Billy Joel reminisces about producer Phil Ramone, who just recently died, and his anecdotes and reflections about him make clear in conversation what you can already hear in recordings. For example: Phil perceived that recording hadn’t been fun for me for a very long time. The process was like pulling teeth. I don’t want to do 15 to 20 takes. I start to hate the song. If I gotta do more than a half a dozen takes, I’m ready to... Read more
James Shakespeare on social media, which he calls “the curse of our age”: The key thing to remember is that you are not enriching your experiences by sharing them online; you’re detracting from them because all your efforts are focused on making them look attractive to other people. Your experience of something, even if similar to the experience of many others, is unique and cannot be reproduced within the constraints of social media. So internalise that experience instead. Think about... Read more
This bit from a Financial Times piece, ostensibly about how social media is improving people’s writing skills, explains so much: “Major Memory for Microblogs”, a recent article in the academic journal Memory & Cognition, found that people were much better at remembering casual writing like Facebook posts or forum comments than lines from books or journalism. One possible reason: “The relatively unfiltered and spontaneous production of one person’s mind is just the sort of thing that is readily stored in... Read more
When I donned the blue shirt of the Apple Store specialist not so long ago, one question came up an awful lot from customers. Whether they were deciding between MacBooks and iMacs, or trying to understand why they might want an iPad or iPhone, hardly a day went by that I wasn’t asked this question: “Can I do Facebook on this?” That’s who Facebook Home is for. For the many, many people who walk into a wireless carrier’s store and... Read more
Oh, hi, Internet. Angus Croll: Writing online is so nearly effortless that reading (not to mention reflection, deliberation and thought) has become a chore in comparison. It’s easier to jot off a patronizing, indignant or self-aggrandizing missive than it is to take the trouble to read the whole article or give fair consideration to the author’s perspective. Thus the vicious circle sets in… Why go to the trouble of producing a balanced or inquiring article for a medium that encourages... Read more
The coming generations will make less than those that came before. Jerry Brito says, well, so what? Today…we are in a position to derive much of our happiness from pursuits internal to our minds. We do this by blogging, watching House of Cards on Netflix, listening to a symphony from iTunes, tweeting with friends and acquaintances, seeing their pictures on Facebook or Path, and learning and collaborating on Wikipedia. As a result, once one secures a certain income to cover... Read more
Frank Chimero: It irks me that we’re throwing around the word “timeless” all willy-nilly. At this point, “timeless” is hyperbole for something with a shelf-life of a couple years. This bag of Doritos? Timeless. Our sense of time is all out of whack. When people link to older blog posts and articles, they’ll maybe call it “timeless” or say some other inane thing like, “Old, but good!” Two years old isn’t old! A two-year-old can’t even wipe his own ass.... Read more
Alice Marwick at Wired on “Donglegate“: Regardless of the nuances of the incident, the fact remains that [Adria] Richards faced a gargantuan backlash that included death threats, rape threats, a flood of racist and sexually violent speech, a DDOS attack on her employer — and a photoshopped picture of a naked, bound, decapitated woman. The use of mob justice to punish women who advocate feminist ideals is nothing new, but why does this happen so regularly when women criticize the tech industry?... Read more
Richard Nash at the Virginia Quarterly Review has a long piece that is ostensibly about the business of literature, but really gets at the heart of what the book means to civilization. I just loved it. The two bits I’ll highlight have to do with the book’s resilience as a piece of both technology and culture. . . . almost one hundred years ago . . . the book [was] beginning to achieve what most technology will never accomplish—the ability... Read more
There is a torrent of Iraq War soul-searches in the media right now, and they continue to stick in my craw for their evasiveness, especially after the brutally self-critical tone of Andrew Sullivan’s professed regrets for his support. I was looking forward to something similar from former Bush speechwriter — Mr. Axis of Evil himself — David Frum, and I did not get it: My youngest daughter was born in December 2001: a war baby. When my wife nursed little... Read more
iMortal
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In