Recently in Culture / Media Category
In 1967, 50% of American men had been arrested. Since then, arrests made in connection with domestic violence and illegal drugs have pushed the number to 60%, estimates Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University. The annual number of arrests for possession of marijuana more than tripled to 1.8 million from 1980 to 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Recently my wife and I got iPhones. There's a lot to say about them, but most of it has been said, so I'll spare you. What I find most interesting and surprising, after about a week of ownership, is what spectacular reading devices they've turned out to be. In fact I find it easier to read a newspaper on my iPhone than I do on paper, probably because of the low-light problems associated with presbyopia. The iPhone screen resolution is just dazzling, and anyone with a special interest in the future of books, reading etc really ought to head over to the nearest Apple store and play with one. I read parts of The Mayor of Casterbridge on mine, and have installed the NY Times and Wall Street Journal apps.
Once you get started with this, any doubt you might have had about the future of ink on paper will likely fall away. Simply put, there is no future for ink on paper, at least not in the mass distribution and consumption of text. I've only briefly played with a Kindle, but I believe that Apple's long-rumored tablet (basically a big iPod Touch, which is essentially an iPhone without the phone) has the potential to be truly transformative, if it's priced right.
I wonder if they are considering some kind of subscription-subsidy model, like the iPhone with AT&T. Why not sell people the tablets cheaply if they agree to spend a certain amount each month on reading matter for a couple of years?
Although there are serious implications for people like me, who make their living with a keyboard, I think the shift to e-books is mostly a good thing, and has the potential to help revive literacy, as email has done. But this may be entirely wishful; it's only human to see virtue in necessity, and this change is coming whether I like it or not.
(Photo: Flickr/Christopher Chan)
Actually this may not be quite as bad as it looks. Students will be equipped with Kindles and the like. If anything the real news here may be that the headmaster is so politically tone-deaf that he thinks it's a good idea to do the whole TV-and-cappuccino rec-room transformation at the same time as he abolishes the library. Why not just announce a new environmental initiative to heat the facility by burning volumes from the library? It's not just eliminating books. It's going green!
On the one hand, he enjoyed a level of freedom and affluence that would have been unimaginable to most people not long ago--or to many of the world's people today. On the other hand, he's a strange, free-floating form of being, lost in time-space, a victim of the intense specialization and mobility that modern life fosters. When things were good, he used this freedom to leave his wife. Since he could work from home (at a job he can barely explain), he moved from suburban Washington, DC, to somewhere in Florida. Then his job went away and he moved to suburban New York, where he thought there would be more opportunities. But there are none. Prospective
employers want applications to be submitted electronically, then never respond to them, so that the whole thing seems an exercise in futility, like yoo-hooing frantically into the void. Now he has no job, no apparent community and no particular prospects. He lives alone, of course. I should think his current situation, to many of the world's people, would be terrifying.Yet he strives to reinvent himself. He's writing genre novels, taking notes on his Blackberry. It's great that he doesn't just sit home, drinking beer and watching TV (like everyone else!), but what a sad pickle. I cannot think of a recent article that captures more effectively both the great opportunities and terrible pitfalls of life in our society.
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/exalthim/226974610
You can read all about it here. The problem is that the Fund's geriatric center takes care of a tiny number of people at enormous expense. It runs huge deficits. And the costs are borne by the many thousands of other beneficiaries who rely on the Fund for benefits.
But since the people in the geriatric facility are quite old, and since the charity's various boards includes such zillionaires as Jeff Katzenberg and David Geffen, the battle over whether to close the facility is shaping up to be a Hollywood classic complete with plucky victims, cold-hearted tycoons--and a cast of thousands of invisible losers in the form of other Fund beneficiaries who need services and are no less entitled to them than the oldsters who are soaking up millions by their refusal to move. (Like any good picture, this one is rich with social metaphor.)
Never mind. Who cares about all those other people and the justice of their claims? What matters here is finding the cranky but lovable leader of the old-timers. It's Home Alone meets The Sunshine Boys! Let's just hope there's a hot young nurse for our hero to team up with.
My very subjective experience is that articles in the papers here tend to be much thinner (a single source, or maybe two, or maybe the sourcing is entirely vague), seem to have a more obvious agenda, and often are hyped out of all proportion to promote newsstand sales.A good example: The Independent the other day blared, "Secret Deal to Keep Karzai in Power" across page 1. But the lede says Karzai "is trying to cut a secret deal with one of his rivals to knock out his leading contender and ensure a decisive victory." This is right under the giant headline! And there is no real sourcing whatsoever; there is just "officials.
In general, I haven't seen a paper that comes close to the breadth or professionalism of The New York Times, Washington Post or a great regional paper like The Boston Globe. There isn't much local coverage either, although London's many boroughs, which function like an agglomeration of villages and have local politics etc., seem to have weeklies that focus on them. (On the other side of the balance sheet, there is the BBC, to which we have nothing comparable except perhaps on radio with the growing power and reach of NPR.)
I've talked about this in the past with my well-traveled friend Nick Schultz and so raised the subject anew yesterday. Here is what he said:
...it's oh so much worse in other countries. India has a thriving press--lots of papers, lots of competition, huge markets, etc.--but the quality is abysmal there, too. Look, there's lots wrong with American media, but American newspapers are a singular achievement in terms of quality and substance. We will likely lose that over the next ten years or so and it will be a shame. A lot of factors conspired together to make American newspapers really high quality. Those factors are evaporating, and so quality will evaporate. I do not look forward to that time--not as a sentimentalist but as someone who enjoys good news reporting and information gathering and is willing to pay for it. Maybe the market will work something out. Doubtful.That's what made this admittedly casual exercise particularly interesting to me: I believe American papers soon enough will be more like those in Britain, with many fewer ads, smaller staffs doing quicker but perhaps shallower work, a greater reliance on freelancers and a higher ratio of commentary (which is cheaper) to reporting.
(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bchu81/613680775)
Sigmund Freud hated America. He couldn't stand being called "Sigmund" by his informal hosts. He believed that Americans had channeled their sexuality into an unhealthy obsession with money. And he seethed at his own need for the dollars that we had in such unseemly abundance. "Is it not sad," he wrote to a German friend after World War I, "that we are materially dependent on these savages, who are not a better class of human beings?"
But while Freud loathed all things American (except its currency), the feeling was anything but mutual. "No nation outside of Germany and Austria was more hospitable to psychoanalysis than America," notes Mark Edmundson in "The Death of Sigmund Freud" (2007). Freud may even have anticipated the eagerness with which Americans would embrace his theories. "We are bringing them the plague," he reportedly told colleagues when disembarking in New York. "And they don't even know it."
Read the rest here.
One stock analyst, Craig Huber of Barclays Capital, issued a report this week suggesting Times Co. shares could fall to $1 each within the next year. That's cheaper than the price of a daily Times.
"In our opinion, newspapers cannot cost cut themselves to prosperity and an online-only newspaper model is not profitable, not even close," Huber wrote. "We do not have a solution on how to solve the difficulties newspapers face."
Daniel Akst
