Category Archives: Uncategorized
shared content
“
All told, the sales picture in the report is bleak: “The 20/20 Experience” was the only album to sell more than 2 million copies last year, and it is only the second album since 1991 to top the year-end chart with fewer than 3 million sales. The previous low-selling No. 1, and the other to reach the top rung after selling fewer than 3 million, was Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter III” (Cash Money/Universal Motown), which sold 2.87 million in 2008.
Moreover, album sales overall dropped 8 percent in 2013, to 289.4 million from almost 316 million in 2012. Sales of CDs dropped 14 percent over the year, and even digital download sales dropped slightly, to 117.58 million from 117.68 million. The drop in downloads was the first since Nielsen began tracking them in 2003. About 41 percent of all album sales were downloads, up from 37 percent in 2012. And vinyl remains a growth industry: Nielsen SoundScan reported 6.1 million sales of vinyl LPs, up 33 percent since 2012.
”
shared content
“
I had been sober for five years when I had a slip and started drinking again last August. I had just finished the manuscript of my book, my one-man show was about to air on HBO, and we had a reality series in the can for Fox Sports. I was not accustomed to all that success in an arena other than boxing.
I have such a negative self-image that I just expect bad things to happen to me. And even though I hadn’t been using for five years, all that time I just didn’t feel comfortable in my skin. I was holding secrets from my loved ones, things that I had to get off my chest because I was dying inside. That’s the worst feeling in the world, keeping things to yourself. When I resolved those issues, through therapy and by talking honestly with my family, I felt like a new man. When I relapsed in the past, I would keep getting high until I was in a car accident or got arrested. But this time, after drinking for two or three days, I came back. I didn’t wait for an intervention. I just got right back on the wagon. After years of therapy, I had learned not to beat up on myself. I remembered that relapse is a part of recovery.
”
– http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/04/opinion/mike-tyson-fighting-to-kick-the-habit.html?ref=todayspaper
shared content
“
Musicmetric listed 20 artists whose work had been illegally downloaded 64.5 million times in 2013. About 70 percent of the downloads were albums; 30 percent were individual tracks.
Mr. Mars’s music accounted for 5,783,556 of those downloads, followed closely by Rihanna (5,414,166), Daft Punk (4,212,361) and Justin Timberlake (3,930,185). Other artists on the list include Flo Rida, Kanye West, Eminem, Jay Z, Maroon 5, Adele and Katy Perry (who holds the No. 20 position, with 2,318,740 downloads).
”
– http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/bruno-mars-tops-illegal-download-chart/?ref=todayspaper
shared content
America might think of itself as a nation of beef eaters, but for the first time in over a century, Americans are eating more chicken than beef, Priceonomics reports.
shared content
“
The Colorado nuns’ group, the Little Sisters of the Poor, is a religiously affiliated organization that is exempt from the health law’s requirement that employer insurance plans cover contraception without a co-pay. The audacious complaint in this case is against the requirement that such groups sign a short form certifying that they have religious objections to providing coverage for contraceptive services, a copy of which would go to their third-party insurance administrator. The nuns say that minor requirement infringes on religious exercise in violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Under that law, the federal government may not “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless the government demonstrates that the burden is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling interest. The certification requirement, an accommodation fashioned by the Obama administration to bolster the protection of religious exercise without depriving women of an important benefit, does not rise to a substantial burden. A federal trial court denied a preliminary injunction on that basis and a federal court of appeals declined to issue an injunction pending appeal, though decisions in some similar cases have come out differently.
”
– http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/03/opinion/no-burden-on-religion.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0
shared content
“
A flourishing teen-pop industry thinks it knows what teenagers care about: crushes, breakups, clothes, parties, perhaps an occasional glimmer of rebellion or idealism. It dispenses songs that are calculated to suit that market. But in 2013, a songwriter who is an actual teenager emerged from the far side of the planet with something smarter and deeper: a class-conscious critique of pop-culture materialism that’s so irresistible it became a No. 1 pop single.
That teenager, now 17, is Ella Yelich-O’Connor, from the suburbs of Auckland, New Zealand, who records as Lorde. In her hit “Royals,” she sings about middle-class kids bombarded by music-video fantasies of bling and luxury but responding, “That kind of luxe just ain’t for us.” It’s palatial-sounding pop that doesn’t condescend to listeners of any age. The song and her debut album brought Lorde four Grammy nominations — including song of the year — although she was inexplicably denied a fifth, for best new artist.
”
– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/arts/music/lordes-royals-is-class-conscious.html?ref=todayspaper
shared content
“
In recent research, my Harvard Business School colleagues Silvia Bellezza and Anat Keinan and I found that under certain conditions, nonconforming behaviors, such as not following the expected dress code or the appropriate professional conduct in a given context, can signal higher status. In our research, for example, shop assistants working in boutiques selling luxury brands in Milan assigned greater status to the woman wearing gym clothes and a jean jacket rather than to the woman properly dressed. In another study, students assigned higher status to a 45-year-old professor working at a top-tier university when he was described as wearing a t-shirt and had a beard than to a clean-shaven one wearing a tie. When the deviant behavior appears to be deliberate, it can lead to higher status inferences rather than lower ones.
Why is this the case? Nonconformity often has a social cost, so people assume people breaking the rules enjoy a powerful enough position that they are not concerned about the costs. So, the keynote speaker at a well-known event who is clearly wearing mis-matched socks, the senior executive who shows up at work in his or her jeans, or even the person who randomly walks up to strangers in restaurants and eats food off their plate may be judged by others as having greater status than if they were to conform to the norms of appropriate conduct. Though different, in all these cases the individuals are breaking accepted social rules. And, by doing so deliberately, they are likely to gain some status points in the eyes of others.
”
– http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=gaining-status-with-red-sneakers
shared content
“
This month, Milwaukee began a pilot program to repurpose cheese brine for use in keeping city roads from freezing, mixing the dairy waste with traditional rock salt as a way to trim costs and ease pollution.
“You want to use provolone or mozzarella,” said Jeffrey A. Tews, the fleet operations manager for the public works department, which has thrice spread the cheesy substance in Bay View, a neighborhood on Milwaukee’s south side. “Those have the best salt content. You have to do practically nothing to it.”
”
shaun james bockert 