BillWasik.com

Via The Texas Tribune, a crazily Autotuned ad for a Democratic...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:21:21 -0500

Via The Texas Tribune, a crazily Autotuned ad for a Democratic gubernatorial candidate.

Wish I were here. Via The Awl, the set-list for the first...

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:59:28 -0500

Wish I were here. Via The Awl, the set-list for the first Pavement reunion show.

The dangers of apartment sharing, as illustrated by a Judge Judy...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 09:06:08 -0500

The dangers of apartment sharing, as illustrated by a Judge Judy ending. (via Consumerist)

from The Onion.

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:55:23 -0500

from The Onion.

via Slog.

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:58:25 -0500

via Slog.

Twitter and the Big Blog Dream

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:52:00 -0500

As one might expect, I agree vehemently with George Packer’s recent screeds about new media here and here; especially, from the latter post, this bit:

[T]he response to my post tells me that techno-worship is a triumphalist and intolerant cult that doesn’t like to be asked questions. If a Luddite is someone who fears and hates all technological change, a Biltonite is someone who celebrates all technological change: because we can, we must. I’d like to think that in 1860 I would have been an early train passenger, but I’d also like to think that in 1960 I’d have urged my wife to go off Thalidomide.

But I don’t buy Packer’s conclusion that “[a]ny journalist who cheerleads uncritically for Twitter is essentially asking for his own destruction.” In fact, I’ve weirdly come to believe that the rise of Twitter — as opposed to the rise of, say, blogs, which ironically enough is the medium in which Packer chose to deliver his broadsides — might actually portend the revival of a more traditional model, rather than its continuing decline.

Yes, that sounds crazy, but let me try to explain.

When people talk about how the Internet is killing the mainstream media, they’re really thinking about blogs, specifically blogs circa 2004. The sudden rise of blogs held out a tantalizing vision of the future, where amateurs would reliably attract an audience to rival that of the mass media. In the Big Blog Dream, there would still be a single media conversation, as it were, but there would be a leveling in that conversation whereby amateurs could join, often as quasi-equals, alongside the professionals.

This is the storyline that still basically dominates discussion of the Internet — and yet the Big Blog Dream has largely died. First, the mainstream media muscled in on it, using their storehouses of experience and talent to launch scores of their own high-traffic blogs. (Where they didn’t build their own, they hired the best amateurs to join their staffs.) Second, the Internet-native media that did survive are now hardly amateur by any definition: they’re places like TPM, Gawker, and the Huffington Post, that have built bare-bones business models that create tons of original content by leveraging young and/or unpaid/low-paid writers. And third, between these two groups (the big-media blogs and the Internet-native blogs), most of the readers no longer have the time or inclination to bother with any actual amateurs. Really, for the past three years or so, there’s been almost no hope for new bloggers who don’t quickly find their way underneath the umbrella of some established site. And so blogging (at least among the non-elderly, as Nick Carr recently pointed out) has come to seem far less vital.

What we now have, instead, are Facebook and Twitter. The contrast between the two is instructive. On Facebook, you can post everything you care most deeply about, and however much of it as you like, so long as you’re satisfied with your audience being restricted to your friends and acquaintances. On Twitter, you can only post 140 characters, but it’s open to everyone, and with searches, hashtags, etc., you can see yourself becoming a part of the giant big conversation. Really, Facebook and Twitter are the bifurcation of the Big Blog Dream. In a Facebook future, everyone is engaging in full creative self-expression, but it’s no longer adding up to one big conversation: we’re all just talking to our small circle. In a Twitter future, what we desperately care about is the survival of that big conversation, even at the expense of full self-expression.

It’s no accident that so many of the most natural uses of Twitter — unlike those of blogs — are not the replacement of long-form media but an augmentation of them. If you blog about a long article, you’ll likely block-quote the best part and bury the link; on Twitter, all you can do is link. If you’re blogging about a TV show, you might summarize the whole damn thing (spoiler alert!), but the Twitter experience of TV is simultaneous watching. And so on.

There’s oh so much to hate about Twitter, and anyone who follows me there will see that I barely use it. But I do think that the Twitter urge — the thing that has brought people over from Facebook, and has kept people from sinking entirely into Facebook — is also the thing that will save the professional media in some form. Twitterers fervently want to believe in some kind of public meaning, to be a part of big public narratives, to watch the big show together; and they’re willing to accept a 140-character limit to do it.

UPDATE: Links fixed.

Harper's and the paywall

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:43:00 -0500

In general, I’m not inclined to blog about the recent goings-on at Harper’s, where our editor, Roger Hodge, was recently fired. But I do want to comment on Felix Salmon’s post opining that our magazine has been “doomed by its paywall.”

