December 2010
41 posts
8 Smears and Misconceptions About WikiLeaks Spread... →
The corporate media’s tendency to blare misinformation and outright fabrications has been particularly egregious in coverage of WikiLeaks. As Glenn Greenwald has argued, mainstream news outlets are parroting smears and falsehoods about the whistleblower site and its founder Julian Assange, helping to perpetuate a number of “zombie lies” — misconceptions that refuse to die no matter how...
Dec 31st
58 notes
Dec 31st
Dec 31st
2 notes
Dec 30th
24 notes
3 tags
Cognition and Comic Sans →
via Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber Here’s a paper that will provoke a wave of denial in type nerds everywhere. Short version: setting information in hard-to-read fonts, including Comic Sans Italic, led to better retention amongst research subjects because of “disfluency”. When you have to work harder to read it, you remember it better. Abstract: Previous research has shown that disfluency –...
Dec 29th
“I’d guess that most organizations a generation from now will be pretty small by...”
– Why Wikileaks Will Kill Big Business And Big Government | The New Republic (via ayjay)
Dec 27th
2 notes
Dec 27th
58 notes
“For your writing to be great—I mean great, not clever, or even brilliant, or...”
– An Inspirational Letter to My Students (via Instapaper)
Dec 27th
279 notes
Dec 26th
“Santa has the same wrapping paper as we do.”
– My niece, slowly but surely beginning her peek behind the curtain.
Dec 25th
The New Inquiry: On Looking at James Franco →
thenewinquiry: via The New York Times Magazine, “14 Actors Acting” “By offering himself to be seen rather than trying to obscure his performance, Franco at his best has the ability to pacify the camera’s gaze and appear not (like Walker) as a lack of ability, but an excess. As Paul Klee said of… This makes sense
Dec 25th
13 notes
“Diplomats have become weak in the way that musicians are weak. Musicians...”
– OH SNAP! (via seanbonner)
Dec 25th
15 notes
2 tags
Dec 24th
1 note
2 tags
Dec 24th
2 notes
1 tag
How Words are Invented →
First of all, there needs to be a need for a new word, a “semantic space” in the language that needs to be filled.  Let’s use some of Milton’s words as examples.  His day, like ours, had a lot of “worship wars” in the Church of England.  The word “liturgy” existed.  But, earlier, that was pretty much the only kind of worship there was.  There was a need for an adjectival form of that word to...
Dec 23rd
Dec 23rd
25 notes
Dec 21st
99 notes
Dec 21st
285 notes
Dec 21st
2,284 notes
“My memory is certainly in my hands. I can remember things only if I have a...”
– Rebecca West (birthday today)
Dec 21st
"Twenty rules for writing detective stories"... →
thingsthatscarelaurenleto:   1. The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.    2. No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.    3. There must be no love interest. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to...
Dec 20th
11 notes
“Networks don’t require the whole person, only a narrow piece…A community is a...”
– John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down (via caseyagollan)
Dec 18th
2 notes
Dec 17th
51 notes
2 tags
Dec 15th
14 notes
2 tags
Dec 15th
3 tags
Dec 15th
WatchWatch
perpetua: Dum Dum Girls “Rest of Our Lives” Live in Williamsburg, 10/26/2009 My blurb for the Dum Dum Girls’ lovely debut album I Will Be is included in the honorable mentions category in Pitchfork’s best albums of 2010 list. This song is easily one of my favorites from the year, and I really love this live version. Did anyone put out a better pure love song in 2010?
Dec 15th
17 notes
Dec 14th
An Ethnography Primer - AIGA →
Dec 14th
Dec 14th
95 notes
“Until we start seeing assessments that ask kids to write research papers, ask...”
– NYtimes (via Ta-Nehisi)
Dec 14th
2 notes
Dec 14th
4 tags
Dec 14th
2 notes
The State, the press, and a hyperdemocracy - Mark... →
In the interregnum, the press must reinvent its technological base as comprehensively as Gutenberg or Berners-Lee. Just as the legal strangulation of Napster laid the groundwork for Gnutella, every point of failure revealed in the state attack against WikiLeaks creates a blueprint for the press which can succeed where WikiLeaks failed. We need networks that lie outside of and perhaps even in...
Dec 13th
Here's how Twitter makes a difference in the real... →
This is important stuff — important, tangible stuff. The 140 characters format of Twitter, its simplicity, its low barriers to entry and usage reduce tons of friction to doing things and interacting with other human beings. And this, in turn, brings increased efficiency to plenty of things we do.  This is the main value of the internet: it doesn’t necessarily create things, but it...
Dec 13th
The New Inquiry: Lost & Found (3) →
thenewinquiry: Dispatches from the Reanimation Library: Worthington, A.W. A Study of Splashes. New York: MacMillan. ___ The Reanimation Library is a small, independent library based in Brooklyn. It is a collection of books that have fallen out of mainstream…
Dec 13th
11 notes
“I do not understand why so much ire is directed at Assange and so little at the...”
– Seven Thoughts on Wikileaks - Jack Goldsmith
Dec 10th
The Institutional Feebleness of Moderate... →
Dec 10th
Listenmwfrost: christmasgorilla: Elvis Costello -...
Dec 10th
28 notes
“In its look back the Times declared itself insufficiently skeptical, especially...”
– Jay Rosen - From Judith Miller to Julian Assange
Dec 10th
“The Fourth Amendment’s increasing irrelevance stems from the fact that the...”
– Is the Fourth Amendment Relevant in a Technological Age? - Brookings Institution (via ayjay)
Dec 10th
3 notes