“ In a way, [Girls] matters more than the shows that came before it. When those shows were on the air, there was more diversity on screens all around, so we didn’t notice it as much, it didn’t seem as glaringly missing.”
# Where (My) Girls At? | The Hairpin
Jenna Wortham is right: I don’t care if Lena Dunham’s real-life friends are all white, but insofar as she’s Saying Something – and all the coverage about the platform HBO is giving her makes it clear she is doing just that – it’s disappointing/unacceptable that the cast is so white. That’s just not what life looks like, even for privileged twentysomething New Yorkers.
Especially for privileged twentysomething New Yorkers.
Mike Daisey: Some Thoughts After The Storm
Credit where it’s due – Mike Daisey’s hubris has finally come back to earth, and he has written a thoughtful and unqualified apology. It’s a great read, and I think required of any of us who piled on with an opinion about the original dust-up.
“ [The Shins’] approach became the new standard for indie rock. Bands like Grizzly Bear, St. Vincent, and Bon Iver represent different facets of the genre, but they share a tendency to foreground melody and to present an accessible version of musical beauty. So a generation raised on the dissonance and refusenik ways of bands like Sonic Youth gave way to the campfire kids. The spirit of that earlier strain hardly died, though—it just mutated into a version of dance music that kicked into gear a year after “New Slang” with LCD Soundsytem’s “Losing My Edge”.”
“ But China, it turns out, is not so far away. Daisey’s fiction was predicated on the notion that China is essentially unknowable, that reporters never go to factory gates, that highways exit to nowhere. And he might have gotten away with it twenty years ago. But these days, it’s no longer so far away at all. It’s close enough to make an iPhone today and have it on a U.S. store shelf next week.”
# Letter from China: Apple, China, and the Truth
This is a really, really great post on the This American Life/Mike Daisey retraction from Evan Osnos, the New Yorker’s man in China.
What has been so frustrating to me about Daisey’s narrative is that it encourages feeble thinking about the much larger problems of globalized capitalism, problems which Apple is really dealing with a lot better than most companies its size.
Osnos points out another way Daisey gets the story wrong: by mistaking China for an exoticized other, a land of naïfs. In the end, I wonder if Daisey’s narcissism and intellectual laziness epitomize the real subject of his story: America.
Okay, look, this is a really effing good video and exactly what they need to show his base, which I’m pretty sure is basically me: young progressives who are as discouraged by the President now as we were inspired in 2008.
You watch this and you think, “maybe he didn’t turn out to be such a milquetoast dude after all?”
# The Story of Us: Five Years Ago Today (by BarackObamadotcom)
This is a great Tumblr concept.
Charles Sprague Pearce, Lamentation over the Death of the Firstborn of Egypt (detail)
(via cnide)
wnyc:
From the BBC, a satellite picture of the capsized Costa Concordia.
-Jody, BL Show-
Is it okay that it’s beautiful?
How 'Radiolab' Is Changing the Sound of the Radio
The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal, writing about much more than radio: a whole new media culture that’s grown up in the last few years that prizes thoughtfulness, quality, production, and aesthetics. A neat little argument and even better idea.
This! This.
Introducing our new game called:
“Don’t Be A Di*k During Meals With Friends.”
The first person to crack and look at their phone picks up the check.
Our (initial) purpose of the game was to get everyone off the phones free from twitter/fb/texting and to encourage conversations.
Rules:
1) The game starts after everyone has ordered.
2) Everybody places their phone on the table face down.
3) The first person to flip over their phone loses the game.
4) Loser of the game pays for the bill.
5) If the bill comes before anyone has flipped over their phone everybody is declared a winner and pays for their own meal.
Variations/house rules:
-Starting the game after everyone is seated.
-In the rare event that multiple people flip their phones simultaneously, the bill is split between said players.
- Feel free to invoke penalties/strikes systems.
Notes:
- No touching or messing with anybody else’s phones.
- You don’t have to stack the phones. This was done for picture taking purposes.
- I realize I should perhaps think of a different name for this awesome game. Because I don’t mean to imply that everyone who checks their phone during meals is a di*k.
- I recommend not being such a stickler or hardass on people about the rules and even initiation of the game. Basic premise is to just get people open to the idea of staying active and attentive to one another. But if someone has to take a call; they have to take a call =).
- Have fun! It’s really more of a fun concept in this new age high tech life of ours. Conversation is the spice of life.
