May 2009
42 posts
My Personal Aging Crisis
Elizabeth Wurtzel in Elle, plying another terrible genre that is essentially the personal-life equivalent of this one:
I don’t know what it is—I don’t have wrinkles or age spots or any of the telltale signs that the years have gone by. Thank God for La Mer and Retin-A and Pilates—and, yes, hot sex, which is good fun and may be no more than a Maginot Line against the inevitable, but that’s not...
“When an angry gorilla cries
Who’s gonna be there to dry his eyes?
And...”
– Auto-Tune the News #4. Back and in extremely fine form.
Against Self-Organization →
A great little essay about how “we need to question our reflexive belief — or unwarranted expectation, if you prefer — that emergent or self-organizing phenomena are somehow always (or, at least, generally) for the best.”
“I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph.”
– “Proud Non - Reader” Kanye West Turns Author - NYTimes.com
Last Night I Dreamt I Was Using Twitter →
David Rees is “a yoga guy” now.
That Goldstein post on Sotomayor
linked below (original link here) —
for all that post’s merits, I think he’s dead wrong on this:
I discuss below the four most probable lines of attack that committed ideologues are likely to advance, but to my mind basic political considerations make it very unlikely that mainstream Republican politicians will vocally join the criticism.
No way. I mean, this might be true...
SCOTUSblog on Sotomayor →
A great, long post on the various political and judicial angles. Incredibly, this was posted this morning at 7:34am?! I know she was the frontrunner, but still. Seems like dude would have been pretty sad if the decision had gone another way.
“It’s the year of the wolf, I guess.”
– It’s Made of 100% Cotton; Its Sales Are 99% Ironic - washingtonpost.com
Mary Kay Letourneau Hosts 'Hot for Teacher' Night... →
Oh wow.
Liberty University bans Democrats
As the Republicans flail about in desperation these days, there are a lot of moments that one might call scary-funny-scary. A good example is this startling story from Liberty University, which just banned the campus Democrats. If this had happened in, say, 2003 or 2004, with Republicans in power and ascendant, it would have been seriously chilling. But in the tea-party days of 2009, it seems sort...
Microcelebrity Irono-Racism
For calling people “wogs” in a casual manner, a young witness to a shooting in Australia has become an overnight Internet celebrity:
Her video interview attracted more than 100,000 views, a Facebook fan group with over 1800 members has appeared and even t-shirts featuring Clare quotes are available online.
The group, “Clare the Kings Cross bogan fan club”, has spawned...
How Your Trend-Story Sausage Gets Made →
Oooh, nice catch here. Newspaper reporter quotes same high-school friend three times!
WatchJoshua David Stein makes a cameo in this fantastic Onion video about the sorry contemporary state of par-tay.
“If you want to see the Pittsburgh Steelers, invite us when we don’t win...”
– The Plank.
“It’s the hand of God,” he said. “And I am the best film director in the world....”
– Cannes: Lars von Trier Vigorously Defends Antichrist’s Genital Mutilation
Tom McCarthy Grinds His Ax
and is permitted by the New York Times Book Review to bury it in the back of Clancy Martin’s first novel. I mean c’mon. McCarthy is basically right, but he could have deployed this exact same argument against any number of more established authors, instead of against this clearly talented first-time novelist for whom a crappy review in the NYTBR constitutes a serious blow to his...
Kool-Aid Man in Second Life →
Do yourself a favor and set aside some minutes of your life for this. A tour through the circles of Second Life with Kool-Aid Man as your portly red Virgil.
Racist Camera →
“His colleagues and friends said he had diabetes and sometimes walked with a...”
– 3 Queens Schools Closed After Flu Strikes Principal - NYTimes.com
The Highbrow-Journalist-Money-Woes Genre
has a new entrant in Edmund Andrews’s piece My Personal Credit Crisis, just posted on the Times site. For purposes of a genre-wide survey, let me see how many other oversharing specimens I can gather—
5/19/08: Keith Gessen in n+1 2/4/08: Joel Lovell in New York Magazine 1/04: David Denby’s American Sucker (book) 10/15/00: Manny Howard in the NYT Magazine 10/18/99: Meghan Daum in...
Frank Bruni
is off the Dining desk and headed to the NYT Magazine. Readers of my book will know my hatred for a nauseatingly glib NYT Magazine piece he wrote in 1996 about David Foster Wallace. Editing at the magazine has hopefully improved since then, so perhaps any remaining penchant for nauseating glibness will be held in check.
My favorite part of Keller’s memo on the subject is this:
Frank will...
You Can’t Please Everyone - Anne Frank: The Diary... →
In which one-star Amazon reviews of Anne Frank’s Diary are collected. The whole series is worth keeping an eye on.
Solidarity
Matt Yglesias makes a good point in this post about adultery in US politics: solidarity is probably the #1 indicator of whether a negative “nanostory” (in the catchy lingo from a certain awesome new book) survives or not. If you can’t get enough people on the miscreant’s “side” to attack them, then you can’t successfully run them out of town. The media...
