February 2012
14 posts
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“We know that we live in a “new normal” – a period of time in which we have to...”
– President Eli Capilouto of the University of Kentucky
What a crock…
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CJR: Why We Love The Political Gabfest →
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Though it is (broadly) a political analysis show, the Politcal Gabfest sometimes makes me laugh out loud. There was one evening last summer where I was that strange person on the subway, giggling maniacally, unable to stop as I listened to the show. The conversation had turned to dogs and mimes. You had to be there.
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How Companies Learn Your Secrets →
The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. “If you use a credit card or...
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The Julian Assange Show →
Is now the time for a forty-year-old cyber activist to sell out?
To sell out, Assange would of course have to violate his ideals. Maybe he has, but it would be wrong to confuse the romantic view that he holds of the world with a rigid commitment to ideology or unwavering idealism. He is a charismatic figure precisely because of the way his contradictions—manifest in WikiLeaks from the...
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At Work in Syria, Times Correspondent Anthony... →
The death of Mr. Shadid, an American of Lebanese descent who had a wife and two children, abruptly ended one of the most storied careers in modern American journalism. Fluent in Arabic, with a gifted eye for detail and contextual writing, Mr. Shadid captured dimensions of life in the Middle East that many others failed to see. Those talents won him a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting in...
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“We like to think Seamus spent his golden years in Canada, an outlaw, never...”
– Did the Romney Family Dog Flee to Canada?
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“Stop demanding to be spoon-fed like a baby. Figure out how to deal with art that...”
– D’Agata
Facts Are Stupid: An essayist and his fact-checker go to battle over the line between true and false.
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Larry Summers: What You (Really) Need to Know →
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Where Americans Most Depend on Government Benefits →
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Watch‘Saturday Night Live’ accurately skewers Verizon 4G advertising
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“Facebook exists to make the world more open”
– Mark Zuckerberg in the Facebook IPO filing.
What a joke.
January 2012
13 posts
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Rabbit at Rest: The Bizarre And Misguided Critical... →
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'Live by the bro, die by the bro.' →
The King’s Comeuppance: How the hottest ad agency of the aughts fell from grace.
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Polish state website taken down by hackers →
“Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There’s your...”
– Jonathan Coulton, definitively. (via merlin)
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Kill Hollywood →
That’s one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take...
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Marco Arment: The next SOPA →
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SOPA Is Inevitable →
More on what I was saying earlier…
parislemon:
Marco Arment has this exactly right. We may have beaten these variations of SOPA and PIPA, but the sad fact of that matter is that they — or something like them — will eventually pass.
Obviously, all things being equal, such bills should never pass. But all things aren’t equal. As with most things, this is actually all about money. The MPAA...
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Justice Department calls MegaUpload an... →
Insanity.
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Employers add 200,000 jobs, unemployment rate... →
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“If he had not the energy to ascertain his position in time and space, he also...”
– Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
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How Many Stephen Colberts Are There? →
December 2011
39 posts
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Do you need a dead rat sent to your enemy? →
We are a company committed to the spiteful and timely dissemination of dead rats to our customers mortal enemies. We, the Company, basically want to offer a community of dead rats to the consumer economy at large. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely until you start mailing people dead rats for twenty-five dollars a rat, pro-rata. The good Lord once said, Vengeance is mine, but...
Scripting News: How to move a domain from GoDaddy... →
“The story of writing in the digital age is every bit as messy as the ink-stained...”
– A Literary History of Word Processing - NYTimes.com (via thisistheverge)
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Bourbon’s All-American Roar →
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Something About Occupy: (With a Primer)
There are few answers to be found here. For a while now, I’ve been setting out to write about the much discussed Occupy Wall St. movement. I have written here and there little bits, no more than notes, about my impressions of it at any given moment. I have cautiously spied local iterations of the group, half-heartily observing it from a block or so away — not interested in engaging with it here...
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“But I think that we don’t entirely do our favorite artists, or works of art, a...”
– The Awl on Louis C.K.
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“But what Christopher showed me—and I keep it in mind now wherever I...”
– Daniel C. Dennett
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“I don’t even know what I want to look at most days ending and beginning the day...”
– The Condition: The Eye That Never Blinks | The Awl (via thisistheverge)
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Forensic Examiner Found No Match of Cables on... →
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Why apps are not the future →
Dave Winer speaks truth.
He may have coined the term “natural born blogger” but it applies to him more than just about anyone.
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On the Passing of Christopher Hitchens
In one of his later essays, ‘Unspoken Truths’, Hitchens wrote:
The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed.
If it was Hitchens’ biting arguments and effortless writing that drew me to him, then it was the sense that he writing to me that fiercely held my attention. His writing placed that weird curse we sometimes...
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“It does concentrate the mind, of course, to realise that your life is more...”
– Hitchens
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“Editing Christopher Hitchens, who died Thursday at the age of 62, was the...”
– June Thomas on editing Hitchens at Slate
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WatchThe Immortal Rejoinders of Christopher Hitchens
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Christopher Hitchens, 1949–2011: In Memoriam →
Christopher was the beau ideal of the public intellectual. You felt as though he was writing to you and to you alone.
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“Here’s what I learned from Christopher Hitchens in the 25 years I knew him....”
– Christopher Hitchens’ death: His generosity to young people was amazing. - Slate Magazine
@jacobwe nails Hitch’s awe-inspiring integrity
(via felixsalmon)
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“Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty, and...”
– Christopher Hitchens (via nevver)