June 2011
42 posts
➚ The Web Is a Customer Service Medium →
Last week Apple released the new version of its video editing software - Final Cut Pro X - to a great outcrying from professional editors. All the furor over an update to software echoes this article very well. If you are making something on the internet, it is well worth your time to read and understand this essay.
When it arrived the web seemed to fill all of those niches at once. The web was...
➚ Sex Trafficking of Americans: The Girls Next... →
This article was really hard to read, but I feel like it explores the legal, moral, and law enforcement issues of the subject well. Be warned.
There are more young American girls entering the commercial sex industry—an estimated 300,000 at this moment—and their ages have been dropping drastically. “The average starting age for prostitution is now 13,” says Rachel Lloyd, executive director of Girls...
➚ Our Remembrance Of The Civil War →
I grew up here in the south, and because I am a contrarian, was put off by the fervor with which some people treat the Civil War. I don’t remember ever attending a civil war reenactment, but I imagine this captures the feeling quite well:
The Battle of Antietam, fought on September 17, 1862, was of even greater significance in the war than either the first or the second Battle of Bull Run....
➚ The Joyful Environmentalists →
Andy Crouch, author of Culture Making, interviews Eugene Peterson and Peter Harris on the topic of environmentalism. Great read, whether you are a Christian or not.
As Christian conservationists, do you see urbanization as a good thing, a bad thing, or something neutral?
Harris: My biblical theology means I cannot see it as a bad thing. The ultimate biblical vision is the heavenly city. Our...
The Irresponsible Investor →
This is an older article (2004), but worth considering - I would say “in light of the continuing recession” but I think it’s just worth considering period.
Birkenstock USA has existed for nearly 40 years, but it still has only about $120 million in annual sales. It has grown slowly, generating steady but modest profits and exhibiting no great ambition to grow a lot faster....
My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant - NYTimes.com →
One day when I was 16, I rode my bike to the nearby D.M.V. office to get my driver’s permit. Some of my friends already had their licenses, so I figured it was time. But when I handed the clerk my green card as proof of U.S. residency, she flipped it around, examining it. “This is fake,” she whispered. “Don’t come back here again.”
A personal telling of an injustice that millions of people...
Internet Start-Ups Find New Metrics to Look... →
Now the latest wave of Internet start-ups are adding their own particular yardsticks to the valuation vocabulary.
Try “Acsoi” — a metric so new that there’s no agreement on how to pronounce it. Depending on whom you ask, it’s either “ack-soy” or “ack-swa.”
Short for “adjusted consolidated segment operating income,” Acsoi is one of three yardsticks that Groupon, the online coupon...
Define the Ratio of People to Cake →
Google: You are climbing a staircase. Each time you can either take one step or two. The staircase has n steps. In how many distinct ways can you climb the staircase?
There’s a typo in your question, there, dude. You said “n,” but I think you were supposed to put a number.
Answering the 20 strangest questions that large companies ask during the interview process.
“There’s a rule they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School. It is, if...”
– Edwin Land
Polaroid’s SX-70: The Art and Science of the Nearly Impossible
Preet Bharara Takes on Wall Street Crime : The New... →
This article is long, fascinating, and frustrating. Instapaper it and read it when you get a chance.
Is James Franco For Real? -- New York Magazine →
At age 28, ten years after dropping out, Franco decided to go back to college. He enrolled in a couple of UCLA extension courses (literature, creative writing) and found them so magically satisfying—so safe and pure compared with the world of acting—that he threw himself back into his education with crazy abandon. He persuaded his advisers to let him exceed the maximum course load, then...
Technology Provides an Alternative to Love →
The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and...
The End Of The Rodeo For The World's Greatest... →
“Mike, what did you come out here for?” he asks.
For a moment, the Lord strikes me dumb. On the drive to Monticello, I had rehearsed my questions about Delaney’s murder. After two hours in Driver’s company, I have not asked one of them. I am not scared, or even embarrassed, but suddenly aware that there is more to his existence than the terrible, earth-shattering act of violence he...
“What if a reinvigorated Church were to embed genuine faith in the artist’s...”
– Tony Woodlief on Bad Christian Art
“Focus on one at a time, knowing you can do the other stuff afterwards.”
– Trying to pursue many different directions at once?
Kind of Screwed →
Andy Baio used Kickstarter to fund an 8-bit (think old Nintendo music) reinterpretation of Miles Davis’ classic Kind of Blue album. For the cover, they did an 8-bit (think old Nintendo graphics) version of the cover photo, a use which they considered well within the legal definition of Fair Use. The photographer who took the photo disagreed.
After seven months of legal wrangling, we...
“We now only make 3% of our apparel in the United States, down from 90% in 1955....”
– The History of a Cheap Dress :: Etsy Blog
A Telephonic Conversation - Magazine - The... →
Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world,—a conversation with only one end to it. You hear questions asked; you don’t hear the answer. You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return. You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise, or sorrow, or dismay. You can’t make head or tail of...
A Frightening Time in America →
For many years everybody knew that business was business and people needed to make money, but people were also a little embarrassed or ashamed of that. It was regarded as somewhat crass. Some of this contradiction comes out of England and old conflicts between the bourgeoisie and nobility. Sometime – I’m not sure whether it was the 1990s or 1980s in America – half of that conflict really sort...
“I think it’s always a good thing — and often downright essential — for...”
– Daring Fireball: The Future of NetNewsWire: An Interview With Brent Simmons and Black Pixel’s Daniel Pasco regarding the sale of NetNewsWire.
“I’m never afraid of running out of ideas—I always have plenty of them. The...”
