Frank Chimero: It irks me that we’re throwing around the word “timeless” all willy-nilly. At this point, “timeless” is hyperbole for something with a shelf-life of a couple years. This bag of Doritos? Timeless. Our sense of time is all out of whack. When people link to older blog posts and articles, they’ll maybe call …
Monthly Archive: March 2013
Mar 29 2013
A “-gate” Repeats Itself
Alice Marwick at Wired on “Donglegate“: Regardless of the nuances of the incident, the fact remains that [Adria] Richards faced a gargantuan backlash that included death threats, rape threats, a flood of racist and sexually violent speech, a DDOS attack on her employer — and a photoshopped picture of a naked, bound, decapitated woman. The …
Mar 27 2013
Mecha-Obama and Micro-Payments
Technology guru-turned-Cassandra, Jaron Lanier, thinks he knows why Obama won reelection. In a recent interview with UK’s Spectator, he said: If you have the biggest computer and the biggest data, you can calculate how to target people with a political message, and have almost a guaranteed deterministic level of success. Politics then becomes about who …
Mar 25 2013
The Agent of Change, the Barbarian
Richard Nash at the Virginia Quarterly Review has a long piece that is ostensibly about the business of literature, but really gets at the heart of what the book means to civilization. I just loved it. The two bits I’ll highlight have to do with the book’s resilience as a piece of both technology and …
Mar 20 2013
The Blood Will Not Come Off, Ctd.
There is a torrent of Iraq War soul-searches in the media right now, and they continue to stick in my craw for their evasiveness, especially after the brutally self-critical tone of Andrew Sullivan’s professed regrets for his support. I was looking forward to something similar from former Bush speechwriter — Mr. Axis of Evil himself …
Mar 20 2013
The Blood Will Not Come Off
This feels like an academic debate. But it isn’t. I have blood on my hands. However many times I try to wash them, the blood will not come off. Andrew Sullivan, on the explanations and mea culpas given by those like himself who supported the Iraq War. Warning: Image that accompanies the above link is …
Mar 20 2013
Amazon, I Do Not Understand Your Recommendation Engine
Because, obviously, if I’m going to get a medium-sized Bluetooth speaker, I’m also going to need a stapler. Q.E.D. Bonus: The stapler apparently runs on Windows. Of course, I hate having to defrag those things.
Mar 18 2013
Mike Daisey vs. The View From Nowhere
Mike Daisey, in a Facebook comment thread, confronts a former CNN vice-president with the press’s blindness to its own sickness, in the wake of CNN’s much-derided coverage of the Steubenville rape trial: This is an absolutely perfect example of a story that tells all the facts in front of these reporters, and they have totally …
Mar 17 2013
Near-Earth for Your Ears
This is an experiment. I’m interested in perhaps — perhaps! — beginning a podcast project, in which I’d read selections from this blog on a semi-regular basis. For now, in order to avoid podcast “episodes” that last only four or five minutes, I’m thinking about grouping posts together that follow a certain theme. For example, …
Mar 15 2013
Paul Dreams of Tech-Journalism Intrigue
This is a dream I had a couple of nights ago. I was entering some kind of convention hall along with an excited and somewhat hip throng of people (I, of course, was in no way hip). I didn’t enter alone, though my companions were unidentifiable to me, sort of faceless. I don’t know who …
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