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“If readers knew that reviewers had really been to the restaurant in question, it would not solve all the credibility problems but it would be a step in the right direction. That is the benefit of a new program that TripAdvisor and American Express introduced Tuesday. Amex card members will sign in to a new part of the review site and be given the opportunity to evaluate the places they patronized. Next to their write-up it will say, “Amex cardmember review.” The reviewer might still be a friend — or enemy — of the establishment, but at least he really went there.”

– http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/08/encouraging-the-reviewers-honestly/?ref=todayspaper

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I’ve long admired Gladwell’s work in The New Yorker, which employs many of the same literary techniques but is more persuasive, perhaps, because it is more contained and less ambitious. “David and Goliath,” on the other hand, is at once deeply repetitive and a bewildering sprawl. There are chapters, especially toward the end, whose relation to the rest of the book are hard to ascertain, even with his constant guidance.

Maybe what “David and Goliath” really illustrates is that it’s time for Malcolm Gladwell to find a new shtick.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/books/review/malcolm-gladwells-david-and-goliath.html?pagewanted=2&ref=todayspaper

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“Soon, the question of a name came up. Williams jokingly suggested calling the project “Friendstalker,” which was ruled out as too creepy. Glass became obsessive, flipping through a physical dictionary, almost word by word, looking for the right name. One late afternoon, alone in his apartment, he reached over to his cellphone and turned it to silent, which caused it to vibrate. He quickly considered the name “Vibrate,” which he nixed, but it led him to the word “twitch.” He dismissed that too, but he continued through the “Tw” section of the dictionary: twist, twit, twitch, twitcher, twitchy … and then, there it was. He read the definition aloud. “The light chirping sound made by certain birds.” This is it, he thought. “Agitation or excitement; flutter.” Twitter.”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/magazine/all-is-fair-in-love-and-twitter.html?pagewanted=all

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So you have this neighbor who has been making your life hell. First he tied you up with a spurious lawsuit; you’re both suffering from huge legal bills. Then he threatened bodily harm to your family. Now, however, he says he’s willing to compromise: He’ll call off the lawsuit, which is to his advantage as well as yours. But in return you must give him your car. Oh, and he’ll stop threatening your family — but only for a week, after which the threats will resume.

Not much of an offer, is it? But here’s the kicker: Your neighbor’s relatives, who have been egging him on, are furious that he didn’t also demand that you kill your dog.

And now you understand the current state of budget negotiations.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/opinion/krugman-the-dixiecrat-solution.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

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While Blok worked on her design, she and her colleagues agreed that the logo, like the software, should be open-sourced. “We decided it would be a collaborative logo that everybody in the world could customize,” she says. “That was pretty daring.” Most companies, of course, defend their trademark from copycats, and million-dollar lawsuits have been filed over the rights to corporate insignia. This one would remain free.

In the years since, the Android logo has been dressed up as a ninja, given skis and skateboards and even transformed into a limited-edition Kit-Kat bar. Blok (who is now creative director at Edmodo, a social network for students and teachers) says that creating the logo was like raising a child: “You give a life to this individual, and then they have a life of their own.”

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/magazine/who-made-that-android-logo.html?ref=todayspaper

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“The beauty of the stock market is that it’s an astonishingly easy place for buyers and sellers to connect with one another. If you want to sell almost any stock, you can find a buyer within seconds and know within a few cents how much the buyer will pay. (Compare that with selling a house or a car or even an old piece of furniture on Craigslist.) In the old days, the stock market worked because there were people — so-called market makers — whose job was to ensure that there was almost always a willing buyer and seller for every stock. In the past decade, their jobs have been largely replaced by high-frequency traders who provide this middleman service. Over time, this shift to technology has generally made it cheaper for everyone, including long-term investors, to buy and sell stocks. But there are notable exceptions. A trader using a high-speed connection to jump in front of a deal between a willing buyer and seller is driving up costs for the buyer and isn’t really improving the market.”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/magazine/high-frequency-traders.html?pagewanted=2&ref=todayspaper

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Legalisation may, as I noted last week, result in more adults using marijuana, but the negative consequences of any increase in use are likely to be modest given its relative safety compared with most other psychoactive plants and substances. Legal regulation offers the promise of safer use, with consumers able to purchase their marijuana from licensed outlets and to know the type and potency of their purchases—and to have peace of mind that such purchases will be free from contamination. Legalisation will also accelerate the transition from smoking marijuana in joints and pipes to consuming it in edible and vaporised forms, with significant health benefits for heavy consumers.

