May 2012
58 posts
“If readers are too lazy to copy and paste the URL, and write a few words about...”
– I’m going to disagree here. I use these buttons a lot - nearly always when I’m browsing the web on my iPad. Copy-and-pasting a URL into Twitter is still decidedly non-trivial on the iPad, and these buttons make sharing sites on Twitter a lot easier. I like ‘em!
Sweep the Sleaze |...
Big, Fat Cognitive Illusion (and all of us are...
markdow:
Here’s the table that was screaming of self-deception:
Look at the first column. Once the giggles have subsided, and you’ve shown it to your colleagues so that they can share in the derision, don’t you wonder how it is that Greeks—and only the Greeks—believe they, and not the Germans, are the hardest working people in the Eurozone? Okay, you may be tempted to think it’s somehow a...
“Why does Peter Wolfgang get to toot his own stupid bugle for two paragraphs? The...”
– The AP Is Gay For Stupid
“Along with TA, Barry popularized the concept of “roof hits”: when...”
– Now that’s what I call fiscal responsibility.
A User’s Guide To Smoking Pot With Barack Obama
“Research is a Wall Street product. Back in the days of the dot-com bust, the...”
– Noah Millman (via pegobry)
“One of the big questions from readers, Hardiman said: “What can you do to get me...”
– First clue that you’re not dealing with a representative NYT reader: that they use a term like “content types” to refer to journalism.
NY Times updates iPhone/iPad apps for customized reading » Nieman Journalism Lab
“Men only, no females. The other requirement is that you must have some sort of...”
– Chinese business looking for a few good Jews | FP Passport
“How did Malley, who was clearly in awe of Armstrong during the interview, manage...”
– Neil Armstrong breaks silence to give accountants moon exclusive | Science | The Guardian
“Under those fiscal conditions, which will occur under current law, growth in...”
– Can someone explain this math to me? If you contract at a 1.3% pace in the first half and then expand by a 2.3% pace in the second half, don’t you end the year up by something over 1.1% overall? Rather than being up just 0.5%? What am I missing here?
OK, never mind, I can’t do math.
...
The top 15 contemporary artists, according to...
1 Bacon, Francis 2 Still, Clyfford 3 Zao Wou-Ki 4 Zeng Fanzhi 5 Rothko, Mark 6 Basquiat, Jean-Michel 7 Warhol, Andy 8 Thiebaud, Wayne 9 Kooning, Willem de 10 Richter, Gerhard 11 Chu Teh-Chun 12 Zhang Xiaogang 13 Botero, Fernando 14 Wang Yidong 15 Fontana, Lucio
“If someone at Facebook did whisper in the ear of the underwriters’ analysts...”
– Facebook Forecast Scandal’s Big Question: Insider Trading? - CNBC
“Would Glass-Steagall make things slightly better? Sure. But the next time...”
– A true classic of the straw-man form from Sorkin, here. He spends an entire column arguing against the people arguing for the return of Glass-Steagall. But then he concedes that the return of Glass-Steagall would actually be a good thing. He just doesn’t like people saying that it’s...
“Herbert Matthews sent Ernest Hemingway a letter… Matthews said that he...”
– Herbert Matthews was wrong. The perfect person to tell Morgan’s saga was David Grann. (Although Matthews could be forgiven for not knowing that, seeing as how Grann wasn’t even born yet.) You. Have. To. Read. This.
William Alexander Morgan in the Cuban Revolution : The New Yorker
The David Grann Archive on Longform →
longform:
An editor’s pick bonanza, including Grann’s latest, “The Yankee Comandant,” which came out today.
“Honestly, we’re prostitutes, we give the customer what they want,” he said. “If...”
– The Specialists, Prop Weapons Supplier to ‘Men in Black 3’ - NYTimes.com
Facebook IPO question
Is it possible that Morgan Stanley, rather than overestimating demand for the Facebook IPO, underestimated supply?
Here’s my point: a bunch of early investors sold out as part of the IPO, paying Morgan Stanley 1.1% for the privilege of having the investment bank sell their shares for them. But let’s say that I’m Eduardo Saverin, and I want to sell a bunch of shares as well....
Watchfred-wilson:
Mick Jagger, Arcade Fire, and Nikolai Fraiture on SNL doing The Last Time
the whole SNL musical lineup last night was crazy. you can watch here
Is Mick Jagger the first person to face the problem of (a) having a wireless mic, (b) not having a mic stand, and (c) wanting to clap his hands? In any case, he came up with the clever solution to this problem, of shoving his mic down the...
Annals of aggregation, Jezebel edition
I went in to the Gawker offices yesterday, and at the top of their Big Board, the number-one most viewed story across all of their different websites was this one, about strapless wedding dresses. It’s 753 words long, and in terms of substance it basically copy-and-pastes the 846-word piece it’s aggregating, at Slate. The Slate piece is more polished, and better constructed, and comes...
“From there we went to Boulder, where we stayed for a week so that Rinpoche could...”
– A Cross-Country Drive With a Guru - NYTimes.com
New in the Longform App: Los Angeles Review of...
longform:
Another exciting day for the Longform iPad app: two fantastic, and very different, sites have joined our roster of magazines. Los Angeles Review of Books—one of the most exciting, ambitious publications to launch in the last few years—turns out several lengthy pieces every week from some of the country’s best writers. A few recent favorites: Hua Hsu’s history of office chairs, and...
Yes, it's a bubble
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Wherein I talk about the art market with CBC
“A theoretical physicist friend likes to say, only partly in jest, that there...”
– What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics? - Quora
“If you fail, all you know is that the particular path you took through that...”
– Joe Kraus Blog
“This trip is designed to give you a profoundly unique experience, showing the...”
– Junket offer du jour: four days in “the uncharted and breathtaking Caribbean”.
WatchWeirdly subdued circumlocutions here. He gets there in the end, but it would be nice if he could punch it up a little more.
reuters
“Mrs. Clark was as quiet a neighbor as one could ever hope to have — because she...”
– Co-op Board Rejects Sheik Seeking Two of Huguette Clark’s Homes - NYTimes.com
“I’ve never been shy about sharing my dislike and distrust of you. Put bluntly, I...”
– Is this Jessica Pressler on Anthony Scaramucci, or Texas Sen. John Carona, R-Dallas, in an email to Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston?
“The Pentagon halted its cooperation with Marvel Studios’ blockbuster movie The...”
– Danger Room - What’s Next in National Security | Wired.com
@attackerman with the lede of the week.
“He’s still steamed up about the whole Felix Salmon thing. “He was trying to say...”
– The Mooch Is His Own Aflac Duck
Jessica Pressler on Anthony Scaramucci. Self-recommending.
Art fair question
Do art fairs generally work on a first-come, first-served basis? If I walk into an art fair, and I’m an absolute nobody, and there’s a pretty important work by a pretty important contemporary artist, and I want to buy it, and I have the money, and it hasn’t already been sold, is there an implicit art-fair promise that I can do that?
Here’s my hypothesis: art fairs are...
