Patrick O'Dowd.com - A Bastion of, Et Cetera

"We know that we live in a “new normal” – a period of time in which we have to find innovative and..."

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:09:07 -0500

“We know that we live in a “new normal” – a period of time in which we have to find innovative and creative strategies to earn our way and fuel our ambitions for the Commonwealth. The economic landscape requires us to work in more collaborative and efficient ways to move forward as we seek to honor the Kentucky Promise that marked our founding.”

- President Eli Capilouto of the University of Kentucky

What a crock…

Bourdain in the hot seat. (Taken with instagram)

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 10:46:17 -0500

Bourdain in the hot seat. (Taken with instagram)

CJR: Why We Love The Political Gabfest

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 10:02:00 -0500

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.

How Companies Learn Your Secrets

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 08:38:21 -0500

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 a coupon, or ﬁll out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID,” Pole said. “We want to know everything we can.”

Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit. Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own. (In a statement, Target declined to identify what demographic information it collects or purchases.) All that information is meaningless, however, without someone to analyze and make sense of it. That’s where Andrew Pole and the dozens of other members of Target’s Guest Marketing Analytics department come in.

The Julian Assange Show

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 08:31:55 -0500

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 start—magically seem to hold together: his self-absorption tempered by his more abstract, but genuinely felt, pursuit of justice; his inexperience or naïveté often masked by his autodidact’s intellect; his utopianism hemmed in by a do-what-it-takes view of combat; his search for hidden truths shrouded by his own secrecy and willingness to equivocate, if not lie. “When you are much brighter than the people you are hanging around with, which I was as a teen-ager, two things happen,” Assange told me while I was reporting “No Secrets,” a profile of him and of WikiLeaks that ran in this magazine two years ago. “First of all, you develop an enormous ego. Secondly, you start to think that everything can be solved with just a bit of thinking—but ideology is too simple to address how things work.”

At Work in Syria, Times Correspondent Anthony Shadid Dies

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 08:07:39 -0500

At Work in Syria, Times Correspondent Anthony Shadid Dies:

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 2004 for his coverage of the American invasion of Iraq and the occupation that followed, and a second Pulitzer in 2010, also for his Iraq reporting, both of them for The Washington Post. He also was a finalist in 2007 for his coverage of Lebanon, and has been nominated by The Times for his coverage of the Arab Spring uprisings that have transfixed the Middle East for the past year.

"We like to think Seamus spent his golden years in Canada, an outlaw, never setting foot in or on or..."

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:08:00 -0500

“We like to think Seamus spent his golden years in Canada, an outlaw, never setting foot in or on or even near an automobile again.”

- Did the Romney Family Dog Flee to Canada?

"Stop demanding to be spoon-fed like a baby. Figure out how to deal with art that you disagree with..."

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 07:51:23 -0500

““Stop demanding to be spoon-fed like a baby. Figure out how to deal with art that you disagree with without throwing a fucking temper tantrum.””

- D’Agata

Facts Are Stupid: An essayist and his fact-checker go to battle over the line between true and false.

‘Niggas in Paris at Midnight’

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 07:41:56 -0500

‘Niggas in Paris at Midnight’

Good food and better friends. (Taken with Instagram at table...

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 13:47:39 -0500

Good food and better friends. (Taken with Instagram at table three ten)

Larry Summers: What You (Really) Need to Know

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 09:21:57 -0500

Larry Summers: What You (Really) Need to Know

Where Americans Most Depend on Government Benefits

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 10:27:35 -0500

Where Americans Most Depend on Government Benefits

‘Saturday Night Live’ accurately skewers Verizon 4G...

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 10:15:00 -0500

‘Saturday Night Live’ accurately skewers Verizon 4G advertising

"Facebook exists to make the world more open"

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:24:29 -0500

“Facebook exists to make the world more open”

- Mark Zuckerberg in the Facebook IPO filing.

What a joke.

Rabbit at Rest: The Bizarre And Misguided Critical Assault On John Updike’s Reputation

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 11:52:03 -0500

Rabbit at Rest: The Bizarre And Misguided Critical Assault On John Updike’s Reputation

'Live by the bro, die by the bro.'

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 07:56:18 -0500

'Live by the bro, die by the bro.':

The King’s Comeuppance: How the hottest ad agency of the aughts fell from grace.

Polish state website taken down by hackers

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 07:41:20 -0500

Polish state website taken down by hackers

"Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There’s your anti-piracy plan."

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 09:56:40 -0500

“Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There’s your anti-piracy plan.”

- Jonathan Coulton, definitively. (via merlin)

Kill Hollywood

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 09:54:07 -0500

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 up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn’t stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it’s only when he’s beaten that he turns to appeal to the ref. SOPA shows Hollywood is beaten. And yet the audiences to be captured from movies and TV are still huge. There is a lot of potential energy to be liberated there.

How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What’s going to kill movies and TV is what’s already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now?

Marco Arment: The next SOPA

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 09:50:16 -0500

Marco Arment: The next SOPA