The Baum fizzles
Dan Baum finally finished his Twittering about getting fired from the New Yorker. I gotta say: I admire that guy’s writing (or his and his wife’s, as I guess is the case), but I’m not sure how much I can sympathize with him on this one.
First of all, he gets three pieces killed in a year? That’s a lot, given that the typical New Yorker writer (of longform narrative...
Introducing The Funemployed →
Another entry in a multipart series I call “HELLO BOOK DEAL!!1!” Seems like we should also start talking about the funinsured. Seriously!
Is the Amazon Kindle the new Macbook? →
Irono-meta-tech-blog awesome.
Funny
F**K YOU, Ashton Kutcher (UPDATE: IGNORE THIS): Pics, Videos, Links, News
Jonah Peretti jokingly attacks Ashton Kutcher… Kutcher calls Jonah? One of those real-joke-real Web things that are as entertaining when resumed fake as when presumed true. (But as far as I can tell it’s true.)
“They’re like the soft cheese of an administration. You leave it out for...”
– Jon Stewart talking about the shelf-life of WH press secretaries, since they have to dissemble all day. I’m always on the lookout for good metaphors of cultural perishability, and this is an amazing one…
Dan Baum
is Twittering the story of his getting hired and fired by the New Yorker. An odd use of the medium but I’m eager to see how each sentence turns out — Twithangers!
Per my earlier post on Twitter....
Twitscoop - Search twitter, see what’s hot right now
This is a tool I’ve been looking at for a while now. The top “hot trend” on Twitter right now is “annoyatrekkie,” which I guess is something we can all get behind.
Colbert is King
Right after Election Day, my expectation was that an Obama presidency would be bad for Stewart and Colbert — that they’d have trouble finding their footing without the Republicans in power. With Stewart, I think that’s basically been the case. I still really enjoy his show, but way too much of it consists of video clips of conservatives saying stupid stuff and then cuts to...
Is David Simon wrong about blogs and local...
Why David Simon Is Wrong About Blogs and Local Reporting - The Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com
Eric Etheridge (the very first writer of the Harper’s Index, by the way, which is one of my jobs now) notes David Simon’s testimony before Congress and then excerpt a riposte from Ryan Avent on Gawker. Avent brings up some good examples of local bloggers who are doing gutsy reporting...
Sotomayor
There’s a fascinating new-media story developing right now around Sonia Sotomayor, who’s widely considered to be one of Obama’s top choices for the upcoming Supreme Court vacancy. Almost immediately after the spot was announced, Jeffrey Rosen posted a story on the New Republic website in which a string of anonymous sources questioned whether she had the temperament and...
Succeed the Al Qaeda Way! →
From Malcolm Gladwell, a new business-motivational article about how success is like sports (if one disregards athletics, aesthetics, and sportsmanship) and like war (if one disregards morality).
Twitter
I am not yet on Twitter; well, I’m technically on it, but I’m not actually posting to it, just using my account to browse around. But the Times had a how-to guide today that gives me more of a sense of why people like it. Like Tumblr (but more so) it integrates with a great set of apps, so you can post and read from anywhere (including via SMS, because of the 140-character...
HELLO AND BOOK TOUR
Hi, welcome to BillWasik.com. My book, AND THEN THERE’S THIS: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, is coming out on June 15th, so I’m launching this site to provide all the relevant info.
First, of course, if you’re inclined to pre-order it, you can do so via Amazon, Borders, or B&N, or you can use IndieBound to find an independent bookstore near you.
Second, I do...
OppoDepot
(“Experiment” #5 of five, from the book.)
In the run-up to the 2008 election season, OppoDepot.com was conceived as the ideal Web 2.0 tool for the American political scene: a collaborative repository of all scandals, rumors, and other dirt about every primary candidate. The site was designed as an experiment in political clustering, confirmation bias, and narrative construction....
Bill Shiller
(“Experiment” #4 of five, from the book…)
In order to explore the consumer relationship in the word-of-mouth (WOM) online media environment, I created the persona of Bill Shiller, who did whatever corporations asked of him for one month. Via Gmail, MySpace, corporate affiliate lists, and various buzz-marketing organizations, he tried to spread the word about scores of...
The Right-Wing New York Times
(“Experiment” #3 of five, from the book…)
Created for the August 2006 Contagious Festival of the Huffington Post, the Right Wing New York Times was designed to test different methods of creating viral content. After two weeks languishing in the middle of the rankings, the site’s traffic suddenly skyrocketed on August 18th, securing its claim on the $2,500...
Stop Peter Bjorn and John
(“Experiment” #2 of five, from the book…)
As part of an inquiry into the concept of “buzz bands” in indie rock, Stop Peter Bjorn and John was conceived in advance of the 2007 South by Southwest festival as an experiment in “antibuzz.” It attempted to use blogging technology to check the spread of the Swedish band Peter Bjorn and John. Despite garnering...
The Mob Project
(note: In the book I conduct five “experiments,” one in each chapter; I’m starting off this blog with short synopses of each, with links.—BW)
Undertaken in the summer of 2003, the Mob Project used chain emails to gathered “inexplicable mobs” of people in Manhattan for ten minutes or less. Following media coverage, it touched off a worldwide “flash mob”...