June 2011
62 posts
1 tag
douglashaddow:
Consider The Black Eyed Peas and Coldplay. I dare anyone to argue that popular music hasn’t become a complete nightmare in comparison to what it was in the 80s.
Just wondering: What do you think qualifies as popular music now, and what do you think qualified as popular music in the 80s?
Also: How old are you?
SMART.FUNNY.NICE
bluefugate:
When I meet a person, I often plot their personality into a mental Venn diagram that I call SMART.FUNNY.NICE. We can all agree that the best people are the ones who display all three of these virtues, to a high degree, with great consistency. We can also all agree that the worst people are the ones who display none of these three virtues, to a high degree, with great consistency...
The essential question is whether it can survive... →
"I do think there is a good number of excellent... →
When the first signs of microbial doom surfaced in... →
1 tag
5 tags
10 authors men should stop talking about
kstoeffel:
chagrinternet:
In no particular order:
- David Foster Wallace
- Roberto Bolaño
- Barry Hannah
- The Beat Poets
- Clarice Lispector
- Michel Houellebecq
- V.S. Naipaul
- Marilynne Robinson
- Denis Johnson
- Cormac McCarthy
To be fair, we women could stand to chill out about Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov*, Philip Roth*, Joan Didion and Lorrie Moore.
...
Startup Social: Fortnighter @ Above Allen -... →
alexanderbasek:
nickdouglas:
I covered another startup and its launch party! I found the startup lacking, and/or targeted toward people with $100 to spend on a single four-page travel itinerary!
I guess I was supposed to buy Nick a seltzer, but he never introduced himself. I did invite him though, because he asked very politely.
This is all in good fun, I guess. The way I have come to...
Adele Reschedules North American Dates, New Yorker... →
endasher:
nickminichino:
In which I take Sasha Frere-Jones to task for his dismissal of Adele’s audience as “middle-aged moms who don’t know how to pirate music and will drive to Starbucks when they need to buy it” in the June 27, 2011 New Yorker.
This is very confusing, because obviously S F-J is right, but also obviously many readers/watchers of VH1 (not to mention The New Yorker) are...
endasher:
Jesus Christ, grammar doesn’t just mean “words.” “Usage correction” would be ok, “diction correction” (kinda redundant) less so, though why the prescriptiveness at all? Sometimes poor prepositional choices prove serendipitous. For instance, the strongest regional marker of my speech—and really, one of the few that anyone under 35 retains from the once gloriously non-rhotic hodgepodge...
2 tags
A lot of people who screech about usage and claim that there is an obvious and immutably right way to write/speak English often (in my experience) adhere more or less blindly to rules imparted to them by stiff, officious authority figures who themselves often don’t know or care about the reasoning behind their edicts.
In other words, if you really cared about diction and syntax, then you...
“The authorities really don’t know what to do about fraud when they...”
– Einhorn, David. Fooling Some of the People All of the Time. 352.
1 tag
Sarah Palin’s critics routinely mock her intellect, so when the state of Alaska released 24,000 emails she wrote while serving as governor, “AOL Weird News,” an offbeat component of AOL.com, had a representative sample analyzed to see how well she wrote. They expected the results to confirm their anti-Palin bias, but they were in for a surprise.
Far from being an...
“The Smell of Politics”
– Title of Chapter 26 in David Einhorn’s Fooling Some of the People All of the Time.
1 tag
“We are, today in America, in a Luxemburgian economy. Inequality between the rich...”
– Timothy Snyder (via marcthesharc)
Daniel?
1 tag
1 tag
“That he could not prevent the first world war plunged the septuagenarian steel...”
– The Economist on Andrew Carnegie.
Good one.
“His interest in rock and roll music began at age 10 when he met Elvis Presley.”
– “Tom Petty.” Wikipedia.
1 tag
That dress you're wearing is a weapon against the...
A similar logic applies whenever fluctuation in or constantly low levels of demand create markets that are too uncertain or small to encourage mass production. At the fringe of almost every industry, therefore, small firms survive by supplying a changing variety of oddments or responding to surges in demand. In exceptional cases — for example, women’s garments — most of an...
1 tag
“Mass production … means the creation of general goods through specialized...”
– Piore and Sabel. The Second Industrial Divide. 27.
I mean: here is a guy who invested in a growing... →
And they confused which type of diabetes they’re... →
Ms. Abramson is now the trade magazine’s star... →
“We don’t have to necessarily wear padded shoulders that make us look like men or be serious 24 hours a day about everything,” Ms. Mayer said. “She can both kick ass more than anyone as a news person and make a great salad dressing.
1 tag
“Uncertainty about changes in national economies is matched by confusion about...”
– Piore and Sabel. The Second Industrial Divide. 13-14.
“Marx no less than Smith believed that survival in any economic system imposes...”
– Piore, Michael and Charles Sabel. The Second Industrial Divide. 10.
“I had never milked a goat before the time I... →
Just don’t let anyone take your picture.
doree:
I profiled Anthony Weiner for the Observer in 2007:
“I love The Dog Whisperer,” he said. “I’ve tried their techniques.”
“He has cats,” said [his press secretary] Mr. Caplin.
“Cats don’t like it,” said Mr. Weiner.
“In theory, bank loyalties ought to be mixed. On the one hand, banks prefer...”
– Interfluidity.
1 tag
“The histories of capitalism are punctuated by “divides” or...”
– Schneiberg, Marc. Course description for Sociology 340: American Capitalism.
1 tag
im confused about this… are u saying don himself is an artist? or that the show is art? because the iliad is about trying to open up trade routes and also impalement, and that’s art. but what the ppl are doing in it is probably not art.
— bmichael
I’ve been way too reductive about “Mad Men.” As endasher says quite plainly, “I’m not sure why you use it...
