Category: issues

“The [Rockford] City Council voted Aug. 11 to dissolve the Rockford Arts Commission, including releasing the remaining seven board members from their volunteer functions with the city.” Four of the 11 members “had recently resigned ‘because they didn’t like the drama’ of the conflict between the city and the members of the group.”

William Deresiewicz: Not, as people commonly believe, to entertain them in class and hand out easy A’s. That’s what they retreat to, once they see that nothing better is on offer. … They don’t want fun and games; they want the real thing.”

“The Italians, who are touring the region, are here out of curiosity because Ray and Carrie Cash moved their family to Dyess in 1935 and the fourth of their seven children became a music great whose influence and appeal endure worldwide more than a decade after his death.”

“How to cope with an an almost infinite access to information is one of the questions of our age. You can see why ephemeral and anonymized messaging services such as Snapchat and Secret are growing rapidly. Social norms are shifting rapidly.”

Comments “belong on personal blogs, or on Twitter or Tumblr or Reddit, where individuals build a full, searchable body of work and can be judged accordingly. Hell, put them all on Medium, and let Evan Williams try to sell the douche bags to BMW.”

“I’m both appalled and wryly amused that Amazon’s tactics should come straight out of Orwell’s own nightmare dystopia, 1984.”

“Archaeologists around the world, who have long relied on the classic tools of their profession, like the trowel and the plumb bob, are now turning to the modern technology of drones to defend and explore endangered sites. And perhaps nowhere is the shift happening as swiftly as in Peru.”

There are more out-of-use terminals around than you’d think, some of them architectural landmarks (Saarinen’s TWA terminal at JFK) and all of them expensive. Jonathan Glancey looks at what’s been tried, from the triumphant repurposing of Berlin Tempelhof to Saarinen’s building to poor old Montreal Mirabel.

Some pundits, and Silicon valley types with cloud software to sell, keep arguing that email is an antiquated, dying technology. But no: “You can’t kill email! It’s the cockroach of the Internet, and I mean that as a compliment. This resilience is a good thing.” Alexis Madrigal explains why.

“I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web. The fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services.” Ethan Zuckerman, who wrote the code for the very first pop-up ad, points out some downsides of the ad-based business model and argues that there’s still time to come to Jesus work out a better system.