Hundreds of millions of people worldwide use marijuana not just “for fun” but because they find it useful for many of the same reasons that people drink alcohol or take pharmaceutical drugs. It’s akin to the beer, glass of wine, or cocktail at the end of the work day, or the prescribed drug to alleviate depression or anxiety, or the sleeping pill, or the aid to sexual function and pleasure. A decade ago, a subsidiary of The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal, speculated whether marijuana might soon emerge as the “aspirin of the 21st century”, providing a wide array of medical benefits at low cost to diverse populations. That prediction appears ever more prescient as scientists employed by both universities and pharmaceutical companies explore marijuana’s potential.

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– http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/1020#pro_statement_anchor

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At the time of the hijacking, a lot of the news reports focused on Captain Phillips and the nominal exoticism of a 21st-century piracy that had nothing to do with illegal downloads, football or Johnny Depp swashbuckling through a Disney franchise. The existential realities that inform contemporary Somali piracy turn out to be one of the unexpected themes of “Captain Phillips,” which begins as something of a procedural about men at work and morphs into a jittery thriller even as it also deepens, brilliantly, unexpectedly, into an unsettling look at global capitalism and American privilege and power. Phillips is unambiguously a heroic figure, but he’s scarcely the sole point of interest in a movie that steadily and almost stealthily asserts the agonized humanity of his captors.

This humanization hits you like a jolt. The shock isn’t that the pirates are people, however corrupted. But that even as the movie’s rhythms quicken along with your own — Mr. Greengrass works you over like a deep-tissue pugilist with smash cuts, racing cameras and a propulsive soundtrack so you feel the urgency as well as see it — an argument is being created. There is, you realize, meaning here beyond the plot, meaning in the barren Somali hamlet in which Muse and his companions congregate under warlord gunpoint and in the razored angles of their startling, gaunt faces. There’s meaning, too, in the wild eyes and stained teeth of men who never eat, but stuff their thin cheeks with khat, the amphetaminelike plant that, among its uses, helps suppress the appetite.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/11/movies/captain-phillips-stars-tom-hanks-as-a-high-seas-hostage.html?ref=todayspaper

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But you know what separates the “good” from the “significant”? Exposure. Not just initial exposure, like the hoopla surrounding the relatively unpopular Girls, but endured attention and familiarity. Viewers of broad ages and classes and tastes watching. Syndication used to do some of this work for us: that’s how I consumed M*A*S*H, My Three Sons, The Brady Bunch, I Love Lucy, classic Saturday Night Live, original Star Trek, and even MacGyver. It was MTV reruns, for example, and not ABC, that made My So-Called Life a cultural touchstone: the two words “Jordan Catalano” stand in for a host of dude-related agonies and ecstasies. Granted, you could watch Sex and the City on TBS, and The Wire on BET. But those were Frankenstein edits of the originals — and what little extended cable this generation does watch, it’s generally new content.

Netflix, and other forms of cheap streaming, thus takes up the role formerly occupied by second-run syndication. Only unlike the reruns of M*A*S*H I’d watch every night at 7:00 pm, these reruns are there whenever I want them and without commercials. With the rise of streaming services, we’ve avoided the term “rerun” and its connotations of the hot, bored days of summer. But apart from its foray into original programming, that’s what Netflix is: a distribution service of reruns. And as with second-run syndication, what’s available is what gets watched; what gets watched becomes part of the conversation. It’s not a question of quality, in other words, it’s one of availability.

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– http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/deartv/77/

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“A sitcom essentially takes life situations and makes them less boring through unlikely, quirky, and slightly absurd twists. Something always happens in a sitcom — someone gets sick, or a miscommunication causes problems — but there is always a resolution, and in hindsight, the conflict was wholly innocuous. Sitcoms often try to depict TV life as a considerably less boring version of our lives, but that their reach is so limited often makes the shows boring in of themselves. (A county fair gone awry, Tracy Jordan is acting up again!). That our sitcoms, embroidered versions of our lives, start to feel boring is a testament to the prevalent sterility and innocuousness of our daily lives (Wake up, go to work, come home, family time, watch TV, et cetera). It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, if only for a mere twenty-two minutes a week, gives us a chance to enter a world without stakes; their idle schemes are the elixir for our idle generation. For those twenty-two minutes we don’t need to pretend about how boring our lives can be. We can accept it,rage against ennui, and become nihilists: throw glass bottles, blow up cars, be mean to homeless people, make fun of religion, not care about other people, try all of the drugs especially (and frequently) huffing glue, go on welfare just for the fun of it, make fun of molestation, get black-out drunk, dabble in possible incest, hang out under the bridge or in sewers, and generally just act like the stupid, selfish, destructive, children we all want to be from time to time.”

– https://medium.com/editors-picks/cac888bc7f8e

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