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The New York State Senate passed a motion to remember MCA.
WHEREAS, The music and message of the Beastie Boys evolved over the years, but they can’t, they don’t, they won’t stop changing the face of hip-hop, of music, and of our culture;
[…]
RESOLVED, That this Legislative Body pause in its deliberations to mourn the death of famed rapper and activist Adam “MCA” Yauch
UPDATE: There’s a video.
Jeff Atwood counters the growing sentiment that everyone should learn how to code.
To those who argue programming is an essential skill we should be teaching our children, right up there with reading, writing, and arithmetic: can you explain to me how Michael Bloomberg would be better at his day to day job of leading the largest city in the USA if he woke up one morning as a crack Java coder? It is obvious to me how being a skilled reader, a skilled writer, and at least high school level math are fundamental to performing the job of a politician. Or at any job, for that matter. But understanding variables and functions, pointers and recursion? I can’t see it.
It is so easy to underrate the impact of the humanities and of the arts. Too many people, some of whom should know better, do it all the time. But understanding why the natural sciences are regarded as the gold standard for human knowledge is not hard.
A TED talk you won’t find online: Nick Hanauer’s presentation on income inequality that attacks the idea that rich people create jobs. “Ideas worth spreading” indeed. [via]
UPDATE: Someone put it online. It’s less exciting than you’d hope and I’m not sure what all the fuss is about, but it is an interesting idea that I agree with and I’m glad it’s out there.
If life were an RPG, “Straight White Male” would be the lowest difficulty setting. [via]
This means that the default behaviors for almost all the non-player characters in the game are easier on you than they would be otherwise. The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.
This piece from the latest issue of Esquire is an amusing assessment of the state of right-wing politics in the US. (And I say “amusing” because to not be amused by it is to be completely terrified by it. Seriously, shit is getting crazy.)
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Republican party, root and branch, from its deepest grass roots to its highest levels, has become completely demented. This does not mean that it is incapable of winning elections; on the contrary, the 2010 midterms, as well as the statewide elections around the country, ushered in a class of politicians so thoroughly dedicated to turning nonsense into public policy that future historians are going to marvel at our ability to survive what we wrought upon ourselves. It is now impossible to become an elected Republican politician in this country if, for example, you believe in the overwhelming scientific consensus that exists behind the concept of anthropogenic global warming. Just recently, birth control, an issue most people thought pretty well had been settled in the 1960s, became yet another litmus test for Republican candidates, as did the Keystone XL pipeline, to which every Republican presidential candidate pledged unyielding fealty despite the fact that several prairie Republicans and an army of conservative farmers and ranchers are scared to death of the thing.
Here’s an article called “Why flipping through paper-like pages endures in the digital world” that unfortunately doesn’t look at the answers in any kind of interesting way. Especially since it hasn’t “endured” so much as it’s making a comeback.
Whether developers recognize it or not, users still subconsciously desire some kind of visual feedback when flipping through multiple pages of content. Some of these visual cues are comically exaggerated (iBooks), some are more subdued (Instapaper’s “Fast Pagination” action) and others fit somewhere in between (Flipboard). But each presents a challenge to developers attempting to blend the tactility of real-world pages with the digitally native tablet aesthetic.
Developers do realize it, which is why they (usually) build it in. And the desire isn’t subconscious—if I can’t immediately tell that a page has changed, I am very conscious of the confusion that creates and the half second it takes me to examine the text to make sure it’s different than the text I just read. Personally, I like a quick page-to-page fade, or the iPhone Kindle slide effect. Page transitions that mimic actual books are kind of ludicrous. McLuhan would hate them. Or love them, I guess.
The point is this: we once moved from scrolls to books, so we shouldn’t be all that shocked that we’re moving from scrolling to book-like page transitions. What makes it more interesting this time around is that we don’t actually need to. Though in the case of reading on my iPad, a slight right-to-left twitch of my thumb is vastly easier than scrolling the entire length of the screen from bottom to top, so maybe it is the same thing.
The Globe & Mail is adding a New York Timesesque paywall.
We used to be a Globe subscribers and they call monthly asking us to come back. I remind them that we canceled once because they ran a full-page ad from an anti-gay marriage religious organization, then we came back for awhile and had to cancel again when they endorsed a Harper majority in last year’s federal election. Generally they say goodbye to me at that point of the call.
The sad irony is that I still do read the Globe, I just refuse to subscribe to it, which means (1) I’m paying more, and (2) this paywall could really fuck with my universe.
For several years it’s bugged me that the ad industry seems to taken ownership of the word “creative.” This is mostly because I associate the ad industry (which, it seems worth noting, I often work in) with the words “asshole” and “moron” and “assfacefuckwitcuntwhore.” It’s a horrible industry rife with stupid, awful human beings. And Gawker, of all places, fucking nails it by sending Hamilton Nolan—which so sounds like the name of an advertising account director—to something called “Creative Week” in New York.
The bro position was played by Dave Clemans of an agency called Taxi, whose adult frat-boy look and constant stream of empty positive affirmations would have qualified him as the heartthrob counselor at a teen summer camp.
“It comes down to understanding people,” Dave said. “It’s really cool… Steve and I were just rapping about this last night…” Dave said. “I said this before and I really believe it: culture is everything,” Dave said. “If there is any new craft in the industry, innovation is the new craft,” Dave said. “It’s about assembling the right team—the ‘Make It Happen’ people,” Dave said. “Ideas are acorns,” Dave said. “They’re only powerful because that acorn becomes an oak tree.”
