.

I love that it's not just a visualization -- it's actually showing you how it was made. And showing you, in a roundabout way, how you might make one yourself.

Copious Free Time

Robin says,

Heh... one of the new entries on Daily Routines is Joseph Campbell's, during the Depression:

It worked very well. I would get nine hours of sheer reading done a day. And this went on for five years straight.

Do the math -- that's a lot of reading. Makes me think again of five- and ten-year projects, and the wonders that you can achieve...

Th'Inconstant Moon ...

Matt says,

... is incandescent tonight. Do give a look.

Best of the Best

Tim says,

Really, really love the Washington Post's extended Best Books of the year -- better I think than the NYT's list or their own top tens.

Only serious omission -- no poetry. I'd feel worse about this if the other best books list didn't practically ignore poetry already.

Also, it's set up as a "holiday guide," which I think makes it easier somehow to get you interested.

The Tipping Point

Matt says,

Question: Is anybody else on board with the notion that the Atlantic's blogs have outpaced the mag itself for interestingness? Last month's issue had a ton of interesting stuff, so I picked it up, and enjoyed it, but kept finding myself going to the respective authors' spots online to read what they and their commenters wrote about the article. Is it just me?

Snarkmarket's Best of '08

Matt says,

In case you missed the comments to this thread, we're soliciting your nods and votes for the best interviews and speeches of '08.

The 21st Century Capitalist

Robin says,

For years now, Umair Haque has been arguing that the core of the global economy is bad -- and that it's much deeper than sketchy mortgages. It has to do with decades-old assumptions about strategy and even older delusions about value. (Here's a good example of how he thinks.)

It's always cold comfort to be proven right when your argument is so apocalyptic -- but Haque is more than a Pandora. He's got prescriptions, too.

Whether Haque has got all the answers, I can't judge; but man, I really appreciate the fact that he is thinking about things in such an original way -- using different language, and fighting for a different conventional wisdom.

Fubiz

Robin says,

You guys read Fubiz, right? It's my favorite blog discovery of the past few months. The fact that it's in French (which I do not read) makes it even better, somehow.

Recent posts I liked:

Books as type!

Watch paint dry flow. (Shades of that old crayon factory clip...)

From Above They Look Like Brains

Robin says,

Favorite new phrase (well, new to me): the sentient city.

Best X of 2008

Robin says,

Hey, let's make a best-of list and get it into Rex's meta-monster.

The "ideas" category is pretty empty right now. I feel like we could beat the NYT Mag to the punch. And it's sorta up Snarkmarket's alley, you know?

But I'm open to "paranormal" too.

What do you think? (This is the meta-question. We'll get to constructing the list soon enough. But first let's decide what list we're going to construct.)

The Decision Tree

Robin says,

Thomas Goetz over at Epidemix is writing a book -- and relaunching his blog: The Decision Tree. Here's the nut of it:

The premise is that we are at a new phase of health and medical care, where more decisions are being made by individuals on their own behalf, rather than by physicians, and that, furthermore, these decisions are being informed by new tools based on statistics, data, and predictions. This is a good thing -- it will let us, the general public, live better, happier, and even longer lives. But it will require us to be stewards of our health in ways we may not be prepared for. We will act on the basis of risk factors and predictive scores, rather than on conventional wisdom and doctors recommendations.

In other words: An apple a day reduces your chance of seeing the doctor 84%, based on your genetic profile and other risk factors.

I have been a big fan of Thomas's blogging and his magazine writing, so I think this is going to be good.

And, is it just me, or is biotech still the revolution-to-come? The decision tree, 23andme, synthetic biology -- are we on the cusp of something, or is this stuff, like "real" A.I., always going to be five years away?

The Boom in Unemployment Media

Robin says,

Oh, this is just the beginning: Unemploymentality.

Your Daily Moment of Zen

Robin says,

This is so weird. It's just another Nintendo DS hack, but there's something about the video... he is speaking so emphatically! And in Japanese! And those Kanye glasses... and the weird orality of it all... I don't know, this is a little more "hey look random whoah" than the usual Snarkmarket fare, but I was transfixed.

Daily Routines

Robin says,

These are all old-ish posts, so maybe this blog has already made the rounds, but I am mesmerized:

Le Corbusier's daily routine. No office 'til 2 p.m.!

Philip Roth's. Solitude.

Haruki Murakami's. Physical activity, repetition.

Benjamin Franklin's. My favorite.

Piglet Agonistes

Robin says,

I am not a huge Winnie the Pooh fan -- none of the characters are actually that likable, you know? -- but I have to admit, in these original illustrations, Piglet stands as perhaps the most charmingly-rendered character ever.

