At every increment of improvement in human history somebody got pissed off and said, ‘This can be better, this must be better.’ To be an optimist has to mean being a critic. The enemy of the future is not the pessimist but the complacent person. | | | | Tatum O'Neal and Kristy McNichol in LITTLE DARLINGS. 1980. Movie poster, creases and all...
(Paramount Pictures) | | | | | | “At every increment of improvement in human history somebody got pissed off and said, ‘This can be better, this must be better.’ To be an optimist has to mean being a critic. The enemy of the future is not the pessimist but the complacent person.”
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| | rantnrave:// I just got back from a very relaxing (and exhausting) long weekend in ASPEN, COLORADO. I don't normally test myself. Sometimes I'm lazy. If I pick up something immediately, I stick with it. If not, not so much. Trying to change that (given I do curiosity for a living) so I can challenge myself in all sorts of ways. So, three years after a horrendous heart surgery, I went to see what this rebuilt thing could do. From Thursday to Sunday I hiked 40 miles at a high altitude. Including SMUGGLER MOUNTAIN for the first time. The baby of Aspen but still a big deal for me. I'm proud of myself, which is a rarity. Only snag? The minute my friend KARYN GERSCHEL LAMB and I reached the top, a massive rain and hail storm with ridiculous winds pounded us. We hid under the viewing platform, literally under it, on the cliff for about 30 minutes. Replete with hypothermia. I took it in stride, just another story. That's saying something given I'm usually CHIEF COMPLAINING OFFICER. Karyn, not so much. Yapped every minute of the 30. If this was a bank robbery and they took hostages, the hostages would have killed Karyn. I loved every minute of it... Thinking about how many important stories journalists, good journalists, need to tell every day. As the industry shrinks. I wonder if there is a more efficient way for organizations to work together so that the important coverage doesn't taper off. As a curator, I read thousands of stories a month. The duplication is astounding and often doesn't add anything. In fact, the duplication is usually without new reporting or any at all. We have news agencies such as REUTERS and THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. I imagine that helps. But was thinking about this and would love your thoughts. We've confused punditry with journalism and we need the best fact-based journalism more than ever right now... JONATHAN GOLD opened people's minds, hearts, and stomachs to the forgotten, the unknown and the underappreciated, from taco trucks to haute cuisine. He tended to prefer the taco trucks. And he changed the way Angelenos thought about food, their city and each other. We remember him with this tasting menu of his best writing. My friend, JAMIE PATRICOF (aka CHINESE FOOD KID, aka a very good foodie newsletter), gives us an overview in MediaSET: "Our Menus, Ourselves: The Best of Jonathan Gold"... My baby niece AMELIE (aka AMELICIOUS) goes to sleep away camp today. I'm proud of her, but a little choked up. And I'm just the uncle. I get no board seat. Just an observer seat. And I have to submit all complaints in writing. Thank god she isn't going to CAMP MOHAWK... COURTNEY BARNETT's "Nameless, Faceless" started life as three different songs. Drake's "In My Feelings" was born of many samples and many female friends. THE B-52S' "Rock Lobster" began as a slide on the wall at a run-down Atlanta disco. Those songs and more, traced back to the source. MusicREDEF's MATTY KARAS explores in "Behind the Song, Vol. 8." The link was broken last week, but subscribe to his newsletter. It's the best music interest remix in the world... Happy Birthday to LARRY AIDEM, CHRISTINA NORMAN, DANNY TURKEWITZ, ADAM STOTSKY, LEAH CONTE, NICOLE HEATHER SLAVEN. Belated to RICHARD GREENFIELD, GREG BRODY, RUZWANA BASHIR, BILLY PARKS, CHRISTOPHER M. SCHROEDER, LILY NEUMEYER, DAVE SMITH, AMANDA MARKSSAM TOLES, CHARLIE O'DONNELL, URSA PHILBIN, MATT HARRITON, ALEX HUNTER, KEN LI, ROB HAYES, RACHEL STEIN DICKINSON, CHRISTOS MICHAEL COTSAKOS, MICHAEL ABBATTISTA, BILL STRATTON, and MICHAEL FINN. | | | - Jason Hirschhorn, curator |
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| Latest Mueller indictment offers excruciating details to confirm known election pwnage. | | |
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| Kelly Posner Gerstenhaber, PhD, director and founder of the Columbia Lighthouse Project, shares her thoughts about identifying and treating depression. | | |
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| Popular music has always delivered social critique. But it’s struggled to grapple with the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. | | |
