[1] "Johnson suggests even in private, North Koreans cannot tell the truth — that everything in their lives is fictionalized to one degree or another — & Brown says that's part of why his book is so original.

"Their own biographies are captured and rewritten and made to be the thing that you imbibe and live through, and that's why the freedom of the rower becomes such a haunting thing to Jun Do," Brown says."

[2] ""[York] writes about 'dictator chic,' which has now taken over as the fall of all these dictators from the Arab Spring brings all this flight money into Europe, & invades us with their taste," Brown says. According to York, 'despot decor' is increasing in certain spots around the world."

[3] "Murphy suggests that the Inquisition, rather than being a relic of the past, is a harbinger of modern times. Brown says that the sustained ability to create a system of fear, maintain records, & monitor people through communication systems & law reminds her of more modern examples."

"From the many, many ideas Popova has sparked in my brain, one has stuck more stubbornly than any other: We need to start treating discovery, connection and sharing as creative acts."

"Why do these heady observations on nostalgia matter for busy media professionals? Because I’d argue there’s real opportunity in our affinity for nostalgia. Think of Instagram: I’d argue it’s taken off partly because its filters lend an artificial veneer of nostalgia to those in-the-moment digital photos; they instantly make a moment seem more distant or unrecoverable."

[via: http://bettyann.tumblr.com/post/16433811360 ]

"What's different about Radiolab (&…changing about the web) is that it *is* a production…one of a very new kind. Radiolab is actually post-blog & post-livestream…not aping oratory of old or raggedness of new…a hybrid that takes lessons from the past, recent & deep.

That's where…web journalism is headed…"No one wants to read a 9,000-word treatise online. On the Web, one-sentence links are as legitimate as 1000-word diatribes—in fact, they are often valued more."

While this might have been true at one point, it simply no longer is…at The Atlantic, there is a very strong positive correlation between length of post & readers attracted. The genre conventions of blogging are changing. Few old-style linkblogs exist & a whole culture has developed around the longread. New online publications…look beautiful.

This is the Radiolab effect extended: expect less pretension to authority, greater understanding of one's nodeness, but greater respect for the production culture of the pre-web era."

Harris: "I think that’s something stories can do—prepare their way of finding meaning in this madness and bringing some order to the chaos.<br />
<br />
…creating a space that’s more about slowing down and contemplating and being introspective is a prerequisite for getting people to tell stories that have impact.<br />
<br />
…Cow Bird is basically a storytelling platform that people can use to tell stories online using photos, sound maps, timelines, videos, and casts of characters. It’s geared towards long-form narrative…when many different people tell stories, the system automatically finds connections between them and weaves them together into a kind of meta-story…The platform automatically analyzes all the text in your memory, figures out your cast of characters, and connects it to previous stories.<br />
<br />
…one of the pieces of this system I’ve been building is that to tell the story you have to dedicate it to somebody, which creates a gift economy of stories."

"Proving that age is no boundary to publishing success, the French book world has been taken by storm by a surprise Christmas bestseller: a political call to arms by Stéphane Hessel, 93.<br />
<br />
The unlikely publishing sensation is a former resistance hero whose 30-page essay, Indignez-vous!, calls on readers to get angry about the state of modern society.<br />
<br />
Launched in October by Indigène…tiny first print-run, 6,000…sold for €3, unprecedentedly cheap in a country where book prices are regulated & kept high by the law.<br />
<br />
Hessel's success has stunned France. After two months on the bestseller lists, the book has spent five weeks at number one…has sold 600,000 copies & – publishers predict it will reach a million…<br />
<br />
 argues that French people should re-embrace the values of the French resistance, which have been lost, which was driven by indignation, and French people need to get outraged again…calls for peaceful and non-violent insurrection…"

"…glaring weakness of “realtime” services like Twitter & Instagram as journalistic outlets: their narrow focus on “the now” & their relative disregard for the archival. While…the off-the-cuff, throwaway nature of Twitter or Instagram may be a big part of their appeal to otherwise reluctant amateur journalists…it’s a pretty poor journal that can’t be easily recalled later.<br />
<br />
I’ve struggled a bit with this (I still dearly wish I could access my earliest tweets to put together my own tweet book), but I’ve recently found comfort in my friend Kellan’s notion of “long form tweeting.” Increasingly, I’ve come to think of Twitter & Instagram as notebooks where I develop & discuss ideas that I later elaborate on on my personal blog (I like to think of it a bit like F Scott Fitzgerald’s notebooks full of fragmentary ideas…). ”Real time” services are great for journalistic impetus and visceral feedback, but I’ve come go think of Tumblr as my final draft."

"Introducing Byliner Originals. Great writers. Compelling stories. Told at their proper length."

"new Readability service: you pay a small fee each month, & they give most of the proceeds to the authors of the pages you choose (by using Readability bookmarklet on them, or adding them in other ways). It’s a great way for readers to support web publishers, big & small, directly & automatically…<br />
<br />
Instapaper will soon provide an option to send logs of your reading activity to your Readability account if you have one, so pages you read in Instapaper will give “credit” to the publishers.<br />
<br />
I’ve created a special Readability edition of the Instapaper iPhone & iPad app to serve as Readability’s official mobile app, due out in the near future.<br />
<br />
I’m an advisor to the company.<br />
<br />
Trust me, these guys really know their stuff, & their heads are in the right place: there are no sinister motives or shady practices. It works exactly the way you’d expect, & is one of the most positive, constructive efforts I’ve seen in the online publishing world in a long time."

"One new kind of media that’s start­ing to func­tion as a work is a blog. Not, in most cases, a blog post—but a blog. If NYTimes decides, “hey, we’re going to start & host a blog all about par­ent­ing” that blog becomes a Work. It pro­duces ongo­ing cul­tural focus, & not just because it’s in NYT. Some posts get more atten­tion than oth­ers, espe­cially if they cross over into long-form venue, but writ­ing that blog, stick­ing with it, being its author, cre­ates focus, read­er­ship & long accu­mu­la­tion of con­tent. & I’m sure Lisa Belkin (already wrote a book about par­ent­ing) will get another book out of it.

But the other new, emer­gent work, which might be more rad­i­cal, is the gen­er­a­tive web event. 48HrMag, One Week | One Tool, Robin’s novel­las & maybe even New Lib­eral Arts (espe­cially if we put together another edi­tion) are all ances­tral species of this new thing—chil­dren of TED, Phoot Camp, Long Now, Iron Chef, & par­ents of whatever’s going to come next."

"An editorial selection of the top articles bookmarked on Instapaper. "

"Longer than a newspaper item but shorter than a book, a magazine article is the ideal length for my attention span. I'd rather spend an hour with a great magazine article rather than read a book any day. Ditto for hopscotching through shallow blogs and newspaper bits. But there are fewer print publications running long form journalism. Ironically, a new website, called Long Form, points to the best long form articles appearing anywhere in print, and also collects the great magazine articles from the past. Long Form fits perfectly into a small ecosystem whereby you can read these great pieces of writing on a Kindle, iPad, or phone. I've found the easy-reading portable screens of these tablet devices fit a 1 to 2-hour window perfectly."

"We post articles, past and present, that we think are too long and too interesting to be read on a web browser.