My post from a few weeks back featuring video of one Elske de Wall singing Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love” in Frisian has been getting a steady stream of traffic lately thanks to Theresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden—inspiring me to share some more Netherlandish music. This time it’s Dutch supergroup The Nits (I’ve been a …
Technology & Media
Jim Cramer has a thing about Jon Stewart, and other revelations
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This is a (much-abridged) video of my interview for TIME’s 10 Questions with CNBC’s Jim Cramer. And here’s the print version. I know some of you deeply disapprove of him. And I admit that it’s a weirdly constrained interview, given that my job was simply to ask questions posed by TIME.com …
The career-killers at nytimes.com
I’ve been steamed for years because, when fortune.com became money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/, the Time Warner powers that be saw fit to delete from existence out all web-only content that had previously resided on fortune.com, including the ‘London Calling’ columns I wrote every week in 2000 and 2001. Well, I’m still steamed, but not as …
TIME 100: Paul Krugman makes me cry, Ayaan Hirsi Ali says she’s proud of me, and I squeeze out one lousy Tweet
I ran into Paul Krugman on the street yesterday afternoon. I asked him if he was going to the TIME 100 dinner that night (he’s on the list). He sort of sighed and said yeah—adding that he’d agreed to speak for two minutes and was having trouble coming up with something “uplifting” to say. I chortled and said we hadn’t put him on the …
The other half of the Conde Nast story (newspapers)
My initial reaction to last week’s news that Conde Nast Portfolio was closing down was so selfish that it kept me from blogging on the subject: Roger Lowenstein was gonna review my book in the June issue. And now there won’t be a June issue. What a travesty!
Well, now I’ve read John Koblin’s epic telling of the Portfolio saga in the New …
You don’t really know Leonard Cohen until you’ve heard him in Frisian
I heard this on my favorite Dutch radio show a while back, and when I discovered today that it’s on YouTube, I could not but share. It’s the Leonard Cohen song “Dance me to the end of love,” sung by Frisian singer-songwriter Elske de Wall and what appears to be her sister Femke. Sung in Frisian, of course (the new title, “Dunsje my de …
The Kindle has a future, and other revelations from fourth graders
I spent 90 100 minutes this morning being interrogated by Curious Capitalist Jr.’s fourth grade class. He didn’t ask any questions, but his classmates sure did. This was partly because they knew they had to take a math test as soon as I left, and thus had ample incentive to prolong my visit, but it was still impressive. Just to …
The Guardian becomes the first all-Twitter newspaper
Big news from London:
Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication.
The move, described as
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How Achewood is killing the American newspaper
In his paean to Webcomic Achewood the other day, my fellow time.com blogger Lev Grossman mentioned in passing that “I always loved comic strips—that was the sole reason my family ