Since its inception, we’ve been extremely optimistic about The Verge’s potential to push the boundaries of what a web publication can do. This is the site’s most impressive work to date: 11,000 words of long-form, investigative journalism behind the scammiest get-rich-quick schemes on the web — beautifully designed and expressed with a voice distinct to The Verge.
While The Verge represents the best of what a new, web-only publication can do, The Times continues to produce the smartest, most impressive web content as a traditional media outlet. This infographic — an interactive scattergram that charts average graduate debt against the cost of tuition — is both informative and fun (try to resist the temptation of plugging in your college and comparing it to your friends’ schools).
After searching for eight years, Jenn Frank digs up a copy of an obscure adventure game (game?) called Chop Suey, originally released in 1994. (Jenn showed me Chop Suey last weekend, and it’s truly, awesomely bizarre.)
Chop Suey was a cunning piece of multimedia edutainment, suited just as well to grown-ups — smirking hipsters and punk rockers, probably — as it was to the prescribed “girls 7 to 12” crowd.
But it wasn’t a computer game. It was something else: a loosely-strung system of vignettes; a psychedelic exercise in “let’s-pretend”; a daydream in which the mundanity of smalltown Ohio collides with the interior lives of its two young protagonists.
“To hell with her then.”
Stephen King is at his best when he’s angry:
Mitt Romney has said, in effect, “I’m rich and I don’t apologize for it.” Nobody wants you to, Mitt. What some of us want—those who aren’t blinded by a lot of bullshit persiflage thrown up to mask the idea that rich folks want to keep their damn money—is for you to acknowledge that you couldn’t have made it in America without America. That you were fortunate enough to be born in a country where upward mobility is possible (a subject upon which Barack Obama can speak with the authority of experience), but where the channels making such upward mobility possible are being increasingly clogged. That it’s not fair to ask the middle class to assume a disproportionate amount of the tax burden. Not fair? It’s un-fucking-American is what it is. I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share.
Speaking of authors getting angry, here’s legendary sci-fi author Ursula K. Le Guin on the decline of reading (it’s only a little bit curmudgeonly). She blames publishers:
Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.
One more about a literary giant: this terrific profile of 81-year-old author Toni Morrison. Even though it doesn’t relate to anything else in the article, I just loved this bit she had about Jeremy Lin:
“Mr. Jeremy Lin. Anything that’s just not there, all of a sudden, this complete craziness happens to people who just never existed. Then it’s, ‘We’re gonna hold back his injuries so we can sell more tickets.’ And this guy is just gonna get refuse dumped on his head for the rest of his life if, after playing for a month and a half in the NBA, he doesn’t again beat Kobe Bryant by 38 points. You know what I mean?”
If you’re tired of Girls criticism, just skip below to Deron’s linkblog; but if you can read one more piece about the show, Cord Jefferson’s piece about the lack of characters of color in Girls is probably the best thing out there on the show:
The thing that sucks about Girls and Seinfeld and Sex and the City and every other TV show like them isn’t that they don’t include strong characters focusing on the problems facing blacks and Latinos in America today. The thing that sucks about those shows is that millions of black people look at them and can relate on so many levels to Hannah Horvath and Charlotte York and George Costanza, and yet those characters never look like us. The guys begging for money look like us. The mad black chicks telling white ladies to stay away from their families look like us. Always a gangster, never a rich kid whose parents are both college professors. After a while, the disparity between our affinity for these shows and their lack of affinity towards us puts reality into stark relief: When we look at Lena Dunham and Jerry Seinfeld, we see people with whom we have a lot in common. When they look at us, they see strangers.
Lovely iPhone app for users of mlkshk, in case you ever need to see GIFs when you’re out and about. It’s snappy and elegant, and it makes me wish more apps had this much personality.
You might know Deron as the founder of Clusterflock. He’s been posting some great links, but it’s worth following if only to see his changing desktop wallpaper.
Also: Text Based Tumblr and Pictureless Pinterest
At my last job, I worked from home. I’d give myself 15 minutes for lunch, because that’s about how long it would take me to make and eat a ham, tomato, and avocado sandwich. (Sandwich pro-tip: quality of meat and cheese is less important than the quality of bread.) Watching most YouTube clips were too short — plus I didn’t want to hunt them down — and an episode of a TV show was a little too long (plus I’d likely get sucked into another episode). I really wish Video for Lunch had existed then. It would’ve saved me dozens of lunches wasted on replays of Starcraft 2 matches.
Curated by Mike Deri Smith (you might recognize him as an editor at The Morning News), Video for Lunch seeks to be what Longform.org is for long articles (the hashtag is #qualityvideos). Not only are the clips he pick engaging, they also lean toward documentary/nonfiction subjects, so you get nearly the same sense of accomplishment as, say, finishing a New Yorker profile. Except you’re also full from your sandwich, which is nice.
I ate my dinner in front of Mike’s picks last week.
