Call me a grumpy old codger, but I liked the old way better. For one thing, I used to have at least a rudimentary idea of how a newspaper got produced: On deadline, drunks with cigars wrote stories that were edited by constipated but knowledgeable people, then printed on paper by enormous machines operated by people with stupid hats and dirty faces.
Ian Bremmer’s The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? is on the top of my reading list.
Available for a limited time…
Festival in the Forest
This doc, directed by Alexander Klein, chronicles a 2008 fest in California’s Big Sur forest and includes performances from Beach House and Silver Jews.
via Pitchfork
Apps sparkle like sapphires and emeralds for people bored by the junky nondesign of monster sites like Yahoo, Google, Craigslist, eBay, YouTube and PayPal.
My pal Wendy, the brain behind an I Heart Guts! poster detailing testicular cancer self-testing, finds herself on Los Angeles local TV.
A few months ago, NYT editorialist Thomas Friedman summarized the Beijing Consensus concept:
The Beijing Consensus, says Bennhold, is a “Confucian-Communist-Capitalist” hybrid under the umbrella of a one-party state, with a lot of government guidance, strictly controlled capital markets and an authoritarian decision-making process that is capable of making tough choices and long-term investments, without having to heed daily public polls.
The analogy fits IMHO. Moreover, the analogy begs more insightful discussion than the shrill Doctorow or glib Gruber conversations.
Simply cannot be overstated.
“…Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly, and to challenge the primacy of the laptop. It could even help, eventually, to propel the finger-driven, multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface that has prevailed for decades.” – Walt Mossberg
Exactly.
“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
via Wikipedia