May 2013
7 posts
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historical-nonfiction:
The first newspaper was printed on silk.
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“In its favour, if Google Glass didn’t exist, all these Silicon Valley guys would...”
– (via whitemenwearinggoogleglass)
April 2013
14 posts
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Worthy of a proper gander
This farcical promo, for the benefit of the recent White House Correspondents banquet, proves once and for all that US President Barack Obama is the best talk-show host his nation ever had in the White House. Of course, his real-life conjuring trick is way better and infinitely more successful: fooling more than half of the people more than half of the time that he is the true progressive answer...
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“… “Yes, of course I want to follow your muesli on Twitter”...”
– Chris Addison
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The censorship pyramid
“On the top of the (censorship) pyramid there are the murders of journalists and publishers. And the next level there is political attacks on journalists and publishers. So you think, what is a legal attack? A legal attack is simply a delayed use of coercive force … and then there are other forms of self censorship that are concerned about missing out on business deals, missing out...
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“… “The incomparable A. J. Liebling wrote once that there are three...”
– Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
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1/3 Guardian readers American, US traffic up 37% →
The Guardian’s expansion into the U.S. is on track, editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger said Wednesday, with traffic up by 37 percent last year. For now, there are no plans for a paywall.
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“… “People who understand statistics
stereotype the most. But they...”
– @GSElevator
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Mind the gap
It is probably all about the gap between one’s own past and the history of others. Still, I am not sure any event has ever made me feel older than the passing of Margaret T. I am fairly sure no tech or news release has ever made me wince with such tangible generational dislocation.
And it’s not only because two of the best pieces I read, Russell Brand’s unedited reveries and...
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March 2013
3 posts
"The Day that TV News Died ..."
For the campaigning liberal writer Chris Hedges, the final nail to reach his own heart was the day MSNBC finally slam-dunked the award-winning and supremely popular presenter Phil Donahue off the lot for being “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war”. Nice one, jerk-offs. Hedges remembers how at the same time the only other voice which challenged the drums of war on the gogglebox,...
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The Internet is a Surveillance State →
Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we’re being tracked all the time and the new surveillance state is efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell, writes Bruce Schneier. Sure, we can take measures to prevent this. But increasingly, none of it matters, he writes. Sad, innit?! [ cnn ]
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That Piece Killed by the 'Post' →
Click to read the Outlook piece that Greg Mitchell submitted to the Washington Post last Thursday. The Post is defending killing the piece on the grounds that it didn’t offer sufficient “broader analytical points or insights.” But we can make up our own minds why the weasels spiked it. I can still count on only one hand the number of hacks who have publicly accepted...
February 2013
15 posts
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“In the “”War on Terror”, it would appear that
most of the...”
– In response to this tweet by Ed Pilkington: “#BradleyManning judge has spent TWO hours reading out a ruling at 180 wpm. 23k words! Yet they won’t publish a single one”. The judge ruled that Manning’s right to speedy trial not violated, despite 1000+ days in pretrial...
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kateoplis: Maria Popova - have you made $1M on... →
on-advertising:
Maria Popova is a Forbes 30 under 30 honoree, regular author for The Atlantic, and was named to the Fast Company 100 Most Creative in Business list. I let her know I was a regular reader of her site when I sent her an email a few months ago after she wrote an article about…
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Pay-by-Tweet? Twitter pairs up with Amex →
Twitter and American Express say they are working on a “pay-by-tweet” system that would let accredited users pay for real or virtual items via the microblogging service. [ The Guardian ]
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“The iTunes song download rate
is about 18 million per day and the
(new) app...”
– @TheMediaisDying
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According to a report published by the Atlantic Wire these are the 54 countries that helped the CIA to kidnap and torture terror suspects,
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Louis Theroux: My favourite documentaries →
“I have taken a moment to jot down an idiosyncratic and entirely off-the-top-of-my-head list of some TV documentaries of unusual power or strangeness – docs that I stumbled upon watching TV or had recommended to me over the years or that friends made, but which, for various reasons, have stayed with me since I first saw them. My criterion for choosing the list below has been simple: Can I...
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"Kill List Bill"
And with this white paper I thee show that is is quite legal and proper to drone you to death if you are the wrong kind of American. It is presumably far easier when the target is simply the wrong kind of human. I am not sure whether in that situation I would even need to read a white paper in advance. [ Full DOJ White Paper, NBC report ] No, seriously, is there anybody left who still thinks...
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January 2013
21 posts
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Not with a bang, but with a t ....
The death of a brand …
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A dark cloud for privacy →
“All personal information stored by British internet users on major “cloud” computing services including Google Drive can be spied upon routinely without their knowledge by US authorities under newly-approved legislation.” The Independent manages to sound suitably shocked …
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Who wants your Twitter data? The US
The US government is by far the most eager user of Twitter user info, judging by the number of information requests they made between July and December last year. They made 69% of all the requests by governments during that period. [ more ]
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1,233,872,169 ... and counting →
That is how many have watched the PSY video Gangnam Style on YouTube, netting Google $8million in advertising revenues — Has a free download ever earned more?
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This looks shit, Sherlock
Hollywood’s historical airbrush is set to go into overdrive again with the release of a film about cyber-activist and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, currently living in the Nicaraguan embassy in London. Assange fears the warrant to extradite him to Sweden following accusations of sexual misconduct is a prelude to rendition to the US where a grand jury indictment awaits. I wager...
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“… “We make an incredible movie that celebrates his death – a movie...”
– Matt Taibbi on Zero Dark Thirty
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