Furl http://www.furl.net/ http://backend.userland.com/rss http://www.furl.net/member/cgc373.rss Furl archive. Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:01:12 GMT http://www.furl.net/item/37457318/forward http://www.furl.net/item/37457318 So it turns out that far from becoming obsolete, publishers and editors in the networked era have a crucial role to play. The editor of the future is increasingly a producer, a role that includes signing up projects and overseeing all elements of production and distribution, and that of course includes building and nurturing communities of various demographics, size, and shape. Successful publishers will build brands around curatorial and community building know-how AND be really good at designing and developing the robust technical infrastructures that underlie a complex range of user experiences. [I know I'm using "publisher" to encompass an array of tasks and responsibilities, but I don't think the short-hand does too much damage to the discussion]. Thu, 11 Sep 2008 11:22:55 GMT General Writing & Publishing 3 http://www.furl.net/item/33429795/forward http://www.furl.net/item/33429795 By contrast--in what for me is Zamir's most fascinating chapter--Antony and Cleopatra depicts "mature love," love between people who enjoy being grown-ups together, and who have no project of transcending human life, because they are taking too much pleasure in life as it is. Romeo and Juliet do not eat; Antony and Cleopatra eat all the time. Romeo and Juliet have no occupation; Antony and Cleopatra are friends and supportive colleagues with a great deal of work to do running their respective and interlocking empires. Romeo and Juliet have no sense of humor; Antony and Cleopatra live by elaborate jokes and highly personal forms of teasing--what Zamir calls "idiosyncratic practices." ("That time,--Oh times!--I laugh'd him out of patience") Romeo and Juliet, utterly absorbed, pay no attention to anybody around them; Antony and Cleopatra love to gossip about the odd people in their world, and spend evenings wandering through the streets watching the funny things people do. Romeo and Juliet speak to each other only in terms of worshipful hyperbole; Antony knows how to make contact with Cleopatra through insults, even about her age (he calls her his "serpent of old Nile"), and she knows how to turn a story about a fishhook into a running joke that renews laughter each time it is mentioned. All this suggests a romance that, unlike that of the younger couple, "does not work through transcending life, through perpetually setting its intensities at odds with what life is, but rather structures itself through life and the daily pleasures it affords." Tue, 06 May 2008 13:03:50 GMT General Writing & Publishing 3 http://www.furl.net/item/32979713/forward http://www.furl.net/item/32979713 The spacing effect is "one of the most remarkable phenomena to emerge from laboratory research on learning," the psychologist Frank Dempster wrote in 1988, at the beginning of a typically sad encomium published in American Psychologist under the title "The Spacing Effect: A Case Study in the Failure to Apply the Results of Psychological Research." The sorrrowful tone is not hard to understand. How would computer scientists feel if people continued to use slide rules for engineering calculations? What if, centuries after the invention of spectacles, people still dealt with nearsightedness by holding things closer to their eyes? Psychologists who studied the spacing effect thought they possessed a solution to a problem that had frustrated humankind since before written language: how to remember what's been learned. But instead, the spacing effect became a reminder of the impotence of laboratory psychology. Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:31:32 GMT General 3 http://www.furl.net/item/32930572/forward http://www.furl.net/item/32930572 This discovery shed light on a rather important historical fact that had somehow been omitted from all previous histories of the origin of the "intelligent design" movement. It has always been obvious that ID arguments derived from creationist sources, but never in the wildest dreams of creationism watchers had it occurred to anyone that the phrase "intelligent design" had quite literally originated as a switch in terminology in an actual physical draft of an explicitly creationist textbook. Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:51:57 GMT General Science Writing & Publishing 3 http://www.furl.net/item/32619963/forward http://www.furl.net/item/32619963 Phillips has warned for years about the inevitably malign consequences of what he calls the "financialization" of the American economy. Sometime in the mid-'90s, he writes, financial services overtook manufacturing as the biggest chunk of the U.S. gross domestic product. If you believe, as Phillips does, that all the furious activity on Wall Street masterminded by the likes of Citigroup and Goldman-Sachs and Merrill Lynch is just a bunch of speculation and froth that doesn't actually result in the creation of anything real, then there has never been a better time for triumphantly pointing out the disasters that ensue when the rest of the world also realizes that Wall Street is wearing no clothes. Mon, 14 Apr 2008 02:42:28 GMT General 3 http://www.furl.net/item/32593065/forward http://www.furl.net/item/32593065 The idea for “Bathing With Bierko,” which he said he had been toying with for several years, was to take the artificial familiarity of these programs to its illogical extreme: to relocate the interview in a comically intimate setting while playing the scene completely straight. For his debut broadcast, Mr. Bierko was assisted by the deadpan performance of Mr. Malkovich (the two actors share an agent) and his friend Carrie Fisher, who let him shoot the segment in her bathtub, in a Los Angeles home that was previously owned by Bette Davis and the costume designer Edith Head. (“Any remarkable Hollywood history there,” Mr. Bierko said, “we’ve ruined it.”) Sun, 13 Apr 2008 06:55:11 GMT General 3 http://www.furl.net/item/32569421/forward http://www.furl.net/item/32569421 The rise of the organic black conservative tradition is also a response to America’s retreat from its second attempt at Reconstruction. Blacks have watched as the courts have weakened affirmative action, arguably the country’s greatest symbol of state-sponsored inclusion. They’ve seen a fraudulent war on drugs that, judging by the casualties, looks like a war on black people. They’ve seen themselves bandied about as playthings in the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan (with his 1980 invocation of states’ rights” in Mississippi), George Bush (Willie Horton), Bill Clinton (Sister Souljah), and George W. Bush (McCain’s fabled black love-child). They’ve seen the utter failures of school busing and housing desegregation, as well as the horrors of Katrina. The result is a broad distrust of government as the primary tool for black progress. Sat, 12 Apr 2008 13:15:24 GMT General Politics 3 http://www.furl.net/item/32345451/forward http://www.furl.net/item/32345451 I am a fan of Umair Haque's thinking and writing. I find it refreshingly original and often quite thought provoking. Umair's central tenet is that we are in the midst of a groundbreaking shift from a centralized economy dominated by large "orthodox" companies to a "edge economy" dominated by end users. Mon, 07 Apr 2008 05:17:48 GMT General 3 http://www.furl.net/item/32344492/forward http://www.furl.net/item/32344492 My cousin recently traveled to South Africa, where someone with her background would typically be considered neither white nor black, but colored, a distinct racial group in South Africa. Her skin is light enough so that she was most often taken to be white, which was something she was prepared for, having traveled in other parts of Africa. But she was not prepared for what it meant to be white in South Africa, which was to be reminded, at every possible opportunity, that she was not safe, and that she must be afraid. And she was not prepared for how seductive that fear would become, how omnipresent it would be, so that she spent most of her time there in taxis, and in hotels, and in “safe” places where she was surrounded by white people. When she returned home she told me, “I realized this is what white people do to each other—they cultivate each other’s fear. It’s very violent.” Mon, 07 Apr 2008 04:38:10 GMT General Writing & Publishing 3 http://www.furl.net/item/32154122/forward http://www.furl.net/item/32154122 And so we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism. The transformation of newspapers from enterprises devoted to objective reporting to a cluster of communities, each engaged in its own kind of “news”––and each with its own set of “truths” upon which to base debate and discussion––will mean the loss of a single national narrative and agreed-upon set of “facts” by which to conduct our politics. News will become increasingly “red” or “blue.” This is not utterly new. Before Adolph Ochs took over the Times, in 1896, and issued his famous “without fear or favor” declaration, the American scene was dominated by brazenly partisan newspapers. And the news cultures of many European nations long ago embraced the notion of competing narratives for different political communities, with individual newspapers reflecting the views of each faction. It may not be entirely coincidental that these nations enjoy a level of political engagement that dwarfs that of the United States. Wed, 02 Apr 2008 05:50:38 GMT General Writing & Publishing 3