November 2007
12 posts
The freaky origins of Christian rock →
Via Hannah Faith.
Republican debate thoughts
The questioner asks, “Do you believe every word in this book?” He specifically means the King James Version, even if CNN doesn’t get it. The other candidates fall all over themselves to say how much they believe the Bible, that every word is true, but only Huckabee gets it: no one really takes all the Bible literally, especially when Jesus tells us to pluck out our sinning eyes, and really we...
No naughty words on the NYT’s Facebook wall →
You can now become “fans” of organizations or business or sports teams or whatever on Facebook—it’s about more than just people now. I went to the NY Times’s Facebook page and found this amusing disclaimer: The New York Times writes unblushingly about sexual behavior, arts censorship, science, health, crime and similar subjects, opening its columns to any newsworthy detail, however disturbing,...
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Review of the Amazon Kindle →
I speculated that the newspaper and magazine subscription service was the Kindle’s killer feature. A device that is automatically pushed the day’s paper every morning is the future, right up there with flying cars and an insolvent social security. So I subscribed to The Journal. To be sure, its neat having a copy of the day’s paper always on hand, and the $9.99/month price is fair. But,...
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Kindle not the game-changer everyone craves
The E-newspaper of the future has finally arrived. At this point, though, it’s too late to change anything.
Amazon’s newly-unveiled Kindle is supposedly going to change publishing forever. Based on all the photos I’ve seen, it looks like it’s about the size and thickness of a Moleskine notebook, and while it might not be the prettiest bit of consumer electronics released this year it...
Things That Are Not Torture →
Waterboarding explained in heartbreaking, clinical style: The first step is to firmly bind the prisoner to the table. The ropes or straps should be tight enough to prevent any struggling that could injure either interrogators or the prisoner himself: arms, legs and torso should all be restrained. In addition to ropes or straps, it may also be desirable for several interrogators to physically...
Absinthe Returns in a Glass Half Full of Mystique... →
Lede of the year:Dear reader! Should this column impress you as being more than usually lyrical, recalling perhaps the imagery and elegance of poetry by Baudelaire or Verlaine; should it seem a bit decadent, redolent of Oscar Wilde’s withering hauteur; should it have a touch of madness or perversity, combining, say, the tastes of Toulouse-Lautrec with the passions of van Gogh; should it simply...
Launching a Magazine the Un-Dumb Way →
The internet allows consumers and creators to connect directly. So for the first time, it’s possible to skip those middlemen. Putting ink to papers is always going to be more costly than putting pixels to screen, but now that a group of talented people can collaborate, create, and sell directly to consumers, it’s actually possible to jump the middlemen - a community can support its own content...
Who do you trust? →
So now journalists see their job differently. They no longer consider it their responsibility to try to evaluate the competing claims of the experts, only to report both sides of the dispute accurately (i.e., to reproduce the exact language, no matter how loaded, of each party in the dispute). Call it stenography, or he-said/she-said, this isn’t helpful. The result is pseudo-journalism that...
Postal rate hikes are killing small magazines, and... →