If you follow one linky this week, make it this: Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in The Atlantic about the case for reparations for Black America. It’s an incredible piece, rigorous and searing and delivered in calm and measured tones but you can feel the acidic rage sitting underneath. Coates focuses on property as his way into racial divisions and the continuing reality of white supremacy; the stories in the last few linkys about the wasteland communities of New Jersey are given stark context here. It’s tough, challenging, and might just become one of those pieces that is referenced and remembered for decades after publication. Read it.
Why do we eat the way we do? We think we’re in charge of how we eat, but, nope.
Infographic: am I reading a Gothic novel?
Flaws only a protagonist could have.
Genuine headline: Crocodile injured by falling accountant
Psychic Sally falls flat in front of an audience in the UK. Fascinating to see how she loses the crowd here.
Everything is broken – this piece could also be titled “why your computer will never, ever be secure”
The New York Times lost 80 million homepage visitors—half the traffic to the nytimes.com page—in two years. The lack of vision/comprehension/courage within news organisations astonishes me. Even now, in 2014, digital-delivered news keeps pretending to be a newspaper. Madness. The NYT’s self-review on this subject is interesting reading – the full leaked report is here and I mean to give it a close read one of these days, in the meantime Nieman Labs has a great overview/summary of the key insights. Basically, the NYT knows it’s messing up, but it isn’t doing a great job of fixing that. Metadata is a huge mess, to pick one obvious sign of disarray.
I should link to my vision of the future of online news, a year ago on the Ruminator. The NYT is doing some things – the “Times Topics” present news aggregated by general topic, e.g. on Stop & Frisk, but it looks to me more like a search result page than something that has been curated. And that, I think, is where the future opportunities are for news organisations – curation and editorial direction at this level, instead of offloading that to an automated process.
The report did point me at a place that is trying to do some of the things I wondered why no-one was doing. Vox.com launched a couple months ago with an express aim of providing context to its news coverage, e.g. using what they call a “StoryStream”. Here’s an example on the Abramson ouster story, while we’re talking NYT. It’s pretty thin, and I mean that literally as well as figuratively – it links a bunch of stories vertically, sure, but where’s the horizontal links to other, related, issues and story streams? Nevertheless, it’s obviously been collated by a human with an eye toward noting how the pieces make up a larger story, so that’s something.
One media trend I didn’t discuss in that piece is the growing trend towards smartening up a longform piece using smart scrolling and dynamic images. (The one everyone cites is Snow Fall.) Certain kinds of feature journalism can work like this but the investment is high, and even then it feels like only a small step. Still, here’s a great example frm the last week: The Reykjavik Confessions: The mystery of why six people admitted roles in two murders – when they couldn’t remember anything about the crimes.
Why do people keep believing stuff even when they’re shown it isn’t true? This New Yorker piece has gone quite viral, even though it’s all quite old news. Depressing old news.
Should we have trigger warnings on academic classes?
David Lynch’s Return of the Jedi. (Lynch was offered the gig, but turned it down. This applies the full suite of Lynchisms to Jedi – it’s neat fun.) (via Andrew Watters)
Non-paradoxical Swedish poster (via Mike Sands)
The new Guardians of the Galaxy poster is terrible! The “fixed” version at this link is great.
So a couple linkys back I had a story about American Football coming to China. Here’s the very different story of American Football coming to India. Spoiler for the difference – the China league started because a young Chinese guy thought “this would be awesome!”, the India league started because a wealthy US woman thought “Indians need to learn how to be manly and also we can make money from this”.
Chart of the vocal ranges of popular/famous singers
And finally, the most scandalous photo in Doctor Who history, rendered in Lego.