September 2011
68 posts
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When Practice Alone Isn't Enough - Wall Street... →
Interesting piece about the arrival in the classical music world of performance coaches from athletics. Even more interesting is the differences between the two worlds: athletes are tested with public contests as much as a few times a week. Classical musicians spend most of their time in constant practice (far more hours of actual repetition of pieces than any athlete), and may be required to...
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You know what would be awesome?
motherjones:
Is if people got as pissed off about new bank debit-card fees (and overdraft fees, and ATM fees, and transaction fees, and credit card fees) as they did about a Netflix price hike.
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Pacific Standard Time - Home →
25 museums and galleries waive admission this Sunday as part of kickoff of Pacific Standard Time. Lots of reasons to get out and about and bathe in art. Lots of cool special events sprinkled around city too.
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William Quigley: A Modest Proposal: Why Can't... →
An amusing, but spot-on, suggestion by William Quigley of the need for fuller disclosure to would-be matrimonial candidates of what they’re really getting into.
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15 Songs By This Year's Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame... →
NPR has a nifty little overview of the 15 acts nominated for this year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, along with music videos of each performer. It’s quite a diverse list, including a couple of acts I never liked, and quite a few I quite loved, and a couple of guilty pleasures to boot. Nice mix, though not many on the list, at this point in the proceedings, could ever have been...
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GOP’s 2012 Presidential Primaries Purity Test -... →
Howard Kurtz on the increasingly Jacobin approach hard-core GOP voters are taking in selecting their possible presidential candidates, and why even the most conservative yet electable are still found wanting because of their inability to pass every corner of the purity test.
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Why our government is broken →
Under the old rules, there were certain things that political parties did not do — even though theoretically they could. If one party controlled the Senate and another party controlled the presidency, the Senate party did not reject all the president’s nominees. The party that controlled the House did not refuse to schedule votes on the president’s budgets. Individual senators did not use secret...
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“Only boring people get bored.”
– wreck&salvage (via danielholter)
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In which teenage Ben Franklin improves his writing... →
austinkleon:
mlarson:
When I was reading this New Atlantis article on self-help, I found mention of Ben Franklin’s ingenious plan for becoming a better writer: imitation, summary, repeated practice. He set up lessons for himself, varying ways of copying from The Spectator…
One method was picking an essay, summarizing every sentence with a brief “hint”, setting those summaries aside for a...
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Baseball After Moneyball - WSJ.com →
GREAT WSJ piece about baseball after “Moneyball” transformed the way teams evaluated, and priced talent. Oh, and Joe Morganstern loves the movie. Can’t wait to see it.
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"Mr. Ebert writes as if it were a matter of life... →
austinkleon:
From Janet Maslin’s review of Roger Ebert’s memoir, Life Itself:
When health problems and radical facial surgery took away his voice in 2006, Mr. Ebert turned to blogging as a substitute. That transition clearly influences this book. “Life Itself” is made up of short chapters that have the vitality of blog entries without the sloppiness that often goes with them.
I’ve always...
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CNNMoney Tech Tumblr: Sprint is capping its... →
This rant from CNNmoneytech neatly outlines an essential conflict right now between providers wanting to shut off unlimited bandwidth and charge ridiculous overage fees (despite plunging bandwidth costs) and the power users who lead many others on tech decision-making. It’ll only get worse as more people take advantage of the Hulus and Netflixes and YouTubes of the world. I’m waiting...
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GM is back, thanks to Uncle Sam - The Washington... →
E.J. Dionne on one of Obama’s most “socialist,” and successful, initiatives: saving a now-thriving GM and Chrysler
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Lou Reed, Metallica Post 30-Second Collabo Preview... →
Too little here of Lou Reed, Metallica to judge what they’re creating, but interesting. Call it Metallica Machine Music
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iPads Used For Play, Not Work: Citigroup Survey -... →
Interesting survey data of how people use iPads (i.e., the only tablet with any substantive market share), more for play than work.
Also interesting, and contributing to iPad’s dominance: its users are more likely to be willing to pay for apps, thus helping finance the robust iPad apps market at the highest possible level.
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Better Facebook Sharing - WSJ.com →
WSJ does a nice rundown of latest changes in Facebook, including those to make it easier to control who you’re sharing what with.
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Uncreative Writing - The Chronicle Review - The... →
Brilliant piece about how remix culture, Big Data/Big Text are transforming what it means to be a writer, and to be literature.
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Google Social Network Opened to Public - WSJ.com →
Now that Google has opened up Google+ to all comers, we’ll find out if Google+ has enough legs to do anything with the broader populace. I’m not holding my breath, given Google’s erratic social media history and the fact that use of Google+ dropped precipitously after the first several weeks among the 20 million or so folks who were connected or motivated enough to wangle an...