When it comes to the finances of highbrow magazines, it’s simply impossible to say that the publications with paywalls have done worse than the ones without. For example, one can certainly applaud the dramatic moves that The Atlantic has been making online, but no one over there is pretending that the site comes close to making money right now, or even that it’s helping out the print side in this terrible economy. The New York Review of Books is an intellectual magazine with a paywall somewhat like ours — i.e., nothing becomes available until it’s off the newsstand — and as far as I hear they’re humming along just fine. Meanwhile, The New Yorker still seems to be doing relatively well financially, but that has little to do with the Web and everything to do with structural changes the magazine made starting roughly ten years ago, before it had much of a website. (Even today, their site still reserves perhaps a third of the magazine’s content for subscribers only.)

And yet Salmon is clearly right that articles that aren’t online are not getting talked about. As I wrote in my Times op-ed a while back, the Internet has become the de facto heart of the culture, the place where the important conversations are happening. I’d venture to say that almost every print editor today is getting his or her news primarily online. Speaking for myself, at least, if it’s not online, I’m unlikely to read it.

So the reality about the “health” of magazines is complicated. As I see it, there’s an increasing disconnect between online models that are working financially for publications and ones that are working for getting attention. The model for getting attention is easy: give it all away. But the attention online isn’t reliably translating into subscribers or newsstand buyers. (Neither is it clearly deterring them, I should add, which is why, on balance, I’d prefer to kill the paywall at Harper’s. As an editor, though, of course I’d say that.)

The fact is that the online conversation, for all its centrality, has much less reach than we want to think. Most readers, even of highbrow magazines, aren’t a part of it, and so all the online buzz in the world can’t send over enough new subscribers to make our magazines profitable in this economy. It just can’t. Right now, among print publications, the play for attention is online — in fact, it’s almost the only game in town — but the play for money is far less clear.

Sports news on a Friday?

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:43:22 -0500

Like a savvy politician, Tiger Woods picked Friday afternoon to announce that he’d be taking a hiatus from golf. I wonder, though: is that really a good idea when you’re a professional athlete? I mean, sports fans spend all weekend watching nothing but sports news. It’s all they’ll talk about. Seems like Tiger might have been better off picking Sunday afternoon.

"What Foer’s and Chabon’s baroque ministrations avoid is the one immutable fact of growing up: Your..."

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 10:19:46 -0500

“What Foer’s and Chabon’s baroque ministrations avoid is the one immutable fact of growing up: Your children, if you do a good job, will rarely think of you at all.”

- Fatherhood Gets Hip - The Daily Beast. Hear, Hear.

IHOP

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:50:59 -0500

This is a funny story in itself. Also funny: the NYT blog says that the Facebook status update said, “Where’s my pancakes?” — but was written in “indecipherable street slang”.

But in the image, you can see the actual status update in question and it reads: “ON THE PHONE WITH THIS FAT CHICK… WHERER MY IHOP”

Which is not much indecipherable as really offensive.

Silent "Matrix"

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:13:00 -0500

"I once tried to come up with a definition of art. Always a risky enterprise. But the best I could..."

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:31:46 -0500

“I once tried to come up with a definition of art. Always a risky enterprise. But the best I could come up with was: create an arbitrary set of rules, and then follow them slavishly.”

- Errol Morris.

The Box

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:53:45 -0500

Richard Kelly’s The Box isn’t out yet, so I don’t know how accurate this promotional copy is, but I do find its use of the phrase “impossible moral dilemma” to be pretty funny:

What if someone gave you a box containing a button that, if pushed, would bring you a million dollars…but simultaneously take the life of someone you don’t know? Would you do it? And what would be the consequences? The year is 1976. Norma Lewis (Cameron Diaz) is a teacher at a private high school and her husband, Arthur (James Marsden), is an engineer working at NASA. They are, by all accounts, an average couple living a normal life in the suburbs with their young son…until a mysterious man with a horribly disfigured face (Frank Langella) appears on their doorstep and presents Norma with a life-altering proposition: the box. With only 24 hours to make their choice, Norma and Arthur face an impossible moral dilemma.

Hmm… which is the moral choice? Press the button or not? We wouldn’t even know the victim! And a million dollars is an awful lot of money.

It would be entirely comic, this mistaking of a clear moral choice for a “moral dilemma,” if it weren’t baked into just about everything we do as a society, including how we make war.

Yangians and Savagites

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:44:14 -0500

Brooklyn scene-mate Wesley Yang has a trenchant essay in last week’s New York Magazine analyzing the corpus of their recurring “Sex Diaries” feature. Having read every single diary (no mean feat in itself), Yang makes the observation that they’re not really about hedonism but rather about a whole host of underlying anxieties: about choosing partners correctly, about not being rejected, and so on. An excerpt:

7. The anxiety of appearing prudish.
The Diarists are eager to show themselves to have conquered modesty—as if anyone is still insisting they be modest. This is particularly true of the young women—and the Diaries are full of them—who operate at the weird place where male pornographic fantasies and their own fantasies of self-empowered pleasure converge:

11:39 p.m. Dance with a couple of my girlfriends. We spot some cute guys in the corner checking us out. Decide to give the guys a show and lock lips with one another. Watch guys’ jaws drop to the floor.

