Do all or even most of these gags connect with a viewer under 25 who isn't a 20th century pop culture junkie? I doubt it. Granted, some of the jokes were inside even for 1992-93 -- "The Great Gabbo" and the Eastern bloc cartoon "Worker and Parasite," for instance. But most weren't. They referred to things that were current or that felt that way, thanks to syndication or shared childhood viewing experiences. Circa 2011 that's no longer the case. "Krusty Gets Kancelled" is one of the greatest of all "Simpsons" episodes, but if it were a poem, it would need to have nearly as many footnotes as "The Waste Land" -- and the further away from its original air date we get, the truer that's going to be.

As you'd imagine, smiles ensue. But Radiolab is more than just a post-ironic, earnestly clever refashioning of findings for the literate and curious not apt to subscribe to Nature or The Lancet. What seems like dumbing-down harbors revelation: To listen to enough Radiolab is to see that scientists haven't simply replaced the theologians, the metaphysicians and the social critics as posers and answerers of the biggest questions. They've also become, in a time of gene-splicing and hadron-colliding and psychopharmacology, our true avatars of creative expression, the last radical artists left.

Daring Fireball:<br />
<br />
> But what interests me about all this is the underlying war going on between those playing the pageview game, and those that hate the pageview game. To put it another (simplified) way: the war between quality versus quantity.<br />
Siegler comes close to getting it, but falls short. Pageviews, as a metric used for directly billing advertisers, are a scam. Publishers game it with sensational link-bait articles and bullshit tricks like breaking articles into multiple “pages”. Advertisers get stuck paying for valueless impressions. Readers get stuck with the sensational bullshit articles, the tricks (like breaking single articles into multiple “pages”), and suffer through too many annoying ads surrounding actual content.<br />
It is, as Jim Coudal and I argued at SXSW, a race to the bottom. Be careful of the “everyones” who say pageviews are imperfect but the best we can do. They’re the ones who are happy with the web as a market for bullshit.

“Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!” is an odd title for a weird book. Not weird bad, just weird in a way that makes you stop and think about what precisely the author, Douglas Coupland, is up to. Like the man it chronicles, Coupland’s book is full of unconventional angles, ricochets and resonances. Rather than offering a doorstop-size addition to the Great Man canon, it comes in at just over 200 pages that nonetheless sprawl and unfold to their own idiosyncratic rhythm.

For a private individual using Twitter, it might make sense to delete a message that you later discovered was in error. But for anyone tweeting as part of a professional media job, representing a news organization on Twitter, or using Twitter to do journalism independently, the course here ought to be plain: It’s almost always better to correct than to unpublish. Removing information you’ve already disseminated — sometimes called “scrubbing” — always leaves open the possibility that you’re trying to hide the error or pretend it never happened.

There are, at least, 36 separate days shown in the movie including his multiple death scenes. There could be more, but it's hard to verify if some moments are simply later in the same day or an entirely different day. Additionally, in the scene where Bill Murray revealed he's a god, he stated, “I have been stabbed, shot, poisoned, frozen, hung, electrocuted, and burned.” Of those the movie only showed electrocution, so that brings it to a base line of 42 accountable days. However, there were many days not shown. We know from the scene when Billy Murray and Andy MacDowell are throwing playing cards into a top hat that it would take, “Six months. Four to five hours a day, and you'd be an expert.” So, we have a bare minimum of six months.

One way to escape a commodity market is to offer something that isn’t a commodity. This has been the preferred advice of people committed to the re-invention of newspapers. It is a truism bordering on drinking game material that anyone advising newspapers will at some point say “All you need to do is offer a product so relevant and valuable the consumer is willing to pay for it!”<br />
This advice is well-meaning. It’s just not much help. The suggestion that newspapers should, in the future, create a digital product users are willing to pay for is merely a restatement of the problem, by way of admission that the current product does not pass that test.

Among fans and artists, of course, Ticketmaster is widely despised. It extracts high service fees (known commonly as “those goddamned Ticketmaster service fees”) but has offered very little innovation in ticketing over the past 30 years. The Pixies, for example, added thousands of names, complete with contact info, to their marketing database thanks to the Troxy gig—something they can’t generally get when they sell tickets through Ticketmaster. And now, in the wake of the Live Nation merger, many in the concert industry are worried that Ticketmaster might be more interested in promoting its own artists and venues than in selling tickets for rival acts.