– An Interview with “Weird Al” Yankovic
Films - In Defense of Slow and Boring -... →
I couldn’t find anyone passage that stood above the rest, the entire thing is worth reading. If you think my film-watching habits are snobby, this is the best defense I could imagine.
House Republicans vote to cut funds to implement... →
wilwheaton:
Arguing that the U.S. food supply is 99 percent safe, House Republicans cut millions of dollars Thursday from the Food and Drug Administration’s budget, denying the agency money to implement landmark food safety laws approved by the last Congress.
Saying the cuts were needed to lower the national deficit, the House also reduced funding to the Agriculture Department’s food safety...
Mad German Auteur, Now in 3-D!: Movies + TV: GQ →
“There’s something profoundly wrong—as wrong as the Spanish Inquisition was. The Spanish Inquisition had one goal, to eradicate all traces of Muslim faith on the soil of Spain, and hence you had to confess and proclaim the innermost deepest nature of your faith to the commission. And almost as a parallel event, explaining and scrutinizing the human soul, into all its niches and crooks and...
“If you can… fall in love, with the work, with people you work with, with your...”
– Robert Krulwich
“It is the following formula that I take to task: Camera Gear+Pretty...”
– A Camera Does Not a Filmmaker Make at FreshDV
On Discipline →
Let me be clear. Too many artists already raise artificial barriers to creation: they can’t write, or think, or paint, they claim, unless they’re seated at a pristine desk, with southern light, perfect silence, and a dozen sharpened pencils all pointed west. These are not aids to creation, or marks of real discipline: they are a group of excuses not to create if the conditions are not met. I am...
“You know,” he said with a mildly embarrassed laugh, “every good value that...”
– The Closing of the Marijuana Frontier
“The nurses start by asking, ‘Do you know what’s happening?’” a Sanaa...”
– National Geographic Magazine - The Custom of Child Marriages
This article is harrowing to read, but it also helps one to understand all the problems that come with “modernization.” It is not merely that women have no place in society, it is a problem of what is required of a woman when...
Em dashes—why writers should use them more... →
The problem with the dash—as you may have noticed!—is that it discourages truly efficient writing. It also—and this might be its worst sin—disrupts the flow of a sentence. Don’t you find it annoying—and you can tell me if you do, I won’t be hurt—when a writer inserts a thought into the midst of another one that’s not yet complete? Strunk and White—who must always be mentioned in articles such as...
“It’s as if the great advances of human civilization, in everything from animal...”
– Taco Bell and the Golden Age of Drive-Thru
Go into the kitchen of a Taco Bell today, and you’ll find a strong counterargument to any notion that the U.S. has lost its manufacturing edge. Every Taco Bell, McDonald’s (MCD), Wendy’s (WEN), and Burger King is a little factory, with a manager who...
“The United States now has five per cent of the world’s population, twenty-five...”
– Is Long-Term Solitary Confinement Torture? by Atul Gawande
More:
America now holds at least twenty-five thousand inmates in isolation in supermax prisons. An additional fifty to eighty thousand are kept in restrictive segregation units, many of them in isolation, too, although the government...
As the Years Gather Around Us
The world is getting older. Fast. Phillip Longman, at Foreign Policy, lays it out in stark terms:
It’s true that the world’s population overall will increase by roughly one-third over the next 40 years, from 6.9 to 9.1 billion, according to the U.N. Population Division. But this will be a very different kind of population growth than ever before — driven not by birth rates,...
“We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that’s...”
– Jonah Lehrer for the New Yorker
I linked this before, but it really is a must-read. Add it to Instapaper, print it out, whatever you need to do.
Stanley Kubrick in 1987 →
To make that kind of three-dimensional rubble, you’d have to have everything done by plasterers, modeled, and you couldn’t build that if you spent $80 million and had five years to do it. You couldn’t duplicate, oh, all those twisted bits of reinforcement. And to make rubble, you’d have to go find some real rubble and copy it. It’s the only way. If you’re going to make a tree, for instance, you...
North Korean Dollars
Behind the dictator Kim Jong Il’s regime lies a government agency, Office 39, that is responsible for all the money that passes through Il’s various pursuits. For over a decade, Office 39 has been involved in creating “supernotes” - counterfeit $100 bills - that are identical to real bills down to the type of ink and paper that they are printed with.
For many years, U.S....
The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science →
we have other important goals besides accuracy—including identity affirmation and protecting one’s sense of self—and often those make us highly resistant to changing our beliefs when the facts say we should.
How To Create a Thriving Arthouse Theater (Almost)... →
2011 should be a rotten year for arthouses. With movie attendance plunging by as much as 20%, ticket sales are the worst theater owners have seen in six years.
So why is Toby Leonard, programmer of Nashville’s arthouse Belcourt Theatre, smiling?
“There’s all this talk about theatrical dying, but I don’t see it,” says Leonard, who claims Becourt has posted 20-30% revenue increases over...
“Civilization can survive the loss of its oil reserves, but it cannot survive the...”
– The New Geopolitics of Food - By Lester R. Brown | Foreign Policy
Already in 2011, the U.N. Food Price Index has eclipsed its previous all-time global high; as of March it had climbed for eight consecutive months. With this year’s harvest predicted to fall short, with governments in the Middle East...
The Ghost Park →
The changes in temperature in the past few decades have destroyed great parts of the Yellowstone ecosystem:
States from the Dakotas on down to Nevada weathered devastating jumps of almost 2 degrees, or roughly double the rate of the planet’s rise. The northern Rocky winters got radically milder, the summers started sooner and were drier and longer, and wildfires burned through vast tracts of...
