Newspapers and magazines are in trouble. We think they will mostly die, because we think we know what will replace them, and it is too far from their current model for them to reach it in time.
And yet people still need at least some of what they do.
- Paul Graham, Request for Startups 1:
who spent five years on tour. cool, i say. cool in a pub, maybe, he says, but not on a resume. he told me about pulp, who spent 16 years on the dole before they got famous. you can’t do that anymore, he says. they were probably the last generation. now you have to start looking for a job after a few months. and the thing is, nobody buys music anymore. so the only way to make a living as a band is to sell a jingle for an advertisement. in the 1960s, you were a second-rate musician if you did that, but no one would say the same thing now.
In the age-old battle between book and bath, man has tried many things: the reading tray, the conveniently placed towel, the waterproof page. An eight-year-old has gone one better.
in every language except arabic. this is strange to contemplate, because it is absurd and only partially true. of course the koran is written in classical arabic, but classical arabic is a language that few people speak and even fewer write, because they live and work with various vernacular dialects of arabic: levantine, cairene, north african, gulf. so the hundreds and millions of muslims, for whom this book means the most, are unable to penetrate their holy text, because the clerical and cultural elites oppose its translation. go here — http://quran.com/ — you will find the book in every language but the ones its readers speak.
But what does that mean exactly? The police are lazy and corrupt; the courts slow and expensive; zoning laws and income tax nonexistent; bureaucratic positions and military ranks obtained through bribery. It means that in Tripoli armed militias are killing each other, in Saida a Sunni cleric is shutting the highway in protest, in Hezbollah country a Westerner can disappear, and the war in Syria is a two-hour drive away.
that managed to survive the Arab dictators: the Islamists and the sports fans. Look at Egypt now: the Islamists took power and the only organized resistance are two soccer clubs now rioting in Port Said. The students in Tahrir Square were just fuel in the booster rockets that carried the Muslim Brotherhood’s pay load past the forces of gravity. The same thing is happening with the Syrian National Congress: it has been stacked with Christians and Liberals to put on a good show for the foreign backers.
