New doodads and hoohahs at Nieman Lab →
A few new things in the sidebars of Nieman Lab article pages — a zen mode that whisks you away to Fake Instapaper Land, and a floating, faded-until-hover next-article teaser floaty thing.
The five-hundred-thousand-dollar country guitar / Sits at home, sad and lonely
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"Where he was once highlight reel and championship celebration, he was now someone who ate at Chipotle and chatted with escorts and clowned on his teammates."
Smart Jay Caspian Kang piece at Grantland on how player marketability in an age of Twitter impacts labor relations in the NFL and NBA.
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"How on earth can abundance damage anything for anyone, unless what’s damaged is some critic’s pining to control what shouldn’t be controlled, or to circumscribe boundlessness?"
Jonathan Lethem on the joys of overproduction in “Rushmore Versus Abundance,” in The Ecstasy of Influence, reviewed by Robert Christgau in the NYT.
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Trailer for “Ages and Stages,” a doc about The Meligrove Band, a totally underrated Toronto band. In some alternative universe, Planets Conspire is a classical album.
(Source: vimeo.com)
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All this, and yet I just wrote a blog post. It’s a sickness. (Taken with Instagram at Jewel Dunns River Resort)
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Getting ready for the Dismemberment Plan at Paradise. (Taken with Instagram at Paradise Rock Club)
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Cultural Common Ground Gets Harder To Come By : NPR →
Another in the unending series of pieces on how we have no shared culture any more because we don’t all watch “The Cosby Show” on Thursday nights. Seriously:
What makes us laugh on TV isn’t as broad-based as it once was. At its peak in the mid-1980s, The Cosby Show had 30 million viewers. Today’s top-rated sitcom, Two and a Half Men, gets more like 15 million.
Since we’re not all watching the same shows, “water-cooler moments” are harder to come by. Dan Schneider, a TV veteran and executive producer for Nickelodeon, says a show like Modern Family is a perfect example. “[It’s] a really great comedy that’s popular and new that’s on the air right now,” he says, “but if you go walk around the mall and say, ‘Did you see last week’s Modern Family?’ how many people out of 10 are going to say, ‘Yeah, I saw it?’ ” Schneider believes not that many. “The TV markets are so nichey that even a popular show isn’t watched by most people you’re going to run into.”Catch the flawed argument? Even at The Cosby Show’s peak, almost 90% of the 250 million Americans weren’t watching it. “Most people you’re going to run into” has never been equal to “most people.” Most people I run into probably did watch Mad Men, even though it gets barely gets 2 million viewers, because I hang out in snooty liberal Cambridge. They’re not equal to the norm, but “the norm” has always been stuffed with variety.
Anyway, I hate most of these common-conversation arguments, because they assume that their pre-Internet, pre-fractured experience was the norm, when it was always the exception. Most people never read The New Yorker, most people never watched Hill Street Blues, most people never bought a C+C Music Factory album, and that’s okay!
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Former LA Gov. Edwin Edwards released from prison - WAFB Channel 9, Baton Rouge, LA | →
Free Edwin! The Cajun Prince rides (semi-)free again!
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