As the sales of e-books finally start to soar, what effect will this digital revolution have on publishers, readers and writers? Will the novel as we know it survive?

Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

WASHINGTON — How did a 153-year-old magazine — one that first published the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and gave voice to the abolitionist and transcendentalist movements — reinvent itself for the 21st century?<br />
<br />
By pretending it was a Silicon Valley start-up that needed to kill itself to survive.

Nick Denton ran the company out of his apartment, in SoHo [...] Gawker Media was a deliberately fly-by-night operation: incorporated in Budapest, where a small team of programmers still works, and relying on elegantly jaded bloggers who considered themselves outsiders with nothing to lose. Early contributors tell stories about bounced checks, and receiving payment straight from the A.T.M. The arrangement, many assumed, was a convenient hedge against potential libel claims. (Scarcely a week passes without one or more of Denton’s nine sites receiving a cease-and-desist letter.) It also helped bolster Denton’s image as a kind of digital-sweatshop operator—he initially paid his bloggers twenty-four thousand dollars a year—and cultivated a helpful sense among contributors that they were the crew of a rogue “pirate ship,” as Gawker people sometimes say, initiating stealth attacks on the ocean liners in midtown.

Washington moves at the pace of Brezhnev's Soviet Union. It needs to be more like Silicon Valley if it is to compete with China

This is what @robinsloan uses to snag tweets for blog posts.

Brief reflections on contemporary American culture cover celebrity, privilege, crime, drugs, teen-age alcoholism, race relations, politics, and the media.

Ryan Holiday: In 1920 Upton Sinclair self-published arguably the first ever structural criticism of the corrupt and broken press system in America. Not only did he self-publish it but he refused to copyright it, hoping to pass through the complete media blacklist a book like this faced. It's not only fascinating but a timeless perspective. Sinclair deeply understood the economic incentives of early 20th century journalism and thus could predict and analyze the manipulative effect it had on The Truth. Today, those incentives and pressures are different but they warp our information in a similar way. In almost every substantial charge he leveled against the yellow press, you could, today, sub in blogs and the cable news cycle and be even more correct. In fact, the reason that most newspapers could escape this criticism is that over the last 50 years they have instituted many of the important changes he asked for.

I looked around my parent’s kitchen. It’s the nicest kitchen I’ve ever been in. If I had a million dollars, I’d get an island and wheel it into my kitchen and put a Cuisinart stand mixer on it. I’d replace my fridge with a Sub-Zero fridge and fill it with organic blueberries and yuzu and Dom Perignon. If I wrote for Esquire and made a million dollars, the first thing I’d do is put a garbage disposal in my kitchen. The second thing I’d do would be to buy lots of copies of Esquire and take the pages I’d written out of it and wallpaper my bathroom with it. But if I were writing for Esquire in 1977, I wouldn’t be able to email or win games of Scrabble against my friend Gabe. I wouldn’t be able to show my mom a video of a man dressed up as a sexy vampire singing Beyoncé. I wouldn’t know that there had been an earthquake unless I waited ten minutes and forced myself to change stations to watch the news instead of Intervention.

In thirty-eight years, The Price is Right never had a contestant guess the exact value of prizes in the Showcase showdown. Until Terry Kniess outsmarted everyone — and changed everything.

The likes of Diego Maradona are extremely rare. Football is almost never about one player or about the manager, it shouldn't be about the search for one "world-class" player or coach. It should be about taking the best raw materials available and assembling them in the best possible way. English football needs to rid itself of its messiah-complex, stop looking for a mythical saviour who is going to redeem the protracted decline and get on with making the best of the present situation. As long as there are messiahs, there are going to be crucifixions.

“Can we not devise a system of liberal education which shall find its foundations in the best things of the here and now? Literature and art are all about us; science and faith offer their daily contributions; history is in the making to-day; industry pours forth its wares; and children, no less than adults, are sharing in the dynamic activities of contemporary social life . Not in the things of the past, but in those of the present, should liberal education find its beginnings as well as its results.”

