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Taxpayers fund the stadiums, antitrust law doesn’t apply to broadcast deals, the league enjoys nonprofit status, and Commissioner Roger Goodell makes $30 million a year. It’s time to stop the public giveaways to America’s richest sports league—and to the feudal lords who own its teams.
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The NFL’s nonprofit status should be revoked. And lawmakers—ideally in Congress, to level the national playing field, as it were—should require that television images created in publicly funded sports facilities cannot be privatized. The devil would be in the details of any such action. But Congress regulates health care, airspace, and other far-more-complex aspects of contemporary life; it can crack the whip on the NFL.

If football images created in places funded by taxpayers became public domain, the league would respond by paying the true cost of future stadiums—while negotiating to repay construction subsidies already received. To do otherwise would mean the loss of billions in television-rights fees. Pro football would remain just as exciting and popular, but would no longer take advantage of average people.

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– http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=11877

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“The versatility of the hipster signifier is what makes it such an empty avenue of exploration in goofy listicles and trend pieces while also engendering skeptics’ frustration with its dogged refusal to go away. Public approval of hipsters is at 16 percent, according to a recent poll—Congress looks good in comparison. As Kurutz notes, almost everything can be woven into the hipster fabric now; it’s a choose-your-own-ending story where every option leads to the same page, you standing there in some silly hat or other. White guy with a beard? Hipster. Black dude on a skateboard? Hipster. Just a sort-of-skinny cop? Hipster. Woman riding a bike? Hipster. You can play either a mandolin or a turntable and somehow still be a hipster. No rules! As a result, hipsters have become both an object of incessant scorn, but also endless fascination. When a hipster can be defined as anything, it also essentially means nothing—that’s an undeniably appealing paradox to poke at.”

– http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2013/09/proud_of_being_a_hipster_one_bearded_indie_rock_loving_contrarian_article.html

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In other words, efforts to simply eradicate piracy by shutting down sites can’t work. The internet moves too quickly, and has unlimited space for infringing sites to hide. This is a very strong admission for an industry-funded report, and one that shows the extrajudicial DNS blocking that SOPA would allow can’t work. Never mind the censorship concerns—killing websites that host infringing material, unwittingly or not, won’t kill piracy.

That on its own runs counter to the prevailing refrain in the copyright lobby. But what’s even more surprising is that the report offers an actual solution, as Techdirt adroitly pointed out: If you want to combat piracy, make your content available elsewhere.

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– http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-best-way-to-combat-piracy-is-to-make-movies-easier-to-watch

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A phony review of a restaurant may lead to a bad meal, which is disappointing. But the investigation uncovered a wide range of services buying fake reviews that could do more permanent damage: dentists, lawyers, even an ultrasound clinic.

“What we’ve found is even worse than old-fashioned false advertising,” said Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York attorney general. “When you look at a billboard, you can tell it’s a paid advertisement — but on Yelp or Citysearch, you assume you’re reading authentic consumer opinions, making this practice even more deceiving.”

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/technology/give-yourself-4-stars-online-it-might-cost-you.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

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One of the iPhone’s biggest strengths has always been its branding as a luxury item, a device that lends its owner an unparalleled aura of cool and chic. Having the newest iPhone or iPad was an even stronger symbol of status. It is something that rival hardware makers have struggled to emulate and a reputation that could potentially be damaged with the introduction of a cheaper device, as my colleague Brian X. Chen reported last week.

But as the iPhone evolved from the third-generation 3GS model to the fourth and fifth, something interesting started to happen. It was virtually impossible to tell the devices apart. At a glance, the iPhone 4, 4S and 5 are practically identical. Of course, that is partly because the current iteration of the iPhone is pretty good — and Apple doesn’t seem to see the need to improve on it very much, as Matt Buchanan over at The New Yorker wrote last week.

But perhaps Apple is starting to realize that even if they don’t need to make significant changes to their flagship phone, they still need to sate the desire of their buying base, who want to show off their phone hardware as much as they do a new pair of fall boots or a new handbag.

