October 2008
27 posts
The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace →
Rolling Stone has long been irrelevant to popular culture but it can still nail the obituary.
Today is an auspicious day in the Only story.
Four years ago today, the new proprietors of the paper that I started and very cleverly lost, Terminal City Weekly, suddenly gave up and shut the paper down.
This means that, at four years and one month of age,Only has published longer than the the paper it sprang from.
(The 90s Terminal City Magazine ran a few years longer.)
Here in London, I...
16 films featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls →
Heard about this on NPR the other day and it totally blew my little cinemaphile mind.
WatchMad Men opening sequence, Simpsons style.
Lou Dorfsman, designer 1918-2008 →
Lou Dorfsman’s total control over the way US broadcaster CBS looked influenced the way we perceive the 60s. The designer of Monocle’s website was particularly keen.
chuckmore:
ELISABETH HASSELBECK: Obviously both sides are trying to run and create image. So if we use this as, so they both have funds and are creating an image, making sure their candidates are where they need to be seen, as they need to be. I find it completely then repulsive to then - if we want to look at spending - see how Barack Obama now is going to spend what $3 million on two thirty...
WatchMTV finally creates a big video jukebox of 22,000 songs. About time.
Update: It now has been restricted to US only. Next.
McCain Tackles Obama on "Spread the Wealth" →
rlrr:
The McCain campaign apparently has a new theme this week: attacking Obama for wanting to “spread the wealth.” But it is not clear what that really means. Many Republicans have bitterly opposed the federal income tax since the 16th amendment was passed in 1913. Is McCain going to repeal the federal income tax? If so, how does he plan to finance the government? Or does he mean that the...
“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest...”
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Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com on Colbert.
In 20 years, when people ask when the old media lost the plot and the new journalism moved to the front, the answer is 538’s coverage of the 2008 US election.
A great documentary on the design aesthetic of the London tube map.
The economics of blackmail It appears that blackmail and extortion are not as lucrative as you may think.
I hate when visitors let me in on something in my own (adoptive) town. On his world tour, Cam told us about Camelot. There are many beautiful Victorian and Georgian houses and buildings that are empty. Camelot finds people who love nice places and dirt-cheap rent and puts them in old schoolhouses, printing shops, or castles. Here is a story about it in today’s Times.
Great long interview with Tim & Eric in the Believer.
Thanks Ryan
A good interview with Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner.
I had not even heard of “Revolutionary Road” when I wrote (the pilot). It was given to me by the people at AMC. So I read it in between writing the pilot and starting the series. My reaction to it was “If I had read this book before I wrote the show, I never would have written the show.” I would not compete with that. I don’t have the balls...
Maer Roshan: The Exit Interview →
The New York Observer speaks to the founder of Radar on shuttering the mag for the third time.
Compared to the previous two times in which Radar closed, he said he felt “calmer” this time. “I’m more used to dealing with vagaries of investors who are not in the media,” he said.
Right with you, guy.
Stealing a nation: The novelisation →
Here is the Law Lord’s decision on the Chagos Islander’s case. In the end, the Lords went with the ‘Because we said so’ argument:
“In a conquered or ceded colony the Crown, by virtue of its prerogative, has full power to establish such executive, legislative, and judicial arrangements as this Crown thinks fit.”
WatchStealing a Nation, a great documentary by John Pilger
Beginning in 1968, Britain removed 3,000 people from the Chagos islands, a Crown dependency, to provide space for a US Naval Base at Diego Garcia to assist in conducting the Vietnam War.
The population was sent to Mauritius and the Seychelles and left to fend for themselves in city slums. No compensation or assistance was provided.
...