Year: 2013

Police and anti-crime group Crimestoppers are distributing cannabis “scratch and sniff” cards in Britain:

The cards, which replicate the distinct smell of growing marijuana, will be mailed to homes in 13 areas throughout the country, in the hope that they will help people to identify cannabis factories in their communities.

Alex Moore sighs:

The weird thing is that they got this idea from the Netherlands, where the cards seemed to have actually worked despite weed consumption being legal—and you’d think widely familiar—there. (Growing pot is still illegal there.) After sending out 30,000 cops in the Netherlands were able to bust “hundreds” of cannabis production facilities, according to Time. Good job, Europeans—you just created more work for Mexican drug cartels.

(Image, via NPR, from Crimestoppers)

In the deep end, yet again:

But I was in the pâtisserie thinking of of my wife, who beat me here by seven wise years because she is a woman whose vision sends me to sonnage. I have always been a simple man, and left to my devices, my guiding principles would revolve around warm snugglies, World of Warcraft and intravenous pizza. Except that I have never really walked alone. Instead I’ve been surrounded by people who insisted upon other languages. When I was nine my mother remanded to the tender clutches of a man who taught swimming out in the county in his back yard. On the first day I learned to hold my breath. On the second I floated. On the third I front crawled. On the fourth, I cried as he tossed me into the deep end over and over. And on the fifth, I crawled in the deep end, and it was all I ever wanted.

[Re-posted from earlier today]

Well, you [tinypass_offer text=”asked for it”]. In fact so many asked for it, so quickly, we feel bad it took us this long to get there. But today, we can announce a new way to subscribe to the Dish, which will, we hope, accommodate those of you (a considerable number) who are going through tough economic times and could use a lower barrier to entry and the option of canceling in the future if your budget tightens again. Here’s how one reader put it:

I’m not sure if your clan has considered it, but setting up monthly subscriptions would be a great option for those of us happy to pay more than $20/year but who just don’t have the all-at-once cash. I’d happily sign up for $5/month which would work out to three times the subscription rate.

That’s a super-generous offer. $1.99-a-month seems a more reasonable sum – an app-like fee that simply gives you more options for payment. Like the $19.99-a-year option, we’re also leaving it up to you if you’d like to pay more – even if that’s only $2 or as much as $5. The point of course is to make this available to as many people at as many price points as you want and need, above a minimum baseline. You can buy your new full access $1.99-a month subscription [tinypass_offer text=”here”].

As for our progress, we are purring along. Our gross income is now $653,000 toward a goal of $900,000 by next January 1. That’s 72 percent of our goal in almost three months – but almost all the likeliest subscribers have joined already. It gets tougher from here on out. That $900,000, by the way, is simply the sum of our fixed costs (servers, legal costs, health insurance, salaries for staff, video equipment, photo agencies etc.) and an attempt to pay the three co-owners of the company, Chris, Patrick and me, something close to what we were paid in the past. Alas, it can’t pay for much more than that: our desire to start commissioning the kind of long-form journalism that is disappearing from many magazines, and acquiring a long-form editor to craft the essays, reports and arguments we want to run. But we really do want to reinvent the whole concept of a magazine – starting from a blog outwards – and by the most honest and simple way possible: purely reader support.

It may not be possible; but we didn’t think what we’ve done already would be possible not so long ago. You made it possible – and a large number of media outlets are watching this experiment closely to see if they can follow us. We hope they can, and we can begin to rebuild a model for serious, calm journalism in an era of page-view mania, sponsored content, noisy comments sections and cheap SEO gimmicks.

Think of it: $1.99 a month for a noise-free, carefully edited, always lively, provocative daily read. It isn’t much – but it could help set a model to recapitalize and re-stabilize an entire industry. You can help build this new model by getting an annual or monthly subscription [tinypass_offer text=”here”]. Please help us. It could also at some point help a hell of a load of others.

Just remember the deadline for “I’ve evolved on gay marriage” statements is *tonight* at midnight, EST.

— Tim Murphy (@timothypmurphy) March 25, 2013

David Zax pushes back against “innovation for innovation’s sake” and, using TV as an example, argues that “technology can sometimes reach an endpoint, beyond which further innovation is largely superfluous”:

“There’s nothing worse than a product that has reached its telos, its design endpoint,” I said in January of last year, responding to a Wall Street Journal report about TV innovation. I was being sarcastic. The television has, by and large, reached the state it needs to be in. We don’t need 3-D televisions, and while we’ll take larger, flatter, and higher-res screens, most of us don’t care to pay a premium for them. There are certainly ways to improve the television, particularly when it comes to content (see “The Gordian Knot of Television”). But the basic idea of the television–a screen that projects an image of something recorded far away–doesn’t need to change.

I’m on Charlie Rose tonight talking about marriage equality with Akhil Amar and Jeff Toobin.

But first, for all you goys, a historical primer on the holiday:

Chet Fenster argues that the coffee company created the “perfect example of how to do branded content right”:

In 1923, Maxwell House saw an opportunity and introduced the first kosher for Passover coffee; others soon followed. Looking to solidify the brand in the minds of Jewish consumers in the early 1930s, Maxwell House’s ad agency employed an innovative marketing tactic for the time: branded content.

Well, that’s what we call it today. In fact, Maxwell House decided to publish a book, specifically a Haggadah, and offer it to customers for free with the purchase of a can of coffee. (A Haggadah recounts the Exodus from Egypt, comprised of prayers, songs, and stories which guide the Passover Seder.) The Maxwell House edition was an instant hit. Today, it’s the most popular Haggadah in the world, with over 50 million printed.

This Haggadah is so ubiquitous that it’s become difficult to find others. When I went to a Judaica shop in NYC looking to buy a nice set of Haggadahs, the salesperson suggested I hit the supermarket and pick up the Maxwell House edition: “They’re really good,” she exclaimed.