February 2011
Oscar Predictions
(specifically, what I think will happen)
Best Picture - The King’s Speech
Best Director - David Fincher in The Social Network
Best Actor - Colin Firth in The King’s Speech
Best Actress - Natalie Portman in Black Swan
Best Supporting Actor - Christian Bale in The FIghter
Best Supporting Actress - Melissa Leo in The Fighter
Best Original Screenplay - David Seidler for The...
Detroit public schools to have sixty-student... →
To balance the books, the state has ordered the school district to close half its schools, doubling the current class-size of thirty. I can neither imagine how they will physically fit all the students in those rooms nor how anyone could possibly teach them.
Please DON'T go see I am Number Four this weekend
After the whole A Million Little Pieces debacle died down, James Frey started Full Fathom Five, a fiction factory that preys on aspiring writers so hungry for shelf-space that they’ll write a whole novel for $250 (and 40% of whatever number James Frey decides to pull out of his ass).
Working together, Frey and the author would develop a high-concept (e.g. simple premise), paint-by-numbers...
“The money that has apparently been doled out by Kabul Bank to Afghan officials...”
– Dexter Filkins (of The Forever War fame) writing about banking corruption in the Afghan government. The whole essay is very The Wire-like, covering a unit formed to follow the Taliban money that ended up finding all sorts of governmental corruption.
“How do you feel about death? Does the inevitable termination of your existence...”
– “Watson, the Jeopardy! supercomputer, sizes up one of his opponents before the show” by Daniel Yudkin
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"The Moral Crusade Against Foodies" by B.R. Myers →
From The Atlantic comes a survey and criticism of many of the values underlying foodie culture… sort of. Myers tries to make two arguments: that foodie culture is morally wrong to ignore the ethics of eating (i.e. rare and cruelly-prepared animals), and that they are immoral in being gluttons about food generally.
This would, of course, be the same B.R. Myers that famously decried modern...
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Things I have done to try and enjoy reading Chuck...
Received a xeroxed copy of one of his essays for a non-fiction writing workshop
Discussed it in class, only marginally engaged with the essay or discussion
Read the entirety of Sex, Drugs, and Coco Puffs
Re-read parts
Carefully discussed it with two close friends and one future fiancee, practically begging them to tell me how to like him
Read Eating the Dinosaur
Starting with “that...
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WatchOne of the best video games of the late ’90s - and one of the funniest games of all time - has finally been updated for modern consoles. Welcome back, You Don’t Know Jack.
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On the new Gawker design, and why it is a...
I wrote this on the new Gawker design in an email to a friend, and figured it was good enough to post on the real internet:
The Big Problem in online publishing, I think, is figuring out if there’s a new way to orient users within a publishing stream.
in the Old Days of print publishing, this was pretty simple: you came out with a daily issue, could physically orient yourself within that...
softcastle-mccormick asked: if you could pick a super power, which one would you choose?
“as journalists move back and forth with increasing regularity between mainstream...”
– Felix Salmon, in an aside to rounding up three takes on the latest Madoff news twist.
WatchFinally, a terror alert system I can get behind.
Books I read in January 2011
The Maytrees by Annie Dillard
The American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
Stoner by John Williams
The Known World by Edward P. Jones
I really really enjoyed Stoner.
That said, The Known World as good or even better. It’s not quite my favorite of the two, but it is likely a “better” book. It sounds like...
