Arthur Miller on his motivations for writing Death of a Salesman:
"…there was the smell in the air of a new American Empire in the making…and I wanted to set before the new captains and the so smugly confident kings the corpse of a believer”
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Buying This Thing Will Make Me Happy.
Other people will look up to me because I own this thing and use it frequently, which will make me very happy. When I’m at a party, for instance, I can wait for a moment when people start talking about how cool it looks from the latest advertisement. Then I can stroll over and take it out and start using it, pretending that I hadn’t heard their conversation, and I can look up casually and wink at them. They’re sure to be impressed. Only I haven’t decided about the wink yet, because maybe it would make it obvious that I had heard their conversation. The wink may have to be something I decide in the moment.
I want one. I don’t care what color it is. I’m happier already thinking about this moment, someday, in my life.
Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media, James Fallows:
Fifteen years ago, I published a book, Breaking the News, which argued that a relentless focus on scandal, spectacle, and the “game” of politics was driving citizens away from public affairs, making it harder for even the least cynical politicians to do an effective job, and at the same time steadily eroding our public ability to assess what is happening and decide how to respond. And this was in an era that in retrospect seems innocent.
Not that we need any more evidence that the nature of journalism has changed. But that, really, is the crux and Journalism has changed. It’s now lower-case-j journalism for the most part, and to find Journalism that matters anymore, the responsibility is on us to seek it out.
That’s not to say that what Gawker does is inherently bad. I read Gawker properties all the time. But the organization is representative of how habits have changed seemingly over night.
The Art of Immersion: Why Do We Tell Stories? | Epicenter | Wired.com, Frank Rose:
We stand now at the intersection of lure and blur. The future beckons, but we’re only partway through inventing it. We can see the outlines of a new art form, but its grammar is as tenuous and elusive as the grammar of cinema a century ago.
We know this much: people want to be immersed. They want to get involved in a story, to carve out a role for themselves, to make it their own. But how is the author supposed to accommodate them? What if the audience runs away with the story? And how do we handle the blur—not just between fiction and fact, but between author and audience, entertainment and advertising, story and game? A lot of smart people—in film, in television, in video games, in advertising, in technology, even in neuroscience—are trying to sort these questions out. The Art of Immersion is their story.
How writing by hand makes kids smarter – The Week
Heather Horn in The Atlantic Wire says that while all this research is fascinating, it mostly shows that “scientists are finally beginning to explore what writers have long suspected.” She notes a 1985 article in the Paris Review in which the interviewer asks novelist Robert Stone if he mostly types his manuscripts. His reply: “Yes, until something becomes elusive. Then I write in longhand in order to be precise. On a typewriter or word processor you can rush something that shouldn’t be rushed — you can lose nuance, richness, lucidity. The pen compels lucidity.”
Then, go buy a pen.
The REAL Death Of The Music Industry
No one seems to have tracked it back to the original source nor noticed what happened to catch my eye straight away: This chart sucks.
This is a great piece on the decline of music sales. What’s interesting to me, as hard as it is for the “industry” to adjust to change, independent artists seem to be finding their way in this new world. Overhead is lower when you’re on your own, and you keep more ducats on what you sell, and you need fewer fans to justify your existence.
Seems like getting out from under big labels and embracing the power of the single might just be smart business.
The Day the Movies Died: Movies + TV: GQ
With that in mind, let’s look ahead to what’s on the menu for this year: four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on an amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons. One sequel to a comedy. An adaptation of a children’s book. An adaptation of a Saturday-morning cartoon. One sequel with a 4 in the title. Two sequels with a 5 in the title. One sequel that, if it were inclined to use numbers, would have to have a 7 1/2 in the title.1
Grim.
Apple (finally) announced a plan for allowing publishers a method of selling subscriptions to their publications (and apps and music and TV and whatnot), which includes the standard 30% cut for Apple and a 70% cut for publishers.
Like everything else in Apple’s catalog of stores.
70% publishers.
30% Apple.
Same-same.
But publishers are pissed. They say they’re losing control of the relationship with their subscribers. They say they’re losing money. They say rain is turning to vinegar. They say their toothbrushes are now fashioned of red-hot steel.
The thing is, I’m a potential subscriber for digital magazines. Just as I was a potential customer before Apple introduced a market for music and TV, then apps for my iPhone and iPad. Here’s what happened to me.
I wasn’t buying CDs or DVDs. Apple introduced me to a simple, cheap way to buy the music and movies I wanted to watch without dealing with plastic. Now, I buy music and movies regularly.
I wasn’t buying apps. Web apps sucked on the iPhone at the time. Apple introduced me to a simple marketplace of great apps where developers got a fair shake, and I didn’t feel like I was being kicked in the face by only buying from big box stores. Now, I’m a regular app store customer.