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| Advertising, once a creative industry, is now a data-driven business reliant on algorithms. The implications are deeply sinister - not only for the consumer but for democracy itself. | | |
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| On Amazon Prime Day warehouse workers around the world took action against the company. We hear about some of the organizing going on in fulfillment centers from Germany to New Jersey. | | |
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| There's more to the story of Keith Cooper and Chris Parish, who spent years in prison for a crime they didn't commit. It's a story about Elkhart County justice. | | |
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| While I was mostly unplugged on my vacation last week, with the news of Facebook's disappointing earnings report and subsequent stock decline - the largest one-day loss by any company in U.S. stock market history - I couldn't resist chiming in on Twitter: I do regret the tweet a tad, and not only because "chiming in on Twitter" is always risky. | | |
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| Behind the industry’s elevated reputation: Dozens of artists say they are victims. | | |
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| Helios and Matheson Information Technology (HMIT), a defunct Indian tech company, stands accused in its home country of defrauding 5,000 or more creditors, including banks and senior citizens. Helios and Matheson Analytics (HMNY), the owner of popular movie-theater subscription service MoviePass, was created by HMIT over a decade ago, after HMIT bought and renamed a New York consulting firm. | | |
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| AMC Entertainment announced a $19.95/month subscription last month called the AMC Stubs A-List for movie-goers to see up to 3 movies per week at its theaters (Stubs is their rewards program). This is a big experiment for AMC - the largest exhibitor chain (aka cinema chain) in the world - not least because its CEO Adam Aron has been very critical of MoviePass, which set off a rush of interest in subscription cinema packages after dropping its price from $50/mo to $10/mo last August and... | | |
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| Spotify's Director Of Economics, Will Page, explains how the music industry's size is accelerating | | |
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| This list is part of Turning the Tables, an ongoing project from NPR Music dedicated to recasting the popular music canon in more inclusive – and accurate – ways. This year's list, selected by a panel of more than 70 women and non-binary writers, celebrates artists whose work is changing this century's sense of what popular music can be. | | |
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| Can an FPS compete with the NFL? | | |
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| Israeli Arabs are being made second-class citizens. This form of apartheid violates the commitment to equality, writes the conductor and activist Daniel Barenboim | | |
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| Kevin Mitnick was once the world’s most wanted hacker. He broke into 40 major companies for the challenge of it, and he eventually got caught in a spectacular cat-and-mouse game. He did five years in prison, including a year in solitary confinement because the judge in his case was told that he might be able to launch nuclear weapons from a payphone. | | |
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| Beautycon is the Super Bowl of the beauty industry, where new products are unveiled and celebrities show up to launch their forays into the lucrative makeup business. | | |
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| I went looking for other men who consider mutual masturbation an important sexual experience in its own right. | | |
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| What is the definition of a sport to you? Does golf count? Poker? Curling? This article examines the parameters of what truly defines a a sport and how our traditional definition of the word maybe on the cusp of change. | | |
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| Some say Fidel Castro personally invented the recipe, redolent in milk, cream, and sugar, for Cuba's national ice cream. | | |
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| Susan Gerbic's team of over 100 editors are responsible for some of Wikipedia’s most trafficked pages about UFOs and other pseudoscience. | | |
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| Researchers find evidence that neural systems actively remove memories, suggesting that forgetting may be the default mode of the brain. | | |
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