Author: Andrew Sullivan

Bursting The Beanie Bubble

The above short documentary, Bankrupt by Beanies, is the strangely compelling story of a family that got caught up in the 1990s Beanie Baby craze – to the tune of $100,000. Chris Robinson, the filmmaker as well as a member of the family, spoke to Dazed Digital’s Trey Taylor about their ill-advised scheme:

DD: Are you still in the process of trying to sell the Beanies?

Chris Robinson: We actually never really tried selling them. We just collected them for a few years, finally saw the error in our ways, and then packed them away in hopes that maybe someday they’d rebound and we could get some money back. The plan going in was for them to pay for our college tuition, but it became pretty clear that wasn’t going to happen for us. Maybe by the time our kids graduate high school they’ll have made a comeback. Or we can just burn them for warmth in the event of the Apocalypse.

DD: What are your feelings towards beanie babies now?

Chris Robinson: I’m mostly just apathetic to them at this point. I see the whole time period as one of bonding with my family, despite it being an extraordinary waste of money that would have been better spent on pretty much anything else. It was fun while it lasted, but then it was over and we got on with our lives.

(Hat tip: Gawker)

The Tao Of The Conductor

James McConnachie, in a review of Christopher Seaman’s Inside Conducting, gets to the heart of the question: What do conductors actually do?

Getting started is one answer — and it’s about more than just giving a big downbeat (in the right bar). ‘Your whole personality (especially your face and eyes) has to give the sense of assurance and expectancy that inspires an orchestra to play.’ Controlling tempo and dynamics is another answer. Baroque ensembles can get away with having no conductor, Seaman argues, but the 80-odd musicians of a modern orchestra could never agree on the shape of a Romantic rubato (‘robbed time’, a kind of lingering that’s paid for later) without a conductor to describe it in the air for them.

The conductor’s work is not often discussed in such plain detail. Conducting is ‘like riding a horse not driving a car’. A tighter grip on the baton produces a harder tone. Keeping the arms moving upward very slowly can restrain an audience’s desire to rush to clap after a quiet ending. In a revealing chapter (the chapters are very short) on why orchestras can seem to play late, rather than with the baton, Seaman asserts that the opening chord of Mozart’s Magic Flute overture ‘has more majesty and radiance if I allow an orchestra to place it slightly after the beat’.

Why The Christianist Right Loves Putin

Because he’s targeting gay freedom of expression and assembly:

“You admire some of the things they’re doing in Russia against propaganda,” said Austin Ruse, president of the U.S.-based Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute. “On the other hand, you know it would be impossible to do that here … We want to let them know they do in fact have support among American NGOs (non-governmental organizations) on social issues,” he said.

Among others commending Russia’s anti-gay efforts was Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth About Homosexuality. “Russians do not want to follow America’s reckless and decadent promotion of gender confusion, sexual perversion, and anti-biblical ideologies to youth,” LaBarbera said on his website.

I love that wistful line: “you know it would be impossible to do that here.” Damn that pesky First Amendment! Ruse, meanwhile, defends Putin at The Daily Caller. Richard Bartholomew has a must-read on the Orthodox-Christianist alliance for the fusion of church and state. Kirchick adds more detail:

“In an ironic reversal in time, as America has declared war on the church and Christians, Russians have come back to the church,” the Reverend Austin Miles wrote on the website of the Christian Coalition. “While America has allowed itself to be kicked into the gutter, Russia, the former Communist Soviet Union, has picked up the baton, rapped some knuckles and proclaimed sternly: ‘Do not foul religion or the church.’” What he and other defenders of Putin forgot to mention, however, was that the Pussy Riot protest was specifically aimed at the Church’s open and unapologetic collaboration with an undemocratic and oppressive regime.

So the next time you hear an American Christianist bemoaning gay freedom in this country, I suggest an old, familiar response to offer them: “Why don’t you just go to Russia? You’d love it there.”

A Prohibition Rubicon

dish_marijuana

An entire country – Uruguay – is now poised to end prohibition of a plant much less dangerous to your health than alcohol or nicotine:

Under the legislation, Uruguay’s government would license pot-growers, sellers and consumers, and update a confidential registry to keep people from buying more than 40g a month. Carrying, growing or selling marijuana without a licence could bring prison terms, but licensed consumers could grow up to six plants at a time at home. Growing clubs with up to 45 members each would be encouraged, fostering enough marijuana production to drive out unlicensed dealers and draw a line between marijuana smokers and users of harder drugs.

That makes it the first country to allow free cultivation of marijuana for recreational use and the first to set up a legal and regulatory framework to manage it. A lot rides on the outcome, but Tim Padgett was optimistic only recently:

Uruguay over the past decade has proved to be one of Latin America’s more competent states. (A few years ago, in fact, a U.S. diplomat told me, “It’s a shame Uruguay’s Presidents don’t head a bigger country.”) It has one of the strongest economies on the continent as well as one of the highest rankings on the U.N. Human Development Index and Transparency International’s corruption gauge. And as the pragmatic [President José] Mujica pointed out last week, experiments like this are often best undertaken by smaller nations like Uruguay and Portugal, which can serve as more-controlled laboratories for larger countries to study.

