"Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions." —Marshall McLuhan

Vanity Fair profiles Aaron Sorkin and The Newsroom.

In the hands of a lesser creator, the gee-whiz set—not to mention the news itself—could dominate the show. But placing the series in the recent past makes the news a backdrop to the human story Sorkin wants to tell. “I like writing romantically and idealistically but still having one foot in the world we live in,” he said. “So a show that took place in a newsroom felt like all those things could live together. But I want to be very clear—we’re not doing the news, and the show isn’t about the news. It’s about the people who are doing the news.

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Paul Miller is giving up the internet for a year because, well, I don’t really know. I once gave up the internet for three days. It wasn’t all that enlightening and really just made it hard to find baseball scores.

Now I want to see the internet at a distance. By separating myself from the constant connectivity, I can see which aspects are truly valuable, which are distractions for me, and which parts are corrupting my very soul.

Um, yeah.

Hilariously, Harry Marks has decided to “give up reading.” [via]

Now I want to see words at a distance. By separating myself from written language, I’ll be able to see which aspects of reading are truly valuable, which are distractions, and which ones give me explosive diarrhea.

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Ayn Randers might be the greatest thing to ever appear on McSweeneys.

Dear Ayn,

I’m dating a man who I think I love, but I’m afraid he’s having an affair. He comes home late, he acts suspiciously, and he even has red lipstick on his collar. Should I confront him or just hope for the best?

— County Affair

Dear County,

Red lipstick? Your husband is a communist. Divorce him and sell his clothes, children, and pens to make money to spend on cars, human slaves, and bigger pens. This will simultaneously stimulate the economy and punish the slaves for not having jobs. Slaves: what lazybones!

Hope this helps,
Ayn

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The trailer for Tron Uprising.

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David Stubbs dives into the Peel collection for The Quietus.

Had he lived to be 265, rather than, sadly, 65, he could not possibly hope to have given these albums the solid, several times over hearing their makers naively hoped he would. Possessing them, conscientiously filing and noting them was the thing. This has been reflected in the widespread slew of praise for the undertaking of putting up the collection. What an archive. What a national treasure. What a man.

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Sasha Frere-Jones on the importance of Kraftwerk.

It turned out not only that anyone could make electronic music but that almost everyone wanted to. Kraftwerk is perhaps the only group that played the Ritz in 1981 that sounds entirely current today. Plenty of people saw the machines coming, but nobody else has listened as carefully to them, or documented their strengths as lovingly.

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Here is a quick excerpt from an interview with Margaret Atwood where the interviewer is explaining plot points from the Hunger Games. The exclamations are hilarious and remarkably quick witted. Also notable: there’s a third book in the Oryx & Crake series coming next year.

How did she end up in this position?

Because there’s a lottery, and her sister was chosen, and so she volunteers to take her place.

Shirley Jackson! How old are they?

Between the ages of 11 and 18.

Theseus and the Minotaur! Love it.

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Instagram IRL.

Collecting records doesn’t make you cool. [via]

Some of these knowledge-seekers are young and impressionable, and maybe due to their personal experiences of being a high school student in addition to thinking some 56-year-old store clerk is “cool,” they get the idea that rare = cool and popular = shitty. Maybe these little cocksuckers try to ape their way into a shorthand version of the supposedly “cool” knowledge they just had dropped on them by whatever tuberculoid weirdo they just pestered. Maybe they develop and exude what many internet commenters think of as a “hipster attitude,” without knowing why, exactly. Maybe this “hipster attitude” becomes so prevalent, due to the seemingly increased cultural importance of knowledge transmittal in the internet age, that it borders on oppressive.

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The Space is now online. Here’s an intro video about the site, but the best bit is the John Peel collection, which you can learn about here and view here.

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Remember how I linked to the Kindle Single follow-up to Friday Night Lights? Yeah, it’s not on Amazon anymore Why? Because most people doing business on the internet are kind of dumb. (It should be back on Amazon sometime tomorrow.)