I missed this when it was new, but Joanne McNeil’s essay about her broken iPhone screen is a perfectly framed entry into a thoughtful discussion about our personal relationship to technology, the aesthetics of the future (the gritty, junkyard tech of Philip K. Dick vs. the clean, minimalist vision of Apple), and simply how annoying people can be about a broken iPhone screen (“There was always a whiff of rebuke. These strangers were chiding me for acting irresponsibly with Apple gadgetry.”). This is exactly the kind of reflective, humanizing tech writing I wish I saw more of.
Katie Notopoulos tricks Canseco into exchanging some scandalous tweets, texts, and phone calls with her. Aside from the fact that Conseco is ridiculous, I like that this piece is self-conscious enough to understand that it’s morally dubious:
The ethics of this exchange are, I concede, ambiguous. I first called Canseco for personal amusement; I told the story to colleagues, who insisted I write about it. But the typical rule, my editor tells me, is that you only use deception that get a story you couldn’t get through the front door; and that there’s typically some social value involved. This one passes the first test, but flunks the second.
I won’t spoil the punch line, but it’s definitely worth it.
Searchin’ for my lost shaker of salt
This is not a metaphor. “Margaritaville” literally translates to “this land where I drink a lot of margaritas,” and a shaker of salt is a real component of that process. Jimmy Buffett has actually misplaced his actual salt shaker, presumably during some depraved triple sec-fueled bender, and instead of simply buying another at the gift shop around the corner (they have this great one that’s a cactus wearing a sombrero!), he has chosen to make its recovery a quest.
An extremely ambitious art project where a different artists interprets each of the 151 original Pokémon. Features Bureau friends Maré Odomo, Madeleine Flores, and Sabrina Scott. You can also buy prints.
David Samuels’s 7,000-word profile of Kanye West for The Atlantic — how could I not love this? Samuels draws a great contrast between the effortlessness of Jay-Z and Kanye’s emotionality:
Kanye’s emotional landscape may be troubled, but it is also a unified whole, which is the mark of any great artist. He is a petulant, adolescent, blanked-out, pained emotional mess who toggles between songs about walking with Jesus and songs about luxury brands and porn stars. Raised by his college-professor mother in Chicago, and spending summers in Atlanta with his father, a former Black Panther turned newspaper photographer turned Christian marriage counselor, Kanye united hard-core rap and the more self-aware and sophisticated inward style that had evolved in the early 1990s.
Amanda Hesser’s advice for aspiring food writers is really good advice for any writer:
Start a blog, pitch magazines, go after a book contract, I say, but instead of relying on writing as your bread and butter – and instead of torturing yourself with the rejection and struggle for respectable payment that this will entail — look to other interests in the food industry. We’re in a moment of great change. There’s never been more opportunity to make a difference, to shift the way we think about buying and eating food, to create something new, to start a business. This is what you should be doing.
Don’t feel glum; this new era is actually better. Everyone who can write well is now welcome to.
YouTube streamed live footage from Coachella last weekend. Here’s a rip of Radiohead’s set.
A broad but thoughtful piece by Stephen Marche about how the generation of Baby Boomers are the biggest hinderance to the prosperity of America’s youth. There’s a lot to dig into here, but this is one optimistic bit I liked:
Two thirds of the Boomers thought “being able to give their children better opportunities” was important; 8 percent wanted to live close to their parents; 18 percent believed that making money mattered; 27 percent cared about social problems. The students in 2004: 83 percent claimed that the opportunities of their children were very important; 25 percent wanted to live close to their parents; 35 percent were serious about making money; and 20 percent cared about social problems.
Students and recent grads just entering the workforce may have been dealt an unlucky hand, but perhaps it will contribute to a generation of better parents.
Eight years ago, Blender magazine asked vegan punk rocker Ted Leo to do a street performance of five songs from their “50 Worst Songs of All Time” list. Leo writes about which songs worked and which ones didn’t.
Also see: You Ain’t No Picasso’s Ted Leo covers archive.
An article from The New York Times Magazine on casual games, featuring a playable Asteroids-esque game that allows you to destroy each page element. It’s super clever, although it distracted me from reading the actual article.
Ryan Bateman built a gorgeous Instapaper client for Android called Papermill. It’s the only time I’ve been jealous of Android users. But even with glowing reviews, a featured placement on Google Play (the annoying new thing in your Google nav bar), and a prominent piece in The Verge, Papermill still hasn’t taken off, and it’s unlikey that the app will ever come close to breaking even for the hours of development time Bateman put in. He wrote a candid account of Papermill’s reception:
I think this unhappy end-scenario — of applications that either compromise on quality or have not had the necessary time invested in their design — is as a result of Android users not being willing to pay for an apps whose focus is quality and whose price reflects this. Instead, these users opt for a free but less refined experience. This has led to a race to the bottom, with independent developers creating applications are de-facto free instead and relying on ads for profit.
More pieces like this, please.
There was also one rising culinary star, soft-spoken but elusive, whom I prodded into producing a book with me. Flushed with gratitude, he insisted on cooking at my forthcoming wedding, promised a space inside a New York City landmark and then — quite soon after the invitations had gone out — stopped answering the phone, forever.