Sadly, the US is leading globally from behind on this (via Washington and Colorado). But the direction across South America is becoming quite clear. The prohibition of marijuana is now a much bigger problem than marijuana itself. If you really want to tackle the chaos of the drug cartels, reduce their range of products.

The Meter vs Ads

The NYT has reported slowing subscription sales, but only from a truly remarkable increase from a low base. But the striking thing to me is that the meter is now bringing in $150 million a year to the NYT:

To put that $150 million in new revenue in perspective, consider that the Times Company as a whole will take in roughly $210 million in digital ads this year. And that $150 million doesn’t capture the paywall’s positive impact on print circulation revenue. Altogether, the company has roughly $360 million in digital revenue. Digital ads were again the weak spot (beyond print ads, which goes without saying). They declined 3 percent in the quarter—something that has to be turned around somehow.

The percentage increase in subscription revenue is exactly the same as the percentage drop in ad revenue:

Circulation revenues in the second quarter of 2013 rose 5.1 percent over the same period the year before, a company earnings report says. Advertising revenue fell 5.8 percent over the same period. Overall, revenue was down by .9 percent.

As for the Dish, only seven months into a subscription model, we’re seeing steady increases in subscriptions since the big bang of subscriptions that happened when we went independent in February. Here’s the graph for subscription revenue since the end of March:

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We still have the tough problem of getting all our original January – March 2013 subscribers to renew next year, since we couldn’t put you on auto-renewal when we launched the new site because we were still on the Daily Beast platform, and we had yet to develop the full subscription system that is now in place for all new Dishheads. So the beginning of next year may be a little nerve-wracking – even though I’m pretty confident that our earliest strongest supporters are the most likely to renew of anyone.

As for total revenue, we’re now at $736k toward our original goal of $900k by next February 1 ($900k being the total budget we had at the last year at the Beast). If subscriptions keep coming in at the current rate, we look set to come close. Conversion rates (the percentage of total readers who choose to subscribe) look pretty steady too at around 2.3 percent, a smidgen higher than the industry average:

Screen Shot 2013-08-01 at 5.45.24 PM

The total number of subscribers is now 28,271 as of 5.45 pm today. 11,000 more of you are now on expired meters – having used up all your read-ons. If you all decided to [tinypass_offer text=”subscribe today”], we’d be able to make some serious, solid plans for future investment in the site. So [tinypass_offer text=”please do”]. If you’ve clicked through to the max on all your devices, you really are a Dishhead. The cost is only $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year as a minimum. And if more of you [tinypass_offer text=”subscribe”], we may even be able to avoid advertizing altogether – meaning more signal and less noise to your website.

Subscribe [tinypass_offer text=”here”]. It takes [tinypass_offer text=”two minutes max”]. And [tinypass_offer text=”help shift”] the direction of new media toward quality rather than ad-driven pageviews.

An A-List Worth Ignoring

Zachary Seward notes a growing trend in movie names, especially among video-on-demand titles:

Film studios have figured out that, all else being equal, it’s better for a movie to appear toward the top of the A-to-Z listings where people increasingly pick what they’re going to watch next.

“We call it alpha-stacking,” says Paul Bales of the Asylum, an independent studio that specializes in straight-to-video horror films. Last year, the company generated $16 million in revenue with movies that included Adopting Terror, Air Collision, Alien Origin, American Worships, and Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies.

But movie studios aren’t the first to play this game:

Phonebooks are typically front-loaded with small businesses that all seem enamored of the letter “A.” Authors writing under pseudonyms have been known to pick names that appear closer to the start of fiction shelves in bookstores. But it’s worse for digital media, with seemingly endless supply but few good ways of navigating among the competitors. Companies depend on their products to appear in hand-selected feature menus, crowdsourced most-popular lists, or algorithmic picks. (Netflix recently said that 75% of viewing on the service is driven by its personalized recommendations.) Short of that, it comes down to tricks. People who make mobile apps, for instance, admit to naming conventions they hope will compete alphabetically in crowded app stores.

Update from a reader:

My friend’s dad growing up was the president of a bank named BancFirst, and I was told it was so it would appear in front of all those loser banks that used the “K”.

Quote For The Day II

“Reza Aslan’s book is an educated amateur’s summary and synthesis of a particularly skeptical but quite long-established line of New Testament scholarship, presented to us as simple fact. If you like that kind of thing, Zealot will be the kind of thing you like,” – Alan Jacobs in an interesting post discussing the debate about whether Jesus was literate or not. Yes: a debate.