A self-published book by an obscure author finds a huge audience and lands on the New York Times bestseller list after word of mouth builds…
Month: June 2008
How More Information Will Change Everything
“At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later.”
Boy George Barred From The US
“At the moment, Boy George cannot come to the United States of America because he has been refused permission to enter by the USA Administration. This is not in respect of anything he has done in the past but because he is facing a trial in November in London for something that happened in April last year.” He was to have performed 24 concerts beginning in July.
Ballet Hispanico Founder Steps Down
Tina Ramirez, the founder of Ballet Hispanico, announced Monday that she was hanging up her shoes after 38 years as artistic director.
My Video Game Made Me Do It!
“The idea that video games and explicit media content are a threat to society is demonstrably false. Whatever evidence there might be that violent media content causes violent behavior, or that graphic sexual content stimulates unhealthy sexual behavior, there is a simple test that invariably proves otherwise.”
Landmark San Francisco Bookstore Closes
“Cody’s Books, the legendary Berkeley bookstore that catered to literati nationwide for more than half a century and was firebombed in the 1980s because of its support of the First Amendment, has closed its doors, the victim of lagging sales.”
How “Reality” TV Is Changing Documentaries
“In filming a sequel to a 2000 series about Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, ABC News producers found that reality television had changed how they could present reality on television.”
Publishers Expect More From Their Star Writers
“In an age when reading for pleasure is declining, book publishers increasingly are counting on their biggest moneymaking writers to crank out books at a rate of at least one a year, right on schedule, and sometimes faster than that.”
Web Video Finding Audiences. But Where’re The Audiences?
“It’s easier and cheaper than ever for individuals to produce their own work and put it up for global audiences – on sites like YouTube, Revver, Veoh and My Damn Channel – but it’s almost impossible to make a living outside of the established TV and film industry. While media analysts agree that the future of television will be online – the number of viewers who access video via the Web is expected to nearly quadruple by 2013 to at least 1 billion, according to a new study from ABI Research – no one knows what form Internet TV will take or how it will make money.”
Twyla Tharp – It’s A Guy Thing
“It is perhaps a disappointment, politically, that America’s foremost female choreographer has such an obsession with manliness, and with telling us that men can perform ballet without becoming homosexuals. But Tharp has a point: the movement style associated, in this country, with standard-issue virility–the way men get around on those big, shambly legs of theirs–is beautiful, and is rarely featured in ballet.”