I wasn’t buying much software for my Mac until about three weeks ago. Yeah, Apple introduced the Mac App Store, and the experience is superb. I now buy apps regularly and exclusively from the Mac App Store.
See how this is playing out? I wasn’t buying these things. Apple introduced a clever way for me to enjoy these things. Now I buy these things. You can make a case all you want for how developers are getting screwed, artists are getting plundered, whatever. As a customer, Apple made things easy for me by imposing their sense of sales savvy on a market that has, time and again, shown limited ability to think through these things for themselves.
As a customer, the message I hope I’ve built is this: Apple will take 30% from publishers in exchange for my business as a subscriber. That’s 30% for Apple, 70% for you publishers, adding up to 100% in a transaction for which — just yesterday — neither party would have seen a fat nickel from me.
“We are not going to have any flaws on the execution of the iPhone launch,” said Chief Operating Officer Francis Shammo. “If we go to customer service, we’ve hired over 3,000 people currently, who have been trained. And if you think about it, we launched the iPad, so that our customer service reps in our stores and in our centers could get used to the interface of the iPhone, which was a pre-launch to the iPhone. So we’ve trained everyone, extensive training around that.”
I’m sure Verizon has applied many of the AT&T lessons as they prep their stores and network for the iPhone on February 10. But seriously, one of those lessons they clearly missed is not to talk balls about something with such incendiary potential to blow up in your face. I just have this feeling that this is going to be the line most often repeated on February 12.
That said, I don’t understand what he’s thinking about the iPad launch. It’s not going to touch the iPhone — not the same sport.
Satarii Star Accessory — IndieGoGo
Our idea is the Star Accessory, a product that makes your mobile camera follow your every move. You can video yourself doing anything without the awkwardness of asking friends or complicated setups. It is a sensor enabled motorized base that moves your mobile camera to follow you and keep you within the image frame. And it gets rid of the need for tripods in a sleekly designed, pocket-able form factor.
Hands down one of the coolest ad-ons I’ve seen for consumer video. Count me in.
May we all wish for a speedy recovery for Jobs, and comfort and peace for his family.
The piece was co-published with Rolling Stone magazine — they fact-checked it and published it in print; we posted it online. In the days after running “Deadly Immunity,” we amended the story with five corrections (which can still be found logged here) that went far in undermining Kennedy’s exposé. At the time, we felt that correcting the piece — and keeping it on the site in the spirit of transparency — was the best way to operate. But subsequent critics, including most recently, Seth Mnookin in his book “The Panic Virus,” further eroded any faith we had in the story’s value. We’ve grown to believe the best reader service is to delete the piece entirely.
Personally, I prefer keeping the story alive on the site with appropriate corrections, as Salon had initially done. It truly was an explosive story, and the fact that it was published in the first place is as much a part of the historical record of media on the web as is the now allegedly debunked claims (I know nothing about autism and vaccines, personally) editors purport to be fixing with this latest move. But that’s only half the media story. The rest of the story is that Salon is making this correction a big deal — working hard to make this a big story with front-page placement today. Well on that front, Salon. Even if the nuclear option is a bridge too far.
So we knew we wanted to make an origin story. We knew we wanted to make a young Lara Croft, and we wanted her be a blend of someone that has a level of vulnerability and inner strength. She has this aspirational quality. She wants to be someone and to pull away from the perception of who she is because of her legacy of being a Croft. She is her own person and she is trying to make her way in this world. So that was the focus early on – trying to understand who she was inside.
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The things that we absolutely kept were the brown eyes, the signature quality of her lips having that M shape, and the relationship between the eyes and the nose and the mouth. Those were things we knew we wanted to maintain.
…
We realized that Lara’s hair was a big part of her visual language – the iconography of Lara croft includes her ponytail. But we also knew we didn’t want to do something like the classic braid. We wanted to have the hair itself tell a bit of the story. So the hair moves and helps to sell the drama.
Karl Stewart:
We did some initial tests where we brought in the vision for the new Lara Croft, and then we matched it up against the previous iterations. In the tests of the previous iterations it was clearly evident that people moved around the image more to the items and her chest and her waist size. But with the new image, people spent most of the time piercing her eyes. Anybody who has seen the image says “I know that girl.”
I grew up with Laura Croft. Talk about giving an adolescent boy a false image of the female form? I was that adolescent boy. I don’t regret it for a second, I mean, come on. However, with the reboot of the franchise I think they did a terrific job capturing the story of Laura Croft in her remodeled physique; she’s fit, strong, more normally proportioned. I see women who look like the new Laura working out at my neighborhood club. My kids see those women, too, and strong, fit, and active isn’t a terrible role model to have.