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But there is no valid reason why Netflix should have placed a blind, $100 million bet on a new series. Of all the distributors of television programming, Netflix is in the best position to develop more lean and nimble proofs of concept and to serve them to the right audience.

Unlike a traditional TV network, Netflix has the unique ability to put content in front of millions of targeted, interest-based viewers in incredibly short order. It has better taste profiles and matching algorithms than AMC, ABC, or big advertisers could ever dream of. Why, for instance, couldn’t Netflix buy scripts – or hell, get into the blind script business with established writers – and then test them out before fully committing to them?

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– http://priceonomics.com/the-economics-of-a-hit-tv-show/

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On Thursday, a new company, Fantex, announced the first-ever athlete I.P.O., selling shares tied to the earnings of Mr. Foster, a star running back for the Houston Texans.

Three days later, on Sunday, Mr. Foster had one of the worst outings in his five years in the National Football League. He carried the ball just four times for 11 yards before leaving the Texans game in the first half with a pulled hamstring.

The chance of injury was one of the many risks Fantex disclosed in the Foster I.P.O. Fantex is selling about $10 million worth of stock to pay Mr. Foster for a 20 percent interest in his future income, which includes the value of his playing contracts, corporate endorsements and appearance fees. Shareholders will own interests in a tracking stock whose performance is intended to be linked to Mr. Foster’s future economic success.

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– http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/for-star-athlete-i-p-o-a-stumble-on-the-field/?ref=todayspaper

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Nearly every day, Amazon announces a new venture.

It just bought an online education company and introduced a payment mechanism for Internet retailers that competes with PayPal. It started selling wine for the first time in New York, updated its line of tablets, gave the go-ahead to three new comedy pilots and began a design competition for its fashion division. It is setting up mini-warehouses inside suppliers like Procter & Gamble to ship goods faster.

But one thing it will not be announcing this month: a significant profit.

Who cares? Amazon lost money in 2012, and analysts are anticipating another loss when the company releases its third-quarter results on Thursday. Yet the stock is at a record high.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/technology/sales-are-colossal-shares-are-soaring-all-amazoncom-is-missing-is-a-profit.html?ref=todayspaper

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“Would you want The New England Journal of Medicine to be edited by medical students?” asked Richard A. Wise, who teaches psychology at the University of North Dakota.

Of course not. Then why are law reviews, the primary repositories of legal scholarship, edited by law students?

These student editors are mostly bright and work hard, but they are young, part-time amateurs who know little about the law or about editing prose. Yet they are in charge of picking the best articles from among many hundreds of submissions written by professors with authentic expertise in fields the students may never have studied.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/us/law-scholarships-lackluster-reviews.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

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The biggest difference between the suicide caucus and the survival caucus is geography. While the suicide caucus is dominated by the South, and especially members from Appalachia and states like Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia, as well as Texas, the survival-caucus draws members more equally from the South (thirty per cent), the Midwest (twenty-seven per cent), the West (twenty-two per cent), and the Northeast (twenty-one per cent). There are no Texans, Tennesseans, South Carolinians, or Georgians in the survival caucus. In fact, the clearest divide between the two caucuses is also the oldest divide in American politics: North-South.

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“Sheriff Melton said the culprit stole 195 bottles in three-bottle cases of Pappy Van Winkle 20 Year, which has a suggested retail price of $130 a bottle, and nine cases of 13-year-old Van Winkle Family Reserve Rye, with a suggested price of $69. The thief had an obvious motive: the secondary market for the scarce whiskey is hot. A single bottle of 20-year-old Pappy, as aficionados know it, sold at Bonham’s auction in New York on Sunday for $1,190.”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/19/us/kentuckys-case-of-the-missing-bourbon.html?_r=0

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So far this year, 1.01 billion track downloads have been sold in the United States, down 4 percent from the same time last year, according to the tracking service Nielsen SoundScan. Album downloads are up 2 percent, to 91.9 million; combining these results using the industry’s standard yardstick of 10 tracks to an album, total digital sales are down almost 1 percent.

After enjoying double-digit growth in the years after Apple opened its iTunes store in 2003, song downloads began to cool several years ago. But the rate of decline this year — weekly sales began to lag in February, and the drop has accelerated rapidly in recent months — has caught the business by surprise.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/business/media/as-downloads-dip-music-executives-cast-a-wary-eye-on-streaming-services.html?ref=todayspaper

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The five food stations, staffed by six cooks (two on fish) and one floating chef (a chef de tournant) are arranged perpendicular to the pass, which is where the food is handed off to the food runners (seen at the bottom of the page), all under the scrutiny of another chef, who runs the line.

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Everyone with Internet access is a critic, but some forms of amateur criticism have higher standing than others. Amateur literary critics, like Dylan Lucia, an Amazon reviewer who gave one star to “Fahrenheit 451” (“Bradbury is a good writer [I’ll give him that], but I HATE his writing style”), may lack a nuanced understanding of the English language; some amateur film critics, like the IMDB reviewer who gave 10 stars to “Wrath of the Titans” (“i never saw a movie this good before in my life”), may have never seen another movie before in their lives. But all of us with a tongue and a functioning digestive tract are authorities on food. After all, we have a commanding range of experience to draw from: we eat, according to one study, an average of 4.9 times a day. When it comes to food, everyone is not just a critic — everyone is a connoisseur.

In such a competitive field, how does the amateur food critic distinguish himself? There are popular review sites like Urbanspoon and Yelp, but they can be egalitarian to a fault. In New Orleans, for instance, Urbanspoon ranks Café du Monde as the city’s top restaurant; it may have the best beignets and chicory coffee (many natives will scoff even at this), but it serves little else. Yelp lists Joe’s Falafel in Studio City as Los Angeles’s best restaurant. (“Pita bread and Gyro is the way to go!!! Well done Joe’s” — Calvin K. from Marina del Rey.) The true culinary obsessives go elsewhere. They go to Chowhound.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/magazine/los-angeles-goat-stew-city-usa.html?pagewanted=1&ref=todayspaper

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