February 2012
24 posts
“Why’s this so good?” No. 32: Darcy Frey on the... →
I mentioned recently that “Something’s Got To Give” is one of my favourite longform pieces, so I was delighted to see a post on it in Nieman’s Why’s this so good? series.
1 tag
Tuesdays & Thursdays →
The Bygone Bureau guys started a link blog on Tumblr.
“The Oxford English Dictionary has announced plans to add the word ‘amazeballs’...”
– Oxford Dictionary to cease after adding ‘amazeballs’
Reading The Oscars →
thesyllabi:
The 84th Academy Awards happened last night. If you’re anything like me, you’ve seen a fairly shameful percentage of the nominated films, so here’s a guide to some good reads about the Oscars and the stars of this year’s awards to help you get acquainted.
You walk into a pharmacy and ask for condoms. The female pharmacist digs around and returns saying “sorry, we only have extra large at the moment.”
You don’t have an extra large penis, but the cute pharmacist can never know that. What do you do?
Wrong answer: you say “uhhh….. thatwouldbefinebutIpreferasnuggerfitbye” and never go back to that pharmacy.
Fan Mail
Sometimes I get up early at the weekend, which makes me all introspective and I start to wonder what the meaning of life is and why my blogging platform of choice has a feature that appears to be specifically designed as a spam vector and has no option to turn it off. Then I wonder if my Tumblr pals partiesgroupsex and feetfuckhairy are awake yet, I could sure use some company and a new iPhone 4.
Will we ever? →
Ed Yong, one of my favourite science writers, has a new column at the BBC:
So the column is called “Will we ever…?” The goal is to take far-flung and possibly optimistic applications of basic scientific research and look at the steps and obstacles between now and then. You know that sentence in the fourth or fifth paragraph of most science news pieces? The fluffy one that says, “This discovery...
“This gorgeous sunset is rocking my nuts off.”
– Kenny Powers is back
How Forbes Stole A New York Times Article And Got... →
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but how much is a title worth? If the story that proceeds is any indicator, a title is worth over 6700 words and months of research. It all began Friday when the New York Times published an article “How Companies Learn Your Secrets“. It was an extremely long article which discussed how large companies like WalMart and Target collect data about your...
“feetfuckhairy liked your photo”
Shelf-Conscious →
As it turns out, for a great deal of their history, shelves were much more haphazard than they are today. Before they even displayed books, they supported piles of scrolls. In the first century BC, Atticus loaned Cicero two assistants to build shelves and to tack titles onto his collection. “Your men have made my library gay with their carpentry work,” Cicero reported. “Nothing could look...
“The ease of producing, distributing, and messing around with text has resulted...”
– Marco Arment
The Web Without the Muck: A Long Interview with... →
The $4.99 app is simple, elegant, and attractive—all prerequisites, if you’re promising readers a more serene reading experience. What sets it apart from the other reading apps is the way it fetches a supply of long-form articles from the chosen publications, so users don’t have to. With apps like Instapaper, by contrast, you do the curating yourself: if you find an article on the Web that you...
Arrests leave Sun journalists feeling cast off by... →
Wapping journalists are in a state of shock. Many now believe that their ultimate boss, Rupert Murdoch, no longer cares for them. Staff at the Sun, The Times and the Sunday Times were taken aback when news broke at the weekend of four senior Sun journalists being arrested.
An angry and bewildered veteran of that newspaper explained that it wasn’t so much the arrests themselves that...
Spiders dodge cannibalism through remote... →
In other animal-related news, male orb-spiders break off their own genitals while inside females, which keeps pumping semen into her, to increase the odds of fertilisation in case the female, which has a penchant for cannibalism, decides to eat him. (This strategy is probably not recommended for humans.)
