Just For Today

Mad Men’s Histrionics

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:05:00 -0400

As the television show has devolved into absurdity, so have its fans.

"It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a..."

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 10:20:03 -0400

“

It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, ‘Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe,’ or ‘Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet.’ They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complex picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority.

– G.K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross, 1909

”

- http://www.futilitycloset.com/2013/05/30/world-of-wonders

Revisionist History: Learning to Live with My Grandfather’s Misbegotten Legacy — This Happened to Me — Medium

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 15:23:15 -0400

Revisionist History: Learning to Live with My Grandfather’s Misbegotten Legacy — This Happened to Me — Medium:

Tried out posting on Medium, and went uber-personal.

"My grandfather was not a hero. Unlike Mr. Campbell, he did not plan to put his life on the line. He..."

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 19:52:09 -0400

“My grandfather was not a hero. Unlike Mr. Campbell, he did not plan to put his life on the line. He set out as a privileged person expecting to be heard, and ended as a privileged person surprised by backlash. But he did speak up. He was then used as an example of what could happen even to a white man of standing if he stepped out of line. And, in his own way, he spent his life paying for it. When we look back on our troubled histories, especially at the distance of 50 years, we might like to imagine that we would be Skeeter Phelan, the character in “The Help,” or an abolitionist. My grandfather’s story recalls the painful complexity of oppressive regimes not only to those they oppress most directly but to anyone who dares to question them at all.”

- The Price of Rebellion - NYTimes.com

1-year with this handsome dude. boosh!

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 19:50:12 -0400

1-year with this handsome dude. boosh!

sunny daze

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 16:58:50 -0400

sunny daze

"New Yorkers have a reputation for skin so thick it feels like rock so we adore anything that..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 09:55:00 -0400

“New Yorkers have a reputation for skin so thick it feels like rock so we adore anything that undermines this idea and confirms our secret view of ourselves as neighborly and congenial. It’s the social equivalent of owning a really docile Rottweiler. This trust-filled warmth also serves as a salve against urban haters. People who don’t develop an instant taste for New York? Well, clearly they’re just visiting the wrong parts. The problem now is that we’re confusing humanity with safety… There’s a real tinge of the smug to this “the world is my safe deposit box” mentality. It’s a luxury to blithely trust that everything will work out in your favor regardless of precaution, a luxury commonly reserved for the very young or the very super-model-y.”

- Sloane Crosley, New York Is Yours For The Taking (via nogreatillusion)

One Year Better: America's Best High Schools

Mon, 06 May 2013 12:41:25 -0400

It’s that time again…America’s Best High Schools time. The list this year is really phenomenal. It’s expanded to 2,000 schools. Nearly 50% more schools applied to be on the list. The methodology was tweaked every-so-slightly, strengthening the metric by which we measure schools. And it includes an interactive, which has been a goal since I first helped to put the list together in 2011.

Just like last year, the process was rewarding and challenging. This was the first time I was the only person to put the list together, which was certainly the biggest hurdle.

Ultimately, the list is about the schools. At the risk of sounding trite, many of the teachers and administrators of the nation’s top schools work incredibly hard with very few resources and little pay off. There isn’t a blueprint for making students learn or care about learning.

At it’s core, the list is meant to spotlight great schools. I think it’s getting there.

Chapel Hill priorities regram (at Carrburritos)

Sun, 05 May 2013 10:12:50 -0400

Chapel Hill priorities regram (at Carrburritos)

weekend plans.

Thu, 02 May 2013 23:07:25 -0400

weekend plans.

Photo

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 20:59:19 -0400

speed and spaces

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 01:23:55 -0400

The urge to ride came early. Two wheels, teeny seat, lots of leather and adrenaline—motorcycles were an entree into an alluring breed of freedom. but some of that’s marketing. the harleys and the bikini hicks; the ducatis and the urban cowboy; the bmws and the wide swaths of midwest sky. a brand for every biker or sucker with time and money to burn.

my father rode. first, i wanted to be like him. so i did circles on my dirt bike, waiting to get tall enough to ride the one with the clutch. the smell of exhaust linked with escape. but after i plowed my yamaha into the trunk of a 5-story evergreen tree, the thrill became more tempered. eventually i was an adolescent and wanted to be liked by boys, but the ones i liked thought it was cool that my dad had a stack of cycles in his garage, especially the flashy Moto Guzzi racing one.

soon, i could drive. but not for long; i plowed my first car into a telephone pole, nearly slicing the hood in half on the guidewire. the thrill, yet again, became vulnerable.

i always like the rides. enduring monotony at great speeds is a perfect time to think. but moreso, the excitement was in the option to leave at a high speed. the option to find space in childhood, in adolescence, when the boundaries are never more defined or frustrating. it’s just a way to outrun impatience. so perhaps why i find myself again yearning for wheels is pretty straightforward, but at this age, at 29, the loneliness of the pastime is equally as alluring and frightning as the escapism.