“The biggest award I want is my kids’ smiles,” Dave said, before I stopped writing down what Dave said.
Why fiction is important (or at least influential).
This research consistently shows that fiction does mold us. The more deeply we are cast under a story’s spell, the more potent its influence. In fact, fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read nonfiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to make us rubbery and easy to shape.
But perhaps the most impressive finding is just how fiction shapes us: mainly for the better, not for the worse. Fiction enhances our ability to understand other people; it promotes a deep morality that cuts across religious and political creeds. More peculiarly, fiction’s happy endings seem to warp our sense of reality. They make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is. But believing that lie has important effects for society — and it may even help explain why humans tell stories in the first place.
How highbrows killed culture.
At the peak of the Great Books boom, Beam writes, 50,000 Americans a year were buying collections of the writings of Plato, Aristotle, the Founding Fathers, and Hegel at prices that “started at $298 and topped out at $1,175, the equivalent of $2,500 to $9,800 today.”
This was the danger against which critics of mass culture, inflamed with indignation, arrayed themselves in righteous opposition.
[…]
Why should the well-meaning middle American labor to read a complex novel by an intellectual or try to work his way through a Great Book if the cultural poohbahs first mocked his efforts and then said they were pointless anyway because what mattered was living “life as theater”?
Most of you probably already know that Ze Frank is making videos again. This most recent one is very amusing.
The day before MCA passed away, the Beastie Boys were hit with a lawsuit over samples used on Licensed to Ill and Paul’s Boutique. Slate notes that Paul’s Boutique couldn’t be made today, which echoes the licensing math in the excellent book Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling
I like the idea that the most fitting tribute to the life of Adam Yauch would be to fix the disaster that is copyright law once and for all.
Forget the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, where’s the Adam Yauch Right To Sample Act? We shouldn’t even have to fight for our right to sample.
Polaroid is trying their hand at vintage-looking iPhone photos again with Polamatic. Effects are okay, but the frames on very cool. And it exports to pretty much everywhere, including Instagram.
Sasha Frere-Jones on MCA.
Rather than being perceived as the first draft of Ali G, the Beasties were taken at face value; many threads got tangled in one of hip-hop’s breakthrough moments. Rap is ridiculously profane and loopy and perfect and anybody can do it and you can use any music you want! Ok bye! And then, two years later, on “Paul’s Boutique,” they took the idea even further: maybe you could rap every word you knew over every record ever made. Sure, why not . And there was still this talk of beating people with aluminum bats and other alpha-male stuff that came from who knows where. Rap had now been coded by both friends and enemies as a violent form inspired by violence, a view which these three pacifists had unwittingly helped install.
And then it all changed, and Yauch was the first to take it all back. On 1994’s “Sure Shot ,” MCA pulled the plug on the characters that made them famous: “I wanna say a little something that’s long overdue, the disrespect to women has got to be through. To all the mothers and the sisters and the wives and friends, I wanna offer my love and respect to the end.”
The Beastie Boys on New York public access in 1984. [via]
There used to be some great footage from the Paul’s Boutique release party on Vimeo, but it seems to have gone missing.
UPDATE: Found it!
How Ontario improved education.
Like many school systems, Ontario had too many “top” priorities. The Ministry of Education selected three—literacy, math, and high school graduation—with a commitment to raise the bar for all students and close achievement gaps between all groups. There are other goals, of course, but these three are non-negotiable and take precedence because they leverage so many other learning goals.
Focus and persistence ensure that these priorities are not going to be discarded along the way. The history of education innovations has generated a “this too shall pass” mindset among teachers. One of our colleagues calls this phenomenon “the law of innovation fatigue.” Any attempt to create a high-leverage priority (like the three adopted by Ontario) requires that the education system as a whole commits to them long-term.
Adam Yauch, aka MCA, died. It’s rare that a celebrity death actually elicits a genuine emotional response from me, but this one really sucks.
UPDATE: Coverage from the New York Times and Pitchfork.
Bret Easton Ellis and Paul Schrader are raising funds for their next film, The Canyons, on Kickstarter. I’m in for $25, which gets me a DVD, some posters and I get to vote on casting choices! But there are some crazy incentives if you’ve got the cash.
$10,000 — Receive a moneyclip that was autographed by Robert De Niro and given to Paul on the set of Taxi Driver. http://flickr.com/gp/thecanyonsfilm/8cjH6U — Paul Schrader’s shooting script at the end of filming. — Dinner with Paul — Canyons set visit in Los Angeles (appear as extra if desired) — Handwritten thank you letter and on set photo from Bret and Paul, along with a shout out in the Making of the Canyons video. — You will also receive everything in the above Paul Schrader package.
Something called Popchips (I really have no idea what Popchips are) made a pretty racist ad with Ashton Kutcher. People are understandably upset. Anil Dash offers some new ideas on how we should address issues like this.
Here’s where I want us to do something different. I don’t want to merely say “Indian people in the U.S. are going to boycott Popchips!” Or to just get the usual mumbled apology for the company where they offer the bullshit non-apology apology of saying “We’re sorry if anyone was offended” and then take the ad down, but continue on with the campaign, padding out the apology with a few generic tweets to a contrite blog post.
We’ve all seen that shit before, but I want to do better.
Also, I love the nod he gives to Jay Smooth, who is one of my favourite people on the internet, and his ideas about how to discuss racism.