As for pornography, it plays a role in an extraordinary number of Diaries. Still, few Diarists of either sex are willing to betray any discomfort with it, per se. (“See, I have no issue with porn,” one Diarist assures us when discussing his friend’s enormous collection.) Instead they worry about everything related to porn. Its price, for instance. Or a partner’s overindulgence. Occasionally they do fear that the consumption of it may be wearing them out. This, it seems, is incontestable.

Do read the whole thing. What I love about Yang’s piece is that it manages, without being reactionary or prudish itself (that anxiety again!), to get at what’s so unsatisfying and (ultimately) unbelievable about so much of our discourse on sex.

For example, I’m an avid reader of Savage Love, Dan Savage’s great syndicated sex column. I really love it, and I don’t for a moment doubt either the veracity of the letters Savage gets (except in those cases where he himself calls bullshit on them), or the general wisdom of his advice.

But when you read Savage’s column (plus the Letters of the Day that he posts on The Stranger’s blog), you wind up getting a cumulative vision of human sexuality that seems a bit… skewed. “Utopian” is perhaps too strong a word for Savage’s sexual outlook, but it’s definitely universalist and it’s definitely sunny: in his vision, everyone’s got their kink, or at least a big healthy libido, and if you don’t, well, then repression or some other weird internal bugbear is probably to blame. Sex really is the end in itself, the thing to be pursued, the thing to be celebrated. It’s almost a modernist pose, wherein libertinism (within the reasonable limits of safety and fairness) is a straight line to liberation.

Yang, by contrast, thinks that questions of loneliness and belonging are deeper than questions of sex, indeed are informing all our sexual decisions. His is a much darker view, obviously — maybe too dark, since he could have just as easily discerned dreams as well as anxieties in NYMag’s showy couplings. One might even say that there’s an aesthetics governing sexual and romantic decisions, and that it’s this aesthetics, and not necessarily a repressive (or moral) force, that leads some people to choose less sex over more. At any rate, I am definitely in the Yangian camp on this one, and look forward to more pieces from him.

"If this is organized, we suck."

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:29:59 -0400

"If this is organized, we suck.":

The “flash” Tea Party didn’t do so well, I guess.

"When health-care reform is finished, there are going to be two books worth writing. The first is the..."

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:28:17 -0400

“When health-care reform is finished, there are going to be two books worth writing. The first is the book about the public option, which is also the book about the health-care reform fight that most of us watched. The second is the book about everything else, which, in part because of the consuming controversy around the public option, happened quietly and largely behind closed doors.”

- Ezra Klein. Man do I not want to read either of those books.

Flash Mob Burglary?!

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 17:14:34 -0400

Flash Mob Burglary?!:

Ooh wee.

A national spam economy

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:23:11 -0400

as imagined by the Onion News Network:

"A problem with the industry"

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:49:00 -0400

Via Romenesko, the NYTPicker reports on Times tech reporter David Pogue responding to his critics, who think it’s a conflict of interest for Pogue to write books about tech companies while he’s also reviewing their products. While Romenesko and NYTPicker spotlight Pogue’s rather disingenuous assertion that he is “not a reporter,” the part of his remarks that really grabbed me was this:

“In point of fact this is a problem with the industry. And not so much me alone….It’s about context. Dwight [Silverman] admitted to you that he writes for the Houston Chronicle. And he wrote a Windows book at the same time that he was writing about Windows for the paper. ….and Ed Baig, who writes for an even bigger newspaper than I do, he writes for USA Today, the equivalent column, he wrote Macs for Dummies, Palm Pre: The Missing Manual, he wrote an iPhone book at the same time as he was reviewing those. Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal makes, I think The New Yorker said, $1 million a year off of the D Conferences, where Steve Jobs and Bill Gates make exclusive appearances, the very guys whose products he reviews.

“So it’s a growing problem. You’d probably have a hard time finding someone who doesn’t have a problem like this.”

A growing problem… with the industry! Let’s parse that: what’s the problem that the industry has? The problem is that, despite pulling down big salaries to give unbiased product reviews, everyone in “the industry” wants more money! Can’t you see what a terrible systemic problem has ensnared David Pogue?

"[W]hat is being celebrated here is the ideology of no ideology—the ascendancy of the Nora Ephron..."

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 11:20:15 -0400

“[W]hat is being celebrated here is the ideology of no ideology—the ascendancy of the Nora Ephron view of the world, which may be succinctly described as “food and drink and bathroom fixtures.” What moves such a heart most (aside from children, the poor, and the homeless) are amenities and trivialities. The conferring of importance upon the unimportant, and of unimportance upon the important: this is a mark of decadence, the cognitive inversion of people who live “mostly in aesthetic terms” because they have secured themselves materially—or so they would like to believe—against philosophy and pain. They live for lightness and distraction. Their laughter is the sound of luck. They acquit themselves of their intellectual obligations with opinions.”

- Washington Diarist: Against The Plane | The New Republic