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“According to urban experts, squatters are now the dominant city builders in the...”
– Stewart Brand, Urban squatters save the world (via stoweboyd)
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The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Visualizing... →
Amazing little tool to let you track the tweets that flowed during the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, with filters to include or exclude certain types of tweeters. Very nifty use of the Web and technology. Should be a delight for researchers into political implications of social media.
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MacArthur Foundation Awards $500,000 Grants to 22... →
MacArthur “Genius” Fellowships announced, with the usual intoxicating and puzzling mix of talents and types. I love the life stories of so many winners, and am so glad the MacArthur Foundation came up with such a worthy way to recognize the special people in our midsts.
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Colbert to meet Radiohead in hour-long episode →
Stephen Colbert books hour-long Radiohead show, lauds impact its anti-corporate stance will have on brand awareness for his sponsors. Beautiful, man.
Stephen Colbert meeting Radiohead is such a special occasion, a regular episode of “The Colbert Report” wasn’t sufficient.
The Comedy Central show will air its first hour-long episode Sept. 26, when Colbert sits down with the British rock...
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DC Decoder: Obama: If GOP wants entitlement... →
This is a nice first look at some of Obama’s proposals for deeper deficit reduction. It’ll be interesting to see if any GOP legislator does any compromise on this. Not holding my breath…
dcdecoder:
You won’t find large-scale changes to entitlements in President Obama’s deficit reduction plan. What you will find, in big bold font:
The President will veto any bill that takes...
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Paste interviews St. Vincent/Annie Clark →
Cool story in Paste’s online magazine about (and free live track by) Annie Clark, the guitar whiz who is basically all of St. Vincent. Saw her sit in on several songs with The National during their terrific concert Sunday night at the Hollywood Bowl. She’s also the cover girl for this month’s Spin magazine, which arrived in the mail yesterday. Looks like she’s IT this...
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Newspapers are alive and well in small towns... →
The survival of hyperlocal (print) journalism DOES continue in lots of small communities around the country. Whether they can be superseded in 10 to 20 years by digital equivalents is another issue, but it’s interesting many of these mom-and-pop operations are already behind a paywall online. Nice piece, Judy.
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Mike and Morley's Musings: Fixing Congress →
mikeandmorley:
Since the Republic was conceived, communication technologies have rapidly evolved to reduce the time and distance that separate Congress from the public. But as the most recent poll results show, at least in this case, familiarity breeds contempt.
Too many of Congress’s procedures and…
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News Consumption Tilts Toward Niche Sites -... →
Bigger may not be better for online news sites, where niches and nimble management can lead to stable finances, if not great wealth. Suggests the Zagat sale to Google isn’t headed toward great success.
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Amazon in Talks to Launch Digital-Book Library -... →
Another interesting step in the evolution of the book. Now Amazon wants to create a Netflix-like approach to digital book offerings. Sounds like an electronic version of the old subscription libraries of a couple of centuries ago.
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Mobile Internet Usage to Top Wireline Surfing by... →
What’s YOUR company’s mobile strategy? More stats showing how fast we’re shifting away from PCs and hardwired Internet connections to mobile devices and mobile Internet access. It’s only going to increase: the information we want, wherever we are, exactly when we need it.
smarterplanet:
People are using mobile devices and notebooks to access the mobile Web more than ever...
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The Unintended Consequences of E-Books' Crazy... →
How the shift to e-books is transforming other businesses, such as Ikea’s bookshelves, now increasingly likely to house stuff other than books.
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Mobile Subscriptions Outnumber Toilets →
If anyone doubts the importance of mobile to the future of tech, read this: in the developing world, 4 billion people have cell-phone subscriptions, while 2.6 billion people lack access to toilets or other forms of “improved sanitation.” Want to know what matters to people? Where they spend their money when they have very little of it to spend.
This is all according to the ITU,...
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No SoupSoup For You: Tumblr’s David Karp Has No... →
Interesting, if not flattering look at some of the warts on Tumblr and its operations. As a communications specialist, I have to say this promising platform needs to spend a little money on a better communications/PR approach than the one this piece suggests they’ve used heretofore. Just my $.02
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U2 Revisits 'Achtung Baby' in 'From the Sky Down'... →
GREAT trailer of upcoming Davis Guggenheim doc on the creation of U2’s seminal “Achtung Baby” album recorded, shudder, 20 years ago. Hope the doc measures up to the trailer.
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Mike and Morley's Musings: Now is the Time for All... →
mikeandmorley:
The 2012 election will present the United States with a stark choice between two radically different visions of the country’s future. Which of these competing visions becomes the nation’s future is likely to be determined by the strength and effectiveness of the Millennial Generation’s…
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Moneyball: Toronto Review - The Hollywood Reporter →
Great review for “Moneyball” movie. Really looking forward to this.
