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 …
Tag Archive: culture
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 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 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
Samsung: Pedestrian Pageantry, No Stereos Left Untyped
Samsung apparently put on a bizarre, community-theatre extravaganza for its Galaxy S4 introduction last night, and in doing so seems to have staked its claim as the electronics company that is everything Apple isn’t. Cult of Android‘s John Brownlee: . . . tonight, what Samsung showed off was gimmick after gimmick. Features no one will …
Mar 13 2013
A Population Equally Brave
Jennifer Michael Hecht is one of my favorite writers, and in her review of Susan Jacoby’s new book on Robert Ingersoll, she leaves me with this haunting thought: There have been atheists and religious doubters throughout history, but the ones who remain famous after their deaths tend to have been equally famous for something else …
Mar 13 2013
A Phase of Incestuous Contraction
As a performing artist, here’s a thing I’ve definitely fretted over; doing art only for an audience of people who all do the same thing. Here’s Steve Almond at The New Republic writing from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference (AWP): But there’s a larger and more unsettling truth. . . one that …
Mar 11 2013
Let Zelda Be Zelda
The damsel in distress cliche, enshrined in our video games. This is fantastic. I’ll definitely be watching more of Anita Sarkeesian’s videos.
Mar 10 2013
Used Digital Sales Can Totally Work (I Think)
Thanks to a set of recent patent filings from Apple and Amazon, reports are saying that the two companies are both looking at ways for consumers of their digital products to resell them to other users, in a sense, setting up “used” mp3 and ebook exchanges. Many seem confused about how this would even work, …
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