Another young chef came to my rescue and catered the wedding. I then spent six months writing a proposal for his book — until he signed with the most notorious bullying book agent in the industry, who told me that a writer should be so honored to work on this project that money would not be a factor.
Social media has no understanding of anything aside from the connections between individuals and the ceaseless flow of time: No beginnings, and no endings. These disparate threads of human existence alternately fascinate and horrify that part of the media world that grew up on topic sentences and strong conclusions. This world of old media is like a giant steampunk machine that organizes time into stories. I call it the Epiphanator, and it has always known the value of a meaningful conclusion.
This piece by Paul Ford was one of my favorite essays from last year. Robin Sloan’s distinction between like and love has had me thinking about what a list of things I would read over and over. This would definitely be on that list.
Speaking of Robin, as much as I am a fan of his essay app, I feel like it overshadowed another wonderful piece he wrote recently about taking art from the physical world and pushing into the digital world and pulling out again.
- Move. PHYSICAL
- Record that motion. DIGITAL
- Cut it up. Slow it down. Watch the results. STILL DIGITAL
- Reenact what you’ve seen. PHYSICAL AGAIN
- Record that motion. Post it on YouTube. OMG
I can’t explain why I love this, but I do.
A tumblr dedicated to the future as imagined by the past, from our friend Cory Schmitz.
I liked the film plenty, but I agree with Natasha and Choi here: the film takes no risks and, like a lot of adaptations, lost a bit of perspective when translated from print to screen.
Sasha Frere-Jones makes a strong argument for the value of Twitter that your parents will understand:
Two pernicious fallacies embedded in criticism of Twitter—and, by extension, blogs, tumblrs, and GIFs of catbots who kill with laser eyes—are that non-traditional forms of expression can wipe out existing ones, and that these forms are somehow impoverished. The variables unique to the Internet—hyperlinks, GIFs, chat, comments—have enabled new writing voices with their own distinct syntaxes. But we are not dealing with fungible goods—the new forms will never push out older ones because they’re insufficiently similar. You might overdose on unicorn GIFs and go to bed too tired to read Freedom, but unicorn GIFs will never replace Freedom.
This is largely unrelated to the point of the article, but I loved this:
I like that [Jonathan] Franzen doesn’t sound like a celebrity worried about reducing friction and shifting units. He is the Kanye West of fiction: popular, gifted, influential, and willing to make unpopular statements without the intervention of handlers.
tonight.pm is a simple, clever way to manage day-of RSVPs — perfect if you need to make reservations, or simply want to see how many people can make it to whatever gathering that evening. It sure beats reading through a long Gmail thread and counting all the yeses.
Last week, Maria Popova introduced the Curator’s Code, a standardized model for link attribution on the web. Basically, ᔥ means “via” and ↬ means “hat tip.” Aside from the practicality of it (eg. no one will ever understand these symbols), Popova is inspiring some interesting debate on the value of attribution.
Here’s Marco Arment’s criticism of the Curator’s Code:
Reliably linking to great work is a good way to build an audience for your site. That’s your compensation.
But if another link-blogger posts a link they found from your link-blog, I don’t think they need to credit you. Discovering something doesn’t transfer any ownership to you. Therefore, I don’t think anyone needs to give you credit for showing them the way to something great, since it’s not yours. Some might as a courtesy, but it shouldn’t be considered an obligation.
And here’s Matt Langer’s take:
But come on now, none of us here is Averroes rediscovering Aristotle or Poggio Bracciolini serendipitously plucking Lucretius off a dusty shelf—this is people posting pictures of yawning kittens on Tumblr blogs we’re talking about here.
And yet we see this sort of thing happen all the time on the internet, all these great hand-wringing debates over “proper” attribution (“proper” usually meaning “sending traffic my way as a reward for finding something first”).
And it all stinks to high heaven of self-importance.
Unlike the long-membered brutes who star in the majority of porn, James Deen is a male pornstar who women actually find attractive. There’s a great profile of Deen in GOOD, and J. Bryan Lowder penned a widely linked piece for Slate’s XXFactor about how Deen is evidence of why women do not like mainstream porn. But I like Molly Oswak’s response to Lowder for The Atlantic:
It is a mistake for Lowder to conflate James Deen’s enamored female fans with female consumption of porn, because his is not the only porn that women choose to watch. Calling Deen’s films “porn for ladies” seems to imply that all other mainstream porn, with its various kinks and categories, is somehow not for women. The problem with gender-specific products — be it porn or pre-school toys — is that they deal in stereotype and social conditioning.
The buzz around James Deen reminds me of Sasha Grey three years ago.
My favorite Mac email client is now an iPhone app. It’s far snappier than the native Mail app, and it’s especially useful if you like any Gmail-specific features like starring, archiving, and tagging. The one bummer is that due to certain App Store restrictions, Sparrow for iPhone can’t have push notifications. But I’ve been using Sparrow for about a week now, and I actually like that my phone doesn’t vibrate every time I get an email. It’s funny that Sparrow is the most elegant tool I’ve ever had to manage my email, but it’s also made me realize that my inbox isn’t as urgent as I once believed.
