“You knew it had to happen eventually: Instagram is getting ads.
Facebook, which owns the fast-growing photo and video sharing service, warned Instagram users three weeks ago that photo and video ads were going to start showing up in their image streams. On Thursday, Instagram said the ads would start in the next week for users in the United States.”
– http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/24/instagram-will-begin-showing-ads-in-the-photo-stream/
“Preferences — particularly among young drinkers in the US — have begun to shift from clear spirits to brown liquors. While vodka is still by far the most popular spirit in the US, the growth rate of its sales volume has declined each year since 2010, while gin has actually decreased in popularity. The amount of whiskey purchased has increased every year in the same period, and in 2012, whiskey finally outpaced vodka, growing by 5.1% compared to vodka’s 4% growth. This trend is commonly referred to as the “Mad Men Effect”, because it’s partially driven by whiskey’s larger presence in pop culture and big-name television shows like Mad Men, similar to the way Sex and the City popularized the cosmopolitan. Irish whiskey in particular is just starting to find its way into mixed drinks, having spent most of its long history in a glass with no company save a few drops of water or some ice.”
– http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/10/were-bringing-whiskey-back/280767/
“
Researchers around the world have repeatedly found that strangers can match photos of dogs with photos of their owners at a rate well above chance [4]. Perhaps people are drawn to animals that look like them. In a study of female college students, those with longer hair judged flop-eared dogs—spaniels, beagles—to be more attractive, friendly, and intelligent than dogs with pointy ears; women with shorter hair concluded the opposite [5]. And the apparent affinity between owners and pets is more than fur-deep: One analysis found self-described “dog people” to be less neurotic than “cat people,” who were more curious [6]. Another study, which cross-referenced personality-test scores and breed preferences, noted that disagreeable people favored aggressive dogs [7].
[4] Nakajima et al., “Dogs Look Like Their Owners” (Anthrozoös, June 2009)
[5] Coren, “Do People Look Like Their Dogs?” (Anthrozoös, 1999)
[6] Gosling et al., “Personalities of Self-Identified ‘Dog People’ and ‘Cat People’ ” (Anthrozoös, Sept. 2010)
[7] Egan and MacKenzie, “Does Personality, Delinquency, or Mating Effort Necessarily Dictate a Preference for an Aggressive Dog?” (Anthrozoös, June 2012)
”
– http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/why-you-look-like-your-dog/309526/
“The classic definition of chutzpah is the child who kills his parents and then asks for leniency because he’s an orphan. But in recent weeks, we’ve begun to see the Washington definition: A party that does everything possible to sabotage a law and then professes fury when the law’s launch is rocky.
On Tuesday, Rep. Paul Ryan became the latest Republicans to call for HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to step down because of the Affordable Care Act’s troubled launch. “I do believe people should be held accountable,” he said.
Okay then.
How about House Republicans who refused to appropriate the money the Department of Health and Human Services said it needed to properly implement Obamacare?”
– http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/24/wonkbook-the-gops-obamacare-chutzpah/
“
We now know how it works: a minority group wins just enough votes to have sufficient Congressional representation to twist, postpone, water-down or even stop governmental action. These minority groups may not have the power to impose their views but have just enough power to veto the agenda of the majority.
These disrupters have no interest in helping govern the nation; their goal is to undermine or altogether block the initiatives of their political rivals and ensure their failure. And they justify the “collateral damage” of their belligerence in terms of noble-sounding national causes—from curbing intrusive government to stopping its wasteful ways, and from protecting the middle class to battling corruption. Raising the flag of the common good, divisive leaders deftly obscure the fact that they and their close allies are the primary beneficiaries of their obstructionism.
”
– http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/don-t-feel-too-bad-americans-gridlock-is-global/280790/
“Being a regular is a funny thing in a big city. Outside, you’re just an anonymous schmo. But if you come inside often enough, each visit starts to feel like a family reunion of sorts; like the extended members of your biological family, the people you encounter will likely be happy enough to see you, though they probably have little idea of who you actually are as a person. But there’s a beauty in deciding how much of yourself to offer as part of the general exchange of money and goods: You can be the thoughtfully curated version of you — the one who always smiles and never has any problems.”
