March 2011
1 post
The cruelest paper in Paris is also the funniest and most solvent Der Speigel on Le Canard Enchaîné Canard, on the other hand, France’s only satirical weekly newspaper, is doing well in this ailing country. Circulation went up by 32 percent in the first two years after Sarkozy’s inauguration, and thanks the country’s numerous scandals it now prints 700,000 copies per week. Net profit was roughly...
February 2011
1 post
The Daily: Indexed →
This is amazing. Every story from The Daily, linked for free every day on the web. Doomed.
thedailyindexed:
News
Today’s Cover of The Daily
TAKEN BY STORM — The big dig begins today for millions of Americans buried under one of the largest snowstorms to…
Groundhog wild — Good news for everyone fed up with the snow and ice shellacking the nation: Spring is coming early!…
...
January 2011
2 posts
Gerry Adams singlehandedly changes British constitution by resigning from Westminster One of the joys of having an unwritten constitution, such as the one that the UK operates under, is that it can a) bend to new circumstances and b) change in a heartbeat if someone refuses to obey stupid rules. For the past 400 years, MPs have not had the option of resigning their seat, their only way out was to...
New Yorker buys abandoned men’s club and turns it into a private residence Wow. Here’s the tour. #
December 2010
3 posts
Does a country still exist if it sinks under the sea? Encroaching seas in the far Pacific are raising the salt level in the wells of the Marshall Islands. Waves threaten to cut one sliver of an island in two What happens if the 61,000 Marshallese must abandon their low-lying atolls? Would they still be a nation? With a U.N. seat? With control of their old fisheries and their undersea minerals?...
Remembering Eros, Fact, and Avant Garde Codex99 A beautiful little vignette on three 60s and 70s magazines published by Ralph Ginzburg, Eros, Fact, and Avant Garde. Six months after Fact closed shop Ginzburg and Lubalin collaborated on their third periodical – Avant Garde. The magazine, which Ginzburg intended for “a rarified, even elitist audience” was both editorially and artistically equal...
A brief history of the octothorpe Robert Fulford, National Post The Big O is a sign with deep historical and cultural roots, part of our heritage. It didn’t deserve the neglect it suffered in recent times. It’s lived under many names: the hash, the crunch, the hex (that’s in Singapore), the flash, the grid. In some circles it’s called tic-tactoe, in others pig-pen. From a distance it looks like...
November 2010
3 posts
An interview with Rick Meyerowitz on his National Lampoon book Not only does Rick Meyerowitz’s new book, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great look amazing, it doesn’t use the fucking ‘We’ll shoot this dog cover.’ #
Rupert Murdoch is serious about his iPad newspaper It’s going to be called The Daily and he’s hired New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones as culture editor #
James Frey has a new business: mass producing books James Frey, author of the controversial fictionalised memoir A Million Little Pieces, has gone into the young adult book-packaging business, working with new writers to mass produce new works. The terms of the writers’ agreement with Frey, however, are somewhat one-sided: In exchange for delivering a finished book within a set number of months,...
October 2010
5 posts
The Onion begins franchising to other US cities I’ve known that The Onion has been interested in franchising the paper to other cities for quite some time, but this is the first public request for inquiries that I have seen. You know I love freesheets, but it may be a little late, especially if the franchisees don’t get a cut of the web income. The Onion, Inc. already run company-owned weekly...
How Google avoids tax from its world wide income Bloomberg Businessweek
When a company in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa purchases a search ad through Google, it sends the money to Google Ireland. The Irish government taxes corporate profits at 12.5 percent, but Google mostly escapes that tax because its earnings don’t stay in the Dublin office, which reported a pretax profit of less than 1...
Goodbye to the Netherlands Antilles Andrew Cusack
This morning, one country disappeared, two more were born, a fourth was expanded, and all are part of a single kingdom. The Netherlands Antilles, the collective islands of the Dutch West Indies which since 1954 has formed a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, was dissolved. Two of the islands in the archipelago, Curaçao and Sint...
National Lampoon’s 1971 parody of Mad Magazine As a kid in the 70s, I loved Mad Magazine. By the late 70s, early 80s, I had switched my loyalty to the National Lampoon. But I had never heard of this brutally dead-on 1971 National Lampoon parody of Mad. So much hate. It can only be a love affair gone wrong. #
A ghost airport in North West Washington state along the I-5 Still in the 70s. I recall very clearly being driven down the I-5 from the Canadian border to somewhere south – Bellingham, probably, but possibly the seaside oasis of Birch Bay or the Emerald City. As we entered the farmland outside of the border town, Blaine, there was what appeared to be a wooden control tower, maybe five stories...
September 2010
8 posts
A Skeptical View of Constitution Worship Michael Klarman The (US) Supreme Court for much of its history has approved of racial segregation and disenfranchisement, the subordination of women and gays and lesbians, the criminalization of dissident speech, and a very narrow conception of the separation of church and state and of the rights of criminal defendants. In the end, we, the American...
