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Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky
Interesting. (via Instapaper)
iPhone versus iMagination.
There’s a wonderful little free app for the iPhone called Wikipanion that gives you remote access to Wikipedia. I never considered that it could be the source of my imagination’s imminent demise…
By having every desired question answered at the tip of your fingers could possibly be the downfall of imagination.
What is the best song of 2009?
Go ahead. Answer. It’s the end of August. You should know by now.
"And let’s face it: Our culture has lost the ability to usefully disagree. Most Americans seem to avoid argument. But this has produced passive aggression and groupthink in the office, red and blue states, and families unable to discuss things as simple as what to watch on television. Rhetoric doesn’t turn kids into back-sassers; it makes them think about other points of view."
Jay Heinrichs in “How to Teach a Child to Argue” (via delayprocrastinate) (via mykola)
My First Dictionary Blog
This is great.
"The road we know is always shorter than the road we don’t know — even if the distances are the same."
Verlyn Klinkenborg, The New York Times.
TIME Magazine Cover Story…
Brilliant. On a side note, I wound up meeting Steven Johnson in Manhattan last night and spoke to him for a few minutes about the decline of the newspaper industry and his web site (outside.in) which aims to fill many of the gaps that are opening up as local papers shut down. The site isn’t fully developed, but it’s a great idea.
He is the author of some of my favorite books, including Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software; Everything Bad is Good for You; The Ghost Map; and most recently, The Invention of Air. They are all wonderful reads.
My review of Pitchfork's review of Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest.
Paul Thompson
Review of Veckatimest: 6.8 (link)
After much anticipation, it felt forced, as if the writer wrote a new paragraph every day since the March 3 leak. It took him 1145 words to say what could have been said in 750. Brevity is the soul of wit, is it not? Perhaps he can learn something from the Twitter aesthetic, after all. Sometimes less is more, and sometimes pho is too good to go untweeted. Credit Thompson for being ambitious — this is clearly one of the most highly anticipated album reviews of the year — but under the weight of high expectations, it seems he let this composition marinade a bit too long in the word processor. His “Best New Music” entry is clearly more Cold Roses than it is Funeral — overlong, needlessly verbose, and dripping with its influences — but then again, who among us would be up to the task? Some direct quotes from the review:
2007’s Friend EP had me worried that Grizzly Bear’s insistence on having everything in its right place had forced formula onto what had seemed to that point freewheeling and free-associative.
Reference to Radiohead album, also revered for its layered, understated beauty: check.
(In fact, I’m painfully aware you may just be intimately familiar with the whole damn thing. If that’s you, listen good: that windtunnel 128k leak you nabbed that fateful night back in March? That is not Veckatimest. Get thee to a buying place.)
Underhanded elevation of vinyl format versus massively inferior MP3 (My 31 plays of Two Weeks were a lie!): check.
this trip down yonder to the minor key will doubtless be the big complaint about Veckatimest.
Meaningless Woody Guthrie/Billy Bragg (and by extension, Wilco) reference: check.
I get it; Grizzly Bear can come across to some as boring. Lord knows I could go my whole life never reading another Ed Droste Tweet about pho or seeing Chris Taylor use a neti pot.
Small dose of hipster Twitterphobia (Doesn’t he realize that sometimes Ed posts about eating Mexican, too? God…): check.
Ryan Meehan, May 26, 2009.