“Indeed, ransom payments are the main venture of real-life Somali pirates, unlike the small-scale robberies of the initial Somali piracy narrative. Ransoms have increased in value from under a million dollars on average per year in 2005 to an average payment of $5 million in 2011 (although the average dropped in 2012 to $4 million). As mentioned repeatedly in the film, the hijackers are rarely the sole profiteers from a hostage taking scenario. A band of pirates is usually headed by a kingpin who organizes the mother ship and negotiators, who have higher education and can command up to 5 percent of the payout. Pirate crews need to be nearly proportionate to crew members on the commercial vessels being hijacked so the split generally has to be divided between a lot of people. According to the United Nations, financiers of planned hijackings can buy shares of attempts, and the typical cost of an attempt is about $50,000 dollars. Thus, the payout needs to cover pirate crew, the kingpin’s costs, and the original outlay, as well a high return to investors (investors typically claim at minimum 30 percent of the payout). The U.N. argues that piracy in Somalia in the past garnered public support because of the perception of its redistributive nature. However, this support has recently waned, hinting at the fact that communities are not really seeing the benefits of piracy. As Somalia reconstructs and attracts more legitimate business investors, there may be less support for an activity that increases risk and negative perceptions of the business environment.”
– http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/africa-in-focus/posts/2013/10/18-captain-phillips-east-africa-somalia-sy
“Farmers and laborers ate earlier because they were up really early, and the elite were eating later in the day because they could sleep in. Breakfast and supper were kind of like glorified snacks, often leftovers or cornmeal mush, and there was not a lot of emphasis placed on these meals. Dinner, the main meal, at which people did tend to sit down together and eat, was really not the kind of social event that it has become. People did not emphasize manners, they did not emphasize conversation, and if conversation did take place it wasn’t very formal: it was really about eating and refueling. That’s the time where there are very blurry lines between what is and what isn’t a meal, and very blurry lines between what is breakfast, dinner and lunch.
Then, with the Industrial Revolution, everything changed, because people’s work schedules changed drastically. People were moving from the agrarian lifestyle to an urban, factory-driven lifestyle, and weren’t able to go home in the middle of the day. Instead, they could all come home and have dinner together, so that meal becomes special. And that’s when manners become very important, and protocol and formality. It’s really around then that people start to associate specific foods with certain meals.”
– http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/food/2013/10/why-do-we-eat-cereal-for-breakfast-and-other-questions-about-american-meals-answered/
“
On October 13, the infamous street artist Banksy attempted to sell $60 canvases (worth tens-of-thousands of dollars each) to unsuspecting New Yorkers. In seven hours, he had just three customers.
When news of this broke, the story took over New York. In that echo of media hype, we saw an opportunity for a little mischief, and a chance to make a statement about the nature of hype, public personas, and the value of art.
After a lot of hustle, Lance Pilgrim ( @TheElroyJenkins ) and I, with the help of film maker George Gross ( http://vimeo.com/georgegross ) recreated the Banksy stall one week later.
Same price. Same images. Same location. Everything was the same—we even got Lance’s father Michael to be the salesman. Everything was identical…except for two things:
• The public consciousness had changed.
• Our work was completely worthless.
We were open about this. Our sign said “Fake Banksy.” Mike assured every customer that it was fake. Each canvas even came with a legally notarized “Certificate of Inauthenticity,” claiming that what they bought was not an original Banksy.
It didn’t matter.
We sold everything in less than an hour. Including the price sign.
”
“In other words, the new Wes Anderson film is—to borrow The Atlantic Wire’s usefully tautological adjective—“Wes Anderson-y.” But to say that the new Anderson film seems like a parody of an Anderson film is misleading: It implies that there are Wes Anderson things that aren’t self-parodies. With the arguable exception of Bottle Rocket, his very first film, which was made on a shoestring budget, every feature in his filmography is self-consciously twee, precious, exquisite—so idiosyncratically his that the only way to succinctly describe what distinguishes any part of his canon is via reference to the rest of his canon.”
– http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115231/grand-budapest-hotel-trailer-world-needs-more-wes-andersons
shaun james bockert 