One feels that E. H. Shephard's soul is visible in those strokes.

I mean come on.

Powers That Be

Robin says,

This great Frank Rich piece, about complementing all the smarts in the new Obama administration with some wisdom, made me suddenly wonder: Where's Samantha Power?

Pretty Prose for an Ugly Sport

Matt says,

Ta-Nehisi Coates recommends a profile of an ultimate fighter and dagnabit, you gotta read that profile of an ultimate fighter.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Robin says,

Target: Women, vampire edition.

Watch for the clutch cameo by Mark Ganek!

Column and Slab

Robin says,

I want to live in this house.

Any other dream homes out there in the snarkmatrix?

Alphabetical New York Times

Robin says,

This is really fun.

And note that it's not a Photoshop job but rather scalpel and glue.

(Via.)

O Holy Night

Robin says,

Now this is my kind of advent calendar.

Book Club

Matt says,

Kottke plugs The Millions' annual Year in Reading list, a collection of (not necessarily timely) awesome-book nominations from interesting Web people. I've actually wanted to read most of the books they recommend, which separates this list from most others.

The Econo-futurist

Matt says,

From Infocult: The Economist's annual predictions for the year ahead. They're blogging about the world in 2009 as well.

Health Care Reading

Matt says,

All posted by Ezra Klein at some point or another:

• The Health of Nations: Klein's 2007 round-up of European health care systems.
• The Evidence Gap: "The institute, known as NICE, has decided that Britain, except in rare cases, can afford only £15,000, or about $22,750, to save six months of a citizen’s life."
• Our Invisible Poor: The essay that inspired JFK to declare war on poverty.

Abandon Objects

Robin says,

Love this bit from Clay Shirky:

Businesses don't survive in the long term because old people persist in old behaviors; they survive because young people renew old behaviors, and all the behaviors young people are renewing cluster around reading, while they are adopting almost none of the behaviors tied to cherishing physical containers, whether for the written word or anything else.

Emphasis mine. I think it's true!

(Via Alexis Madrigal.)

Me and My Seven Genius Friends

Robin says,

I love this little anecdote from Paul Graham's latest essay:

The eight men who left Shockley Semiconductor to found Fairchild Semiconductor, the original Silicon Valley startup, weren't even trying to start a company at first. They were just looking for a company willing to hire them as a group. Then one of their parents introduced them to a small investment bank that offered to find funding for them to start their own, so they did. But starting a company was an alien idea to them; it was something they backed into.

Isn't it sweet -- not usually a word you associate with Silicon Valley -- to think about these eight men and their affection for, and loyalty to, one another?

That's an under-recognized part of the startup motivation, I think: the desire to work with exactly the people you want to work with.

I Am A Robot. Can I Help You?

Tim says,

Microsoft is working on a robot receptionist.

Also from Network World's slideshow: The project's code name is "Robot Receptionist."

And "What It Is: A Robot Receptionist."

Via James Fallows, who notes that IBM's five-year projects are way cooler.

The Inside Light

Robin says,

Portraits of "creative people who had to define their personal inspiration in one word." Sharp, fun, luminous.

You know, I think everybody should have a sharp, fun, luminous portrait taken. There's something so exalting about it. The democratization of exaltation, to match the democratization of manipulation.

Salsa Is From the 16th Century

Robin says,

And funnel cake is from 1879!

I'm in love with the Food Timeline!

(Via Alexis Madrigal.)

Go Go Sabamiso

Robin says,

Yeah yeah, I know, there are a million great photos on Flickr, and a million great photographers to follow.

But there's something about sabamiso.

I get this sense that I am really seeing the world through somebody else's eyes here, in a very particular -- and honest -- way. And I feel like there's a story in progress... that I do not really understand. Like, whuh? Say what? Hmm. Whoah!

Is this all seriously from the same person?

And the same decade?

Favorite non-friend, non-family Flickr feed, hands down.

Swann and Odette's Little Phrase

Tim says,

A terrific post by Blair Sanderson sleuthing the real-life identity of the fictional Vinteuil's Sonata from Marcel Proust's Swann's Way.

Since it's at All Music Guide, there are also streaming samples of some of the contenders, including Gabriel Fauré's Violin Sonata No. 1 in A major, Op. 13, César Franck’s Violin Sonata in A major, M. 8, Claude Debussy’s Violin Sonata, L. 140, and Sanderson's most likely candidate, Camille Saint-Saëns’ Violin Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 75.

