great chicken factories

Priceonomics Blog: How Would You Save Journalism?

Mon, 20 May 2013 17:31:00 +0200

Priceonomics Blog: How Would You Save Journalism?:

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:

i know a musician

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:49:05 +0200

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.

Lempicka

Sun, 19 May 2013 10:51:10 +0200

Lempicka

Married they were. Happily they will live.

Sun, 19 May 2013 10:50:19 +0200

Married they were. Happily they will live.

book title

Fri, 10 May 2013 11:27:07 +0200

a dark chapter

t-shirt

Fri, 10 May 2013 11:26:43 +0200

everybody loves oligarchs

theparisreview: In the age-old battle between book and bath,...

Wed, 08 May 2013 19:28:03 +0200

theparisreview:

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.

there are korans

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 19:29:04 +0200

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.

lebanon is a failed state

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 22:04:35 +0200

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.

there were just two movements

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 21:56:21 +0200

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.

the gulf states

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 21:50:47 +0200

— qatar, bahrain, kuwait, the uae and saudi — are run like businesses whose profit can be expressed as the difference between oil revenues and the costs of buying off the population. complacent, undisciplined and proficient in leisure, the rare citizens of the gulf allow their rulers to hoard power and wealth as long as they are well kept. These are states operated by foreigners, as the princes cannot be bothered with the detailed decisions and the middle classes cannot be bothered with the labor.

Abraham Montefiore to N. Rothschild

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 10:35:22 +0200

The only really effective plan [for Britain, 1821] would be a good property tax properly and judiciously levied to reach only the opulent and those who can spare part of their income, but unfortunately it so happens that these very persons are the lawmakers themselves and their patriotism does not go so far as to reach their pockets.

james rothschild to n. rothschild

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 10:29:00 +0200

There is much to be earned from a government which has no money.

the news (shocker)

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 19:19:00 +0200

is an outgrowth of marketing. the news is marketing in an overdetermined sense, as freud would have said. which just means the news is marketing in a couple different ways. firstly, it’s a teaser — a cheap-to-free product that gets people to look at ads and buy more expensive stuff. second and more perniciously, the news itself is spun by those people and companies it seeks to objectively portray, casting them in a more favorable light than they deserve, so that while readers may suffer the reputations of those written about do not.

All the world's online

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 16:23:21 +0100

all the men and woman are but bloggers

tumblropenarts: collage 3 collage work made from encyclopedia...

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:12:58 +0100

tumblropenarts:

collage 3

collage work made from encyclopedia pictures

by Jochem Grin http://jochemgrin.tumblr.com/

the evening was late

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:00:00 +0100

and the bar crowded when i found gavin, my good friend, in a state of beery insincerity that he thought quite charming. he smiled at everyone, looked them in the eyes, lingered on his words, and spoke in emphatic, facile superlatives. the band was between sets, and three young women encircled him, one offering a clear shot of stuff that would make her cough and fan her throat. santé, she said. gavin put his hand high on her back and slowly moved it up and down, a motion somewhere between comfort and invitation. i made my excuses soon after.

tytusjaneta: Přemysl Koblic (1892 – 1955) Ráno ve Vlašimi

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 12:32:25 +0100

tytusjaneta:

Přemysl Koblic (1892 – 1955)
Ráno ve Vlašimi

last night i was talking with a guy

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 12:32:02 +0100

who was pretty smart and he made a confession. we were talking about journalism, the demise of newspapers, the rise of aggregators like huffpo, the shitstreams that pass for information in general. newspapers are going to disappear, he said, and i guess i just don’t care. i can read other stuff that’s good enough. i should care about quality, but i just don’t.

and for the n-plus-wonth time i could feel the ground shift and my mind settle on a new realization. in most ways news is not like art, but it is like art in this one way, which is that most people are satisfied with news that is not the best. the highest expressions of news are for connoisseurs, and like art those highest expressions will become luxury items. or lacking sufficient demand, they will simply cease.

dark ecology

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 11:32:00 +0100

as a race we are lost. the planet, however, is not. the earth does not need to be saved. it can recreate complex life, given time. but that life will not be ours, and our loves will have passed. it will empty out like a stadium after a game, and a lone creature will marvel at the silence before returning to its business.