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– http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/16/rethinking-the-iphone-5c/?ref=todayspaper

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“This week, an F.A.A. advisory panel will meet to complete its recommendations to relax most of the restrictions. The guidelines are expected to allow reading e-books or other publications, listening to podcasts, and watching videos, according to several of the panel’s members who requested anonymity because they could not comment on the recommendations. The ban on making phone calls, as well as sending and receiving e-mails and text messages or using Wi-Fi, is expected to remain in place, the panel members said.”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/technology/faa-nears-new-rules-on-devices.html?ref=todayspaper

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It remains a commonly held belief that for hundreds of years people didn’t smile in pictures because their teeth were generally awful. This is not really true – bad teeth were so common that this was not seen as necessarily taking away from someone’s attractiveness. Lord Palmerston, Queen Victoria’s whig prime minister, was often described as being devastatingly good-looking, and having a ‘strikingly handsome face and figure’ despite the fact that he had a number of prominent teeth missing as a result of hunting accidents. It was only in later life, when he acquired a set of flapping false teeth, that his image was compromised. His fear of them falling out when he spoke led to a stop-start delivery of his speeches, causing Disraeli to openly poke fun at him in parliament.

Nonetheless, both painters and sitters did have a number of good reasons for being disinclined to encourage the smile. The primary reason is as obvious as it is overlooked: it is hard to do. In the few examples we have of broad smiles in formal portraiture, the effect is often not particularly pleasing, and this is something we can easily experience today. When a camera is produced and we are asked to smile, we perform gamely. But should the process take too long, it takes only a fraction of a moment for our smiles to turn into uncomfortable grimaces. What was voluntary a moment ago immediately becomes intolerable. A smile is like a blush – it is a response, not an expression per se, and so it can neither be easily maintained nor easily recorded.

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– http://publicdomainreview.org/2013/09/18/the-serious-and-the-smirk-the-smile-in-portraiture/

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Beer is what economists call an elastic good; the more it costs, the less of it people buy. But at Oktoberfest, Germany’s debaucherous annual beer festival in Munich, the rule doesn’t exactly hold. In fact, it gets flipped on its head.

When this year’s beer festival kicks off on Saturday, more than 7 million beer drinkers will gather to drink some 15 million liter glasses. If they are sober enough, they will notice that their lagers, ales and stouts cost more than they did last year.

As is the case almost every year, the price of beer at the Oktoberfest has risen faster than inflation, according to UniCredit Research’s Oktoberfest 2013 report. The average beer at this year’s festival will cost €9.66 ($13)—3.6% more than it did last year. 3 Considering that inflation in Germany is currently hovering somewhere closer to 1.5%, festival goers should be outraged. And yet, like they have virtually every year before this, they will buy and drink more beer per head than they did the year before.

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– http://qz.com/125940/the-more-expensive-oktoberfest-beer-gets-to-more-beer-oktoberfest-goers-drink/

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If Aaron Sorkin’s “West Wing” represented an idealized Democratic presidency (powerful people doing good things) and inspired a swath of young viewers to enter public service, the latest generation of political television offers a more dystopian vision of the nation’s capital. The distinctly dark “House of Cards,” on Netflix, serves up powerful people doing bad things, while “Scandal,” on ABC, provides powerful people doing bad things in what they believe are in the service of good things.

But “Veep,” which is in the running for four Emmy Awards this Sunday, including one for best comedy, manages to repurpose politics as lowbrow farce, and offers perhaps the most realistic glimpse at the banal tasks, humdrum days and outsize egos that make up the daily lives of the city’s political staff members: largely powerless people doing … things.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/fashion/veep-hits-lots-of-nerves.html?ref=todayspaper

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“In 1904, the Cooper Underwear Company ran a magazine ad announcing a new product for bachelors. In the “before” photo, a man averts his eyes from the camera as if embarrassed; he has lost all the buttons on his undershirt and has safety-pinned its flaps together. In the “after” photo, a virile gentleman sports a handlebar mustache, smokes a cigar and wears a “bachelor undershirt” stretchy enough to be pulled over the head. “No safety pins — no buttons — no needle — no thread,” ran the slogan aimed at men with no wives and no sewing skills. Someone in the U.S. Navy must have seen the logic in this, because the following year, the quartermaster’s office specified that sailors should wear undershirts with no buttons under their uniforms; soon thousands of men became acquainted with the comfort of the cotton pullover.”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/magazine/who-made-that-t-shirt.html?ref=todayspaper

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