Mr. Bissinger wrote the e-book for Byliner.com, one of a number of fledgling companies trying to make a go of it by publishing long-form works — not as long as a traditional book, but longer than most magazine articles — for digital readers. Mr. Bissinger thought the e-book, priced at $2.99, would be a great way to pay tribute to the relationship while also helping Mr. Miles, by giving him a third of the proceeds.

But the plan hit a pothole after Apple, which had been looking to get into shorter works in a digital format, decided to include e-books in a promotion that it does with Starbucks. It selected Mr. Bissinger’s digital sequel as a Pick of the Week, giving customers a code they could redeem online for the book. (Mr. Bissinger said he still received a royalty of $1.50 for each copy sold.)

Amazon interpreted the promotion as a price drop and lowered its price for “After Friday Night Lights” to exactly zero. Byliner withdrew the book from Amazon’s shelves, saying it did so to “protect our authors’ interest.”

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The New Yorker profiles George Hotz—aka geohot—and looks at the politics of hacking.

I’m the complete opposite of Anonymous. I’m George Hotz. Everything I do is aboveboard, everything I do is legit.

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If being a techno-libertarian leads to online anarchy, so be it. I’m not a cause. I just like messing with shit.

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The first 100 records from John Peel’s record collection are going online tomorrow at The Space. The project is aiming to archive all 25,000 LPs, 40,000 vinyl singles and “about a bajillion more CDs than Adele’s flogged.” Imagine in the CBC had been so committed to preserving their archive. [via]

(Speaking of which, I went down and dropped $200 on vinyl from the CBC Calgary archive and am supposed to write something about it for Avenue. I’ll get on that.)

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A second trailer for The Newsroom. I had promised myself when this season of Mad Men ended that I’d stop watching TV shows in real-time. We’ll see.

Previously.

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Chuck Klosterman went to Creed and Nickelback concerts. On the same night.

I wanted to see Creed at New York’s intimate Beacon Theatre (performing their 1997 album My Own Prison in its entirety), followed by Nickelback in front of 18,000 people at Madison Square Garden.

Last Thursday, this dream was accomplished.

I did not do this because I particularly like or dislike either band. I did it because other people like and dislike them so much.

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Radio Time Machine. (For full songs, you’ll need a Rdio account.) [via]

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Where Buddhism overlaps with neuroscience.

Western thought is hardly monolithic or simple, but monotheistic religions made a simple misstep when they didn’t apply naturalism to themselves and their notions of their souls. Time and again, their prominent scholars and philosophers rendered the human soul exceptional and otherworldly, falsely elevating our species above and beyond nature. We see the effects today. When Judeo-Christian belief conflicts with science, it nearly always concerns science removing humans from a putative pedestal, a central place in creation. Yet science has shown us that we reside on the fringes of our galaxy, which itself doesn’t seem to hold a particularly precious location in the universe. Our species came from common ape-like ancestors, many of which in all likelihood possessed brains capable of experiencing and manifesting some of our most precious “human” sentiments and traits. Our own brains produce the thing we call a mind, which is not a soul. Human exceptionalism increasingly seems a vain fantasy. In its modest rejection of that vanity, Buddhism exhibits less error and less original sin, this one of pride.

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Yertle the Turtle: too political for kids. (I’m going to start a blog called “Really Insanely Stupid Shit People Say and Do.”)

The quote in question – “I know up on top you are seeing great sights, but down here on the bottom, we too should have rights” – comes from Yertle the Turtle, the tale of a turtle who climbs on the backs of other turtles to get a better view.

In the midst of a labour dispute between the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation and the province, the quote was deemed unsuitable.

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Interpretive dancing to Adele. In butter. It’s weird and wonderful. But mostly weird. [via]

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Did you know the first time the word “fuck” was used on TV was during a Jefferson Airplane performance on the Dick Cavett Show? Here’s the story and video.

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In case you haven’t been paying attention, Fifty Mission Cap is still rolling along. Recent subjects include the beginning of the baseball season, my increasingly incorrect NHL playoff predictions, a hockey mixtape, a treatise on the behaviour of men and Mason’s decision to become a Tigers fan.

