Tag Archives: media

In which I change the plot of “Avatar” by less than 15% and improve it at least 250%

I keep coming back to “Avatar” in my head. Partly because new people in my life keep seeing it and then asking me what I think. They do this for a couple reasons: 1) I’m the avowed hard-core sci-fi buff … Continue reading

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Celebrities, allergies and Edgar Allen Poe

[Before we get into the blog post, I gotta say that the Newsweek web site is almost unreadable. Totally bad design, UI, findability, etc. I was going to link to the story I'll be mentioning below, but after 2 minutes … Continue reading

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Our (possibly) scary future: two data points

In my RSS reader today, I came across two (seemingly) unrelated posts that ended up colliding in my mind and making me feel, well… a bit troubled about certain aspects of our glorious, technofuture. The first is a video, “What … Continue reading

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Why conservatism isn’t as funny

I don’t know if you remember the (thankfully) short-lived Fox version of “The Daily Show,” “The Half Hour News Hour.” You shouldn’t. It was awful. If you’d like a sample, try this on for size: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fns5lOisXco[/youtube] Yep. Nearly four minutes … Continue reading

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Seth Godin: the new Andy Rooney?

I have mixed feelings about Seth Godin. On the one hand, he’s clearly a very smart, funny, creative guy with lots of good ideas about media, technology, marketing and social systems. On the other (and he has this in common … Continue reading

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Bad editing, sensational reporting, hypocrisy and inattention to irony may lead to Armageddon

Language can be very powerful. Well, duh. We are moved by words every day of our life, governments have risen and fallen because of good writing, and people have died for their belief in one set of words over another. … Continue reading

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Learning to hunt — Newsweek gets it wrong… and insults a whole bunch of us in the process

I subscribe to Newsweek, and generally enjoy it. Any pub with regular articles by Fareed Zakaria is worth keeping on the nightstand. This last week, though, there was an article about how President Obama’s use of a Blackberry is, well… … Continue reading

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