Every Mad magazine cover from 1952 to 2010 Beautiful. Every time I happen to come across a 21st century Mad, I’m horrified that they are peddling this stuff to kids. They still have it. #
NYT web design director Khoi Vinh on designing for journalism Part of a new lecture series that clothing company Frietag is curating in Zuruch Next up – tomorrow – is Wired UK editor David Rowan. #
Good fucking design advice Use only space after a period. Hallelujah. #
Awesome Facebook trick If you type your password into a Facebook comment, it converts into asterisks #
Great end credits I don’t know anything about the Other Guys. It doesn’t even seem worth sticking on my LoveFilm queue. But there is something great about its end credits. #
The first priority was changing the photography Good news, bad news. Good news is this is a great interview about modern magazine design with Dick Barnett. Bad news is that he is currently designing Maxim. #
Interview with Paul Reubens Playboy (Um, NSFW) REUBENS: In truth Pee-wee has this false sense of confidence. He acts as though he knows everything, but really it’s all fake. It’s a facade. PLAYBOY: But wasn’t Pee-wee your own facade? REUBENS: Boy, that was convenient, wasn’t it, to become somebody else #
August 2010
10 posts
PJ O’Rourke returns to form with a piece on Afghanistan Traditionalism being one of the things that makes Afghanistan so hard for Americans to understand. We Americans have so many traditions. For instance our political traditions date back to the 12th-century English Parliament if not to the Roman Senate. Afghans, on the other hand, have had the representative democracy kind of politics...
Uncensored and off-the-record The rise and fall of Confidential magazine #
TIME announces new magazine aimed at grown-ups TIME Advanced is to be produced for readers who already know where Pakistan is #
Why taxes are low in the Middle East Brian Whitaker As a rule of thumb, high taxes can act as a spur towards democracy and accountable government. Conversely, where taxes are low the pressure for democracy and accountability is usually less. #
The slow whiny death of British Christianity Johann Hari
Carey and the CofE demand Christians be allowed to break the law requiring them to treat gay people equally when providing a service to the general public – and that any case where a Christian feels discriminated against should be judged by a special court of “sensitive” Christians. If we started allowing religious people to...
The Last Days of Disco Gerard Cosloy, co-founder of the independent Matador Records Record labels aren’t nearly as fucking smart as they think they are, otherwise they’d have found a way to have done away with these pesky artists. Conversely, who is actually thriving without the benefit of a trad record label? #
I came across this article today, the Best Magazine Articles Ever, and was pleased at the quality of the list and, indeed, how many I have read over the years.
But there is a glaring omission. In 1997, the Baffler published in its tenth edition a feature article by Matt Roth entitled Dreams Incorporated: Living the Delayed Life with Amway.
Roth uses his anthropology background to follow...
July 2010
4 posts
Vancouver FC aka The Whitecaps Brand New has an insightful article on the evolution of the logo of Vancouver’s soccer/football team Love the Avenir typeface. But it is hard to take the nickname ‘Whitecaps’ referring to the mountaintops rather than the waves. #
Copyright termination It’s obviously based on the American experience, but this audio discussion of copyright termination is fascinating. In it, copyright guru David Nimmer, UC Berkeley Professor Peter Menell and UCLA Professor Doug Lichtman discuss copyright disputes of Superman, Captain America, the Fantastic Four, Lassie, and Winnie the Pooh. #
Canadian gaffs and practical amusements Pal Ryan gets the blame, along with Canadian Notes & Queries editor John Metcalf, for the sorry state of Canadian criticism in The Walrus. Ryan is non-plussed. #
David Frum
Canada’s newly-built places are often homes to new Canadians. These areas carry too little memory of Canadian history and Canadian accomplishment. Public memorials, statues and other reminders of the Canadian past are crowded into older central cities. As things stand, the Surreys and the Woodbridges could be any suburbs anywhere. They too need their connections to the...
June 2010
16 posts
The five most difficult countries to visit Law is Cool) Some how-tos on visiting Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, North Korea, and Somaliland. #
Former Frank editor makes Gram Parson’s musical Michael Bate, founder of the Ottawa edition of Frank and its longtime editor, is also a fan of Gram Parsons. #
Writing advice from Ian Fleming From the Guardian, 1962, ‘How to write a thriller’ I never correct anything and I never go back to what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. How could you have written this drivel? How could you have used “terrible” six times on one page? And so forth. If you interrupt the writing of...
A typeface explains his viewpoint McSweeney’s Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m stupid. You think I’m immature. You think I’m a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I’m Comic Sans, and I’m the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg. #
That Bloody Sunday inquiry in full Every word. All ten volumes. Anyone who says the inquiry missed something, just point them there. #
The Paris Review The latest edition has Robert Crumb and Katherine Dunne, both of whom I can always use more. #
Telegraphs and code words Code words for the day of the year
[Some enterprising telegraph operator] realised that telegraph senders charged per word rather than per character—thus transmitting “it is on” would cost the same as “raynor is maschalophilous.”
For example ‘crisp is short hand for “can you recommend to me a good female cook?” and ‘flank means “a fire is raging here....
US labels create fake lobbying group for Canadian copyright change Boing Boing
It’s really telling that the opposition to the Canadian DMCA has come from real grassroots: artist groups, citizen groups, technologists, educators, disabled-rights groups, archivists — people who don’t hide their funding or their affiliations behind false flags. Meanwhile, the only support for this law has...
Canada needs a population of 100 million people - then we will be respected
Global Brief (um, who? *) says that as a middle-weight country, Canada does not get the respect that it deserves. It’s got the money, it’s got the know-how, it got three-Ocean access (sucks, don’t it, Austria) but with 30 million population, nobody is going to care.
That’s why tripling the population to 100 million...
How to Get Your Camera Back When You Lose It Andrew MacDonald leaves this series of pictures on his camera. #
How the Mainstream Media stole Danny Sullivan’s story without credit Danny Sullivan, of Search Engine Land, discovered a lawsuit filed against Google by a woman who says Google Maps caused her an injury. Sullivan wrote it up here. The story goes viral – but few media outlets credit Sullivan, even though they use his graphic and his copy of the statement of complaint. It is a lack of...
The worst ampersand designs in typographic history These are for you, Nyiri #