— David Snedden, “What Of Liberal Education?” The Atlantic Monthly, 1912

Anyway: everyone knows and accepts in their bones that showbiz news is almost certainly fiction, yeah? So when you eventually stumble across a report regarding something you have some first-hand knowledge of, and that report turns out to be peppered with inaccuracies, exaggerations and inventions, you shouldn't be surprised, right? Of course you shouldn't.

"We're experiencing a moment in which the humans are regaining some control over what gets filtered around the web," says Armstrong. "Twitter and Facebook are critical to driving traffic for publishers, and people like to share stories that are thoughtful or unique. These stories are a bit more evergreen than breaking news – they live longer lives and get passed around."

How do other people deal with the torrent of information that pours down on us all? Do they have some secret? Perhaps. We are asking various friends and colleagues who seem well-informed to describe their media diets. This is from an interview with Jay Rosen, press critic, writer, and professor of journalism at New York University.

Sallust, the Roman historian who made his name by connecting great events to the moral outlook of the people involved in them, said it more than 2,000 years ago: “The golden age is before us, not behind us.” Twenty centuries later, we still don’t seem to have learned his epigrammatic lesson: We—both the critical we and the popular we—spend an inordinate amount of time looking backward and mourning a golden age of culture that is likely irrecoverable, while looking at the present day as either approaching or having already arrived at an utter nadir.

Coping with the troubling tradeoff between depth of what we know and how fast we retrieve it may require something like peripheral intellectual vision

RT @tcarmody: From Book to App: Terrific post by if:book's Bob Stein on "the future of the app" as emergent dominant media form: http:// ...

RT @SeamusCondron: Media orgs, don't read this article & think you need a Tumblr. You need to develop relationships with your audience h ...

The future for blogs may be special-interest publishing. Mr Kelly’s research shows that blogs tend to be linked within languages and countries, with each language-group in turn containing smaller pockets of densely linked sites. These pockets form around public subjects: politics, law, economics and knowledge professions. Even narrower specialisations emerge around more personal topics that benefit from public advice. Germany has a cluster for children’s crafts; France, for food; Sweden, for painting your house.

RT @Zonal_Marking: This is a great read for any Brits frustrated with the punditry at this tournament - http://bit.ly/bWZki3

He had been hunted, kidnapped, and told he was filming his own execution. But CNN correspondent Michael Ware had no plans to leave Iraq. Now, it won’t leave him.

RT @flimgoblin: RT @Michael_French: RT @daggle How The Mainstream Media Stole Our News Story Without Credit. http://bit.ly/9Ok7mr (via @ ...

How to Save the News: Google's relationship with print media. Fantastic longform journalism. http://bit.ly/cTOrBa #media #google #newspapers

"The QVC process is so finely calibrated that a producer watches call volume in real time; whenever it spikes, the host hears a voice in his or her ear: “Whatever you just said, say it again. It’s working.” The lessons are disseminated to other hosts, and to the product spokespeople, who must spend hours training before they may present their products on air."

"China often views the ideas of foreigners, from missionaries in the 17th century to 21st-century Internet entrepreneurs, as subversive imports. The tumultuous history behind the clash with Google."

"It's 1996, and you're bored. What do you do? If you're one of the lucky people with an AOL account, you probably do the same thing you'd do in 2009: Go online."

"I've mentioned from time to time the "shot at a time" sessions I do at film festivals and universities, sifting through a film with the help of the audience. The e-mails I receive indicate this is perceived as some kind of esoteric exercise."

"Typography has a visceral and direct effect on everybody who reads. It can inhibit or enhance the feel of reading without being consciously noticeable. It does so by combining specific visuals that echo cultural memories, which are hopefully servile to the words they spell."

The wonderful Steve Albini: "Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit."

"American journalism is in trouble, and the problem is not just financial. My profession is in distress because for more than a decade it has been chasing the false idols of fame and fortune. While engaged in those pursuits, it forgot its readers and the need to produce a commercial product that appealed to its mass audience, which in turn drew advertisers and thus paid for it all. While most corporate owners were seeking increased earnings, higher stock prices, and bigger salaries, editors and reporters focused more on winning prizes or making television appearances."