The Explanatory Power of Images

Robin says,

The Big Picture's new post is about Mumbai. I have to say: I understand it better having looked at these. More and more I'm starting to think the future of journalism is more images, more images, more images. Not just images -- never just images -- but honestly, I've read a lot of articles about Mumbai over the last three days and words are just not capable of communicating some parts of this story -- of any story.

However, fair warning: I did not click the black boxes. You're on your own with those.

Slumdog Millionaire

Robin says,

I think you should go see Slumdog Millionaire this weekend. Seriously.

That might seem off-kilter, because this is a movie about Mumbai that is fundamentally optimistic -- a comedy, in the classic sense -- and the real tale of Mumbai these past few days has been anything but.

But Slumdog Millionaire also has it share of darkness; it doesn't stint on the grim, weird things that are a part of this city's life.

More importantly, it is, all together, the most interesting, accessible, and revelatory portrait of modern India I've ever seen. And if you find yourself a bit at odds, feeling like you ought to do something -- ought to attend to these events mentally or morally in some way -- I think learning isn't a bad place to start.

P is for Pirate

Robin says,

If you read only one Somali pirate story, make it this one:

"Mummy, mummy, please can I phone the pirates for you?"

"No."

"Pleeeeez."

By this time, with rain battering my windscreen and cars jamming the road, I was at the end of my tether.

"OK", I said, tossing the phone into the back of the car. "They are under P for pirates."

"Hello. Please can I talk to the pirates," said my daughter in her obviously childish voice.

I could hear someone replying and a bizarre conversation ensued which eventually ended when my daughter collapsed in giggles.

This was a breakthrough. Dialogue had been established.

(Via EC.)

Recursive Bach

Matt says,

I just discovered this site, a collection of expositions of the fugues in Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Some of Tim Smith's writings are pretty opaque to those of us who aren't trained in music, but many of his comments are accessible enough. ("If you think of the subject as a dancer, then the fugal process is one of finding a suitable partner. But what if the dancer has the ability to be its own partner? Well that is stretto. And stretto is what the C Major fugue is all about.")

And the visualizations help, although I wish they were done in Flash instead of Shockwave. But hey, it was made in 2002.

The Blogger I Miss Most...

Tim says,

... is easily Ben Vershbow, formerly of if:book.

The only post-IFB news I can find of him is a Book Expo Canada from June. I hope he is doing something appropriately awesome.

Boy, This "Gastrosnark" Category Sure Is Useful ...

Matt says,

Found on Ask MetaFilter: "When asked for dessert recommendations, my friend’s 8-year-old son suggested 'chocolate chip cookies with chunks of chocolate chip cookie dough in them.' How on earth can I pull off this fantastic treat?"

Yee-haw.

100 Notable Books

Matt says,

The NYT's annual booklist is out, in case you missed it.

(BTW, Rex's annual list of lists is also in process.)

Cranberry Sauce Recipe

Matt says,

If you want to make your entire house smell amazing for two hours, make this. Exactly as the recipe says. It's brilliant.

Note: The jalapenos seem like a lot at first. Just go with it. I was also tempted to put in a little more water, but I'm happy I didn't. The recipe is perfect. Trust the recipe.

Also: My other contribution to Thanksgiving dinner is creamy potatoes au gratin. I diced the onions like a few of the other reviewers did, sprinkled over a dusting of garlic salt-and-pepper seasoning, and topped the whole with bread crumbs and a handful of shredded cheese before putting it into the oven.

You Get Two Guesses

Tim says,

Does this abstract come from The Onion or The New York Times?

Modern pentathlon has been cut from five events to four in a bid to boost its popularity and stay in the Olympics, combining shooting and running into a single event.

Digital Editions

Tim says,

The Two-Disc Special Edition and Blu-Ray Edition of The Dark Knight ships with a digital AVI copy of the movie; if you buy it on Amazon, you can stream it right away as an Unbox video-on-demand.

Explain to me again why Amazon couldn't make the same model work for books?

Violence to Books

Tim says,

Sin against the Holy Spirit: I'm debating buying a fast sheet-fed scanner and cutting up my library so I can have it with me all the time as PDFs.

Insane? Genius? Should I just get a Kindle instead?

Transit Pretty

Matt says,

I've got two fun US transit infrastructure data visualizations for you.

(Beat.)

OK, everyone that's still here, check this out: a highway system map done in the style of a subway system map (from mathowie) | a hypothetical high-speed rail map with transit time estimates.

Tracking China

Robin says,

Meta-recommendation: The blog-combo of TIME and McClatchy has become my go-to info-feed on China. Wonderful insights and details, almost every day.

For example: the new posh lunch spot in Beijing; China ranks the world's universities.