June 2011
27 posts
WatchIf you haven’t been sufficiently annoyed by the Lohan video, here’s Richard Phillips getting even more LA on Sasha Grey. Amazing how a 90-second video can make you hate an entire city.
May 2011
67 posts
Harvard Business Review Reinvention Is Paying Off... →
A curiously upbeat post from Jeremy Peters, where he hands over NYT real estate to Adi Ignatius to wax enthusiastic about his loyal readers and his rising newsstand sales. And never mentions the fact that HBR circulation is in fact hitting brand-new lows.
“It is the queasy recollection of over-cooked tripe and liver with all the pipes...”
– Bruce Palling on Food: A Deliciously Offal Meal - WSJ.com
I think you need to be (a) English and (b) pushing 60 in order to be able to write this sentence. Unless you grew up during rationing or its immediate aftermath, it’s pretty unlikely that you were ever forced to eat over-cooked tripe...
“one of the arguments in favor of the Skype deal—synergies and users and...”
– Jeff Matthews Is Not Making This Up: A Very Un-Buffett-Like Acquisition
I’ve always wondered about this — is the AOL Time Warner deal generally considered to have been bad for AOL shareholders? It seems to me that they were the only real winner: at least they had Time Warner’s...
Slow News
paddyhirsch:
I got a mixed reaction to my three-minute speech at the Knight Fellowship Re-engineering Journalism presentation at Stanford last night…
News companies look to me a like a line of people at an all you can eat digital buffet. We’re piling our plates with websites, facebook and twitter acounts, podcasts, webcasts, slideshows, videos, mobile and ipad apps, even though we don’t...
PR pitch of the day
Dear Felix,
What if everyone had the potential of being the next Warren Buffet or George Soros? Understanding the complexities of Wall Street may be a daunting task, but with the official launch of [REDACTED] an iPhone/ iPad application, the masses now have a shot.
<snip>
…sophisticated text analysis and proprietary algorithms based on Israeli military ...
“This is New York City, and I’ve seen them paint bike lanes over rats,...”
– Bike Snob NYC: The Indignity of Smugging by Bicycle: Other Cyclists
Felix Salmon's Brain: A Diagram
alexleo:
After knowing Felix for two months, this is my best guess as to how his mind is divvied up. (Bigger version here.)
I had no idea it was even possible to love Alex more than I did before. But it was. It so was.
“This year, my personal challenge is around being thankful for the food I have to...”
– Mark Zuckerberg’s new challenge: Eating only what he kills
iMac puzzles
So this is very odd. Apple will ship a new 21.5-inch iMac with a custom-installed solid-state drive in just 2-4 days. They will also ship a new 27-inch iMac with a custom-installed 2TB drive in the same 2-4 days. But if you want the new 27-inch iMac with a solid-state drive, that’s 4-6 weeks.
“Just get the smaller iMac”, I hear you say, “since the new iMacs now come with...
ELIZABETHWARRNOHSNAP.GIF
celebraterickysargulesh:
Look! I made an animated GIF of Elizabeth Warren! From today’s hearings when she was accused of lying!
“From George Bush to George Osborne, many stupid and disingenuous things have...”
– Is defaulting really ‘political suicide’? | Aditya Chakrabortty | Comment is free | The Guardian
“When Lear wails, “Never, never, never, never, never” before his...”
– King Lear: My quest to build the perfect production of Shakespeare’s harrowing play. - By Jessica Winter - Slate Magazine
Several times in my interviews with business analysts, I spotted the person peeking at a legal pad on which were written a series of bullet points, and then he’d try to find an opening in the interview to launch into the three (or four, or five) reasons that he had chosen to come to McKinsey — “the training” always ranking high, the pay never mentioned. If I tried to take...
“Through chatting with a friend over what he acknowledged was a very difficult...”
– Radio host says world’s end actually coming in Oct | ajc.com
Glad that’s cleared up.
Top Ten lines from Charlie Gasparino’s “What I Read” interview
When I wake up around 7 or 7:30, I’ll go between NY1 and Imus in the background.
If I’m doing a hit on Dobbs at 7:30, say, I’ll have an hour and a half of downtime because the day’s gone—the Wall Street guys hit the bars around 4:30 or 5—so I’ll usually hit the gym and do a...
“In the IPO pricing of LinkedIn,
Which doubled before one had blinked in,...”
– Limerick Poems on Finance and Economics by Dr. Goose: LinkedIn
Genius.
“Why all the fuss? It’s merely a bit of hanky-panky with the help,”...”
– Anne-Elisabeth Moutet despairs of French men, even post-DSK.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn: why French women put up with it - Telegraph
“Mr. Dervis is a close friend of George Papandreou, the prime minister of Greece,...”
– Affair in Kemal Dervis’s Past May Damage His Chances at I.M.F. - NYTimes.com
This, I did not know.
“Speculation about succession at the IMF has included me in the group of persons...”
– Dervis Won’t Seek Top IMF Role - WSJ.com
This defies credulity. He’d rather stay at Brookings than run the IMF? I’m sure his decision has nothing to do with news of his extra-marital affair being splashed all over the NYT. (On which subject, kudos to Landon Thomas for not...
“Q: After the financial crisis, people were saying it is business that is to...”
– Joe Kernen of CNBC’s ‘Squawk Box’ writes ‘Your Teacher Said What?!’ in support of capitalism
Is there anybody on CNBC who doesn’t buy into this kind of thing?
DSK theory du jour
I’m not sure if this theory has made it onto the internet yet, but it’s been floated at the office — that DSK ordered a hooker to come to his hotel room, came out of the bathroom naked, saw that a girl had arrived, and mistook her for the prostitute.
It’s implausible, to be sure, but then again, so’s everything in this case.
“Felix Salmon simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
– Yes, that’s an on-the-record quote from Bill Keller.
What news organizations owe the fixers they rely on, leave behind in foreign countries | Poynter.
“It’s highly affluent (median income is around $500K a year)”
– How to Pitch the New York Observer (Servicey!) - Spiersblr
I’m sorry, Elizabeth, but there’s no way that the median income of NY Observer readers is $500k/year.
“Last week my wife and I told our 13-year-old daughter she could join Facebook....”
– I would say that this is Bill Keller jumping the shark, if he hadn’t done that numerous times already. It’s certainly Bill Keller disqualifying himself from running a 21st-Century newspaper.
The Twitter Trap
Urbaniak: Oops →
jamesurbaniak:
“In life, events tend to follow patterns. People who commit crimes tend to be criminals, for example. Can anyone tell me any economists who have been convicted of violent sex crimes? Can anyone tell me of any heads of nonprofit international economic entities who have ever been charged and…
Ben Stein, 1992:
I have been taking prescription tranquilizers since 1966. I have used almost every kind imaginable: phenothiazines, chlorpromazines and others I cannot recall. But Halcion, a chemical firstcousin to the tranquilizer Xanax, is in a class by itself for mind-altering side effects.
Ben Stein, 2011:
I have had hotel maids that were complete lunatics, stealing airline tickets...
Front Page Scan - New York Times →
This is one of the weirdest pages on nytimes.com. For one thing, it seems to think today’s date is January 14. And for another thing, the front page is reduced to an illegible size “to reduce download time”?!
Stewart vs O’Reilly. No contest.
The presumption of innocence
French politicians on both sides of the political spectrum, and quite a few commentators on Twitter, are talking quite a lot about the presumption of innocence with respect to DSK. Is there a norm that journalists and citizens should presume everybody innocent until they’re proven guilty? Because I always thought it was just that people were innocent “in the eyes of the law”....
Felix: A couple of notes about that hotel suite →
pegobry:
Why wouldn’t the IMF pay for a luxury suite? This is the part of the Twitter chatter that has confounded me. The IMF manages zillions in assets, and it’s an outrage if its MD gets a luxury suite at a hotel?
I’m not opining on whether the IMF would ever pay for a luxury suite at a hotel. I’m saying it didn’t pay for this luxury suite. Quite possibly the purpose of...
A couple of notes about that hotel suite
Of course it’s a luxury suite, if it costs $3,000 a night.
No way was DSK — or the IMF — paying $3,000 for the suite. DSK, as a French VIP and the future president of France, would have booked a perfectly nice room and then gotten upgraded by the (French) hotel to the best suite they had.
DSK was on “personal business”, which not only means that he doesn’t...
“Right by Catania Bakery a couple of dudes ran up from behind, punched me in the...”
– Yglesias » An Evening On The Beltway Yuengling and Minor Assault Circuit
Ouch. Very sorry to hear about this, Matt. All sympathy with you tonight. Heal quick!
“Part of Intellectual Ventures business model is to sell its patents or patent...”
– Is Nathan Myhrovld’s Intellectual Ventures behind the iOS in-app purchase patent troll job? | Edible Apple
“NOT DRINKING POISON is not, however, borne out of frustration that I can’t...”
– Now that’s what I call an About page. In any case, if you love wine, go subscribe to this blog, it rocks.
not drinking poison in paris: about
Yunus Resigns
The text of his resignation letter:
May 12, 2011
Handing‐over of the Charge of Managing Director
I am today relinquishing the post of Managing Director of Grameen Bank on the basis that the Deputy Managing Director Mrs. Nurjahan Begum would hold charge until a Managing Director is appointed in accordance with the procedures under section 14 of the Grameen Bank ordinance. Since the board of...
“Dumb creature” is a rather crude way of putting it, but that excludes...”
– No, Florida’s Bestiality Law Will Not Outlaw Human Sex - Miami News - Riptide 2.0
This is Florida. Don’t be so sure.
“How many times have I been at home cooking dinner and the news comes on and you...”
– Actress Diane Kruger roughs it for her role of journalist kidnapped in Afghanistan - The Washington Post
How many times have I been at home cooking diner and Diane Kruger comes on the TV and I go “oh, turn that off”? Um, never, actually.
“Grant, 49, had been on a two-day drinking spree when he ordered an assistant to...”
– Now that’s how you bid on a Warhol.
Hugh Grant: ‘I was drunk when I bought Elizabeth Taylor painting that made £11m profit’ | Mail Online
