Month: May 2011

Oliver Reichenstein believes users would pay for a better online reading experience. He drafts a mockup:

Reading news online feels like flying Economy. Loud distracting banners, cheap stock picture material, sloppy typography, a lot of useless comment noise, machine generated reading tips, no human service, and a claustrophobic information design make the reading experience a torture. … Remember, whether you fly Economy or Business: the result is the same (you travel from a to b), and only the experience differs. And likewise Business Class and Economy class seats on news sites should deliver the same content.

The idea of creating a business class for online news where is not about buying information, but buying better experience, it’s about service and customer experience. That’s right: Customer (paying), not user (free).

Probably all the best parts anyway:

Vanessa Grigoriadis roots it out:

Everyone can agree that giving is a beautiful thing, and that the rich and famous among us should be encouraged to donate as much as they possibly can. The problem is that celebrity charities are rarely run well; for every impeccable foundation by Martin Scorsese, there’s a Yele Haiti, Wyclef Jean’s charity, or a nonstarter like Kanye West’s educational foundation, which was shuttered in April. In fact, some philanthropy advisers say that many of the celebrities they counsel don’t even want to donate to their own charities. “Very few sports stars, other than Lance Armstrong, actually donate to their own charities,” says a tax adviser. “Most of them say, ‘My fans will donate.’ Their attitude is ‘I’m contributing my celebrity to this cause.’”

Truckee, California, 11.01 am

Tim Carmody surveys the Internet. His bid? $100 a month. He contemplates how such a service would change how we read:

If I haven't laid down money for a particular book, would I feel less obligated to stick it through to the end? I'd probably do a lot more dipping and diving. I'd be quicker to say, "this isn't doing it for me — what else is on?"

Kelefa Sanneh plumbs the history:

One of the biggest differences between today’s reality television and its 1973 antecedent is the genre’s status. Having outgrown PBS, it has inherited the rotten reputation that once attached to the medium itself. In an era of televised precocity—ambitious HBO dramas, cunningly self-aware sitcoms—reality shows still provide a fat target for anyone seeking symptoms or causes of American idiocy; the popularity of unscripted programming has had the unexpected effect of ennobling its scripted counterpart. The same people who brag about having seen every episode of “Friday Night Lights” will brag, too, that they have never laid eyes on “The Real Housewives of Atlanta.” Reality television is the television of television.

(Video: Trailer for "Cinema Verite," HBO's take on the filming of "An American Family")

Jessica Mack interviewed William Easterly about women and international aid:

The battle in American history, which is also a story of development – development is not just about Africa – has been the battle to correct the double standard. Men are not superior to women; white people don’t have one set of rights, and black people another. We white males would prefer to forget that this was very recent in our own society, and this is why we’re so happy to transfer our gaze to some far away society that has some more extreme problem. Confronting that history honestly makes us realize that this is the fight: to keep eroding, eroding, and eroding that double standard.

We’re still a long way from equal rights for women in the US. Recognition of that also helps us appreciate that when we talk about women’s rights in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, we come in with our own skeletons in the closet. That should make should make us more aware of how hard these problems are to make progress on and we should not paper them over with all these development buzzwords, which is unfortunately what’s happening.

Rebecca Greenfield spoke to linguist Mark Liberman about why the verbal gaffe is so common:

The syntactic category rule means that when two words are confused for one another the "target" (the word replaced) and the substituting word are almost always of the same syntactic category. In normal speak: nouns replace nouns, verbs replace verbs, and so on. If "Obama" were a verb instead of a noun (as in, the Democrats are going to Obama the GOP in 2012), we would be substantially less likely to confuse it with the noun "Osama."

The speaker is also subject to what linguists call "priming." Your brain makes certain words more accessible to your tongue when they resemble–in pronunciation, in meaning, in subject matter–words that you frequently hear. "Priming means that when you've been reading/hearing/thinking about hospitals, words like 'doctor' and 'nurse' will be recognized more quickly, and are also more likely to be substituted in a slip of the tongue," Liberman explains. So hearing Osama and Obama in the same context makes your brain more apt to use them interchangeably in speech.

(Image via Buzzfeed)

Ron Kampeas says I owe "Yitzhak Shamir an apology" for inaccurate quotes in this post. The quotes are both accurate. But I miswrote "cockroaches" rather than "grasshoppers" in a summary paragraph when referring to Shamir (the cockroach description came from Rafael Eitan, the former military chief of staff). But the quotes are accurate, and accurately illustrate the dehumanization of Palestinians. For the complete record, here's the Reuters story that contains the "grasshoppers" remark:

As Israel prepared to lift a three-day blockade of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir warned today that rioters would be crushed ''like grasshoppers.'' … Mr. Shamir, standing atop an ancient West Bank castle, told reporters: ''Anybody who wants to damage this fortress and other fortresses we are establishing will have his head smashed against the boulders and walls.'' … In remarks aimed at Arab rioters, the Prime Minister said: ''We say to them from the heights of this mountain and from the perspective of thousands of years of history that they are like grasshoppers compared to us.''

Shamir is owed no apology. Both he and Eitan referred to Palestinians as insects to be crushed. I remember this incident vividly because it was the source of a huge spat between Charles Krauthammer and Leon Wieseltier at TNR in 1988. Leon was disgusted by the remarks. Krauthammer defended them.

(Photo: Stephen Friedt.)

[Update: maybe it's the vicodin for my wisdom teeth but I now see what the issue is, thanks to readers. The quote I used was truncated. In the original I wrote Shamir said, "'The Palestinians' would be crushed like grasshoppers … heads smashed against the boulders and walls." The full quote was as above: "'Anybody who wants to damage this fortress and other fortresses we are establishing will have his head smashed against the boulders and walls." But he is obviously referring to Palestinians resisting settlements, and he equates the entire people as "grasshoppers" compared to the Jewish people across millennia in the second part of his statement. The point stands. But the quote was compressed in ways I missed.]