Wold Gnards on the mystery of Superman’s shirts.

First, let’s break down the issues. So, there have been over 900 Action Comics starring Superman since 1938, and over 700 Superman comics. Including mini-series and shorter runs like Man of Steel, all told there’s over 1900 hundred Superman titles in circulation, and that doesn’t count Superboy, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, or Justice League comics. Let’s suppose that Superman goes through .8 shirts per issue (because sometimes he’s already in costume or finds a different way to change), which means Superman has destroyed roughly 1520 shirts over the years. Dress shirts can cost anywhere between $20 – $80, and can cost the Lex Luthors of the world $500 plus depending on the brand (which is probably a little pricey for a beat reporter). For arguments, let’s say he spends on average $50 for shirts. This means Clark Kent has spent $76000 on button down shirts.

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Every few years discussion about keyboards makes its way around the web. I love it. This time, Shawn Blanc — a recently converted keyboard snob — does an extensive breakdown of the options.

As a computer-nerd-slash-writer, I am always looking and advocating for the right tools. But for years, I have always equated “writing tools” with “software” — I own more text editors than I have fingers to type with — but it never dawned on me until recently that a good keyboard could be equally as important as a good text editor.

Newb.

For the record, I’ve been on an Apple Extended II for years, though I’ll likely move to a Das once it finally breaks down. My preference for a big, clicky keyboard is simple: I just find them more satisfying to type on (though I do keep an Apple wireless for iPad/iPhone use on the move, because carrying around this monster AEII would just look silly).

Will keeping the Beatles off streaming sites lead to people forgetting about them? [via]

Limiting an artist as influential and famous as the Beatles to a single digital distribution platform and method (pay to download) may seem like a good idea to title holders: It serves to standardize revenue and helps make it easier to maintain copyright control. But it’s also a mistake; not even the Beatles will be bigger than Jesus forever. They, just like every band, are capable of being forgotten. And they’re on their way.

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An important lesson from the story of Caine’s Arcade:

Just because you only have one customer doesn’t mean you aren’t in business, and you should treat every customer as carefully as Caine did.

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In the age of Twitter, there’s no longer any room for the music snob. (For the record, I will keep judging you Rdio and Last.fm friends.)

Obscure knowledge was once a kind of currency. To get it, you had to be in the loop. You had to know the right people to learn about the right bands. You had to know the right record stores to hear those bands. The right record stores, like the right comic and book and video stores, were manned by knowledge guardians who scared the bejeezus out of us, so the act of going in to these stores felt kind of intrepid.

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Populism is the new model of cool; elitists, rather than teeny-boppers or bandwagon-jumpers, are the new squares. There are now artists who sell out concerts while rarely getting played on commercial radio (the Weeknd or Tori Amos, for instance), and there are commercial radio artists whom no one in most people’s hipper circles has ever heard of because they listen exclusively to the Internet (Lady Antebellum, Jake Owen — pretty much all of so-called new country).

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Buzz Bissenger’s followup to Friday Night Lights is available as a Kindle Single.

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Steve Soboroff’s typewriter collection gives me a book-nerd boner.

There’s the 1932 Royal Model P that Ernest Hemingway used to write letters during his time in Cuba. There’s a tiny Imperial Good Companion Model T on which John Lennon banged out song lyrics years before the Beatles invaded America.

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Jonathan Franzen doesn’t like your comma-then.

Comma-then is a disease specific to modern prose narrative with lots of action verbs. Sentences infected with it are almost always found in the company of other short, declarative sentences with an and in the middle of them. When you deploy a comma-then to avoid an and, you’re telling me either that you think comma-then sounds better than and, or that you’re aware that your sentences are sounding too much alike but you think you can fool me by making a cosmetic change.

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Teaser trailer for Plastic Galaxy.

Plastic Galaxy is a documentary that explores the groundbreaking and breathtaking world of Star Wars toys. Through interviews with former Kenner employees, experts, authors, and collectors, it looks at the toys’ history, their influence, and the fond and fervent feelings they elicit today.

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