"Smith and Herrman are absolutely wrong that a compelling yet false factoid, being shared willy-nilly..."

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:51:24 -0400

“

Smith and Herrman are absolutely wrong that a compelling yet false factoid, being shared willy-nilly across various social-media platforms, “will become news on that merit alone”. News is something true and important and relevant; it is not, and should never be, misinformation. Neither is it “whatever our readers happen to be finding on the internet”. Smith and Herrman are essentially taking a hugely important story, here, and reducing it to the status of covering a viral meme: the Gangnamization of terror. I have no problem with news stories covering viral sensations, but they’re what you do after you cover the important stuff. They’re not the important stuff themselves.

Which is not to say that BuzzFeed did a bad job last week. Debunking corrosive memes is a genuine public service, and it’s great that outlets like BuzzFeed and Gawker are doing it. Where I part with Smith and Herrman, however, is in their implication that everybody else — the NYT, the WSJ, the Boston Globe, Reuters, Bloomberg, CNN — should be doing it as well. That’s silly, and I can’t believe that many people would want to live in a world where a relatively small number of Redditors could effectively set the news agenda for the entire country.

”

- The social media tail mustn’t wag the MSM dog | Felix Salmon (via brooklynmutt)

Today, I witnessed one of my oldest friends get married. Her...

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 00:47:05 -0400

Today, I witnessed one of my oldest friends get married. Her husband held out his right hand at the altar, she attempted to put the wedding band on his wrong ring finger, and laughter ensued. The maid of honor, her older sister, who graduated with my older brother, ended her toast with “they are great friends and great lovers,” causing a room of Catholics to erupt in laughter.

As teenagers, we couldn’t wait to escape, to get wasted, to laugh ‘til it was time for college. But now, 20 years later, we seek out opportunities to spend another night getting older together. Dressing up and getting wasted together. We’re here, in this weird state of adulthood, together.

homeward bound

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 00:34:45 -0400

homeward bound

"To decide to romantically cohabitate with another person for the rest of your life, to make a family..."

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 22:43:21 -0400

“

To decide to romantically cohabitate with another person for the rest of your life, to make a family with that person, is to go to war. To borrow the language of my mother—you had best love their dirty drawers, because you will be seeing them. And it strikes me that you should understand that cool people fail at being cool together all the time. Sometimes they fail for lack of morality, but very often not.

That women—with all they have to lose in this world, having to struggle to secure the kind of things that the other half of the world takes for granted (the body, for instance)—would be particularly discerning about such a decision, that they would wait until accumulating some amount of power, financial and otherwise, seems logical. The dynamics of power—societal and personal—are inseparable from marriage. Those of us who’ve, thus far, managed to navigate those dynamics should probably be more thankful than boastful. May our days ever be thus.

”

- If You Want to Be Married Young, You Should Marry While Young - Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Atlantic

The best two quotes from Auletta's Henry Blodget profile

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 10:36:00 -0400

As economically beleaguered newspapers invest less in long-form reporting, digital publications are unlikely to invest more. “I talked to a journalist and he said, ‘We have a lot of great scoops,’ ” [Kevin] Ryan told me. “I said, ‘Scoops are irrelevant. They take two days to report. They’re not worth it. If someone has a scoop, we post it four minutes later.’ “

scoops have always been a uniquely valuable currency in online journalism. a new nugget of information can mean significant traffic; it lights a spark that often burns across social media and other news outlets.

i worked at BI for a few months. they certainly saw the value of scoops.

it seems to be a constant discussion over which is more valuable, though, scoops or intelligent analysis. or, as is argued here, just a constant flow of new content. and boobs. which is why this quote is also important:

To Blodget, Business Insider was not so much a news outlet as a rapid-fire conversion. “We were, effectively, a text-based talk-radio service, where every half hour or every hour we had a new blip of information, whether it be a news story or something entertaining,” [Dan] Frommer said. :And then we’d kind of take calls.”

interesting perspective that—instead of the whine that people’s attention span is causing the disintegration of the journalism industry and a loss of respect for hard news—people are more addicted to readable news than ever before, if only for its entertainment and silence-filling qualities.

it’s not about being the lowest common denominator in content, it’s the most digestible common denominator.

Full link to Auletta’s profile here.

dads <3 irresponsibility

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:13:00 -0400

dads <3 irresponsibility

Tomorrow, I’m going to get my motorcycle...

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 15:29:00 -0400

Tomorrow, I’m going to get my motorcycle ~~license~~ permit.

Today, I’m accessorizing my future.

"Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the federal law effectively created a two-tiered system of..."

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 12:49:19 -0400

“Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the federal law effectively created a two-tiered system of marriage. “There are two kinds of marriage,” she said. “Full marriage and the skim-milk marriage.””

- Justices Hears Arguments on Defense of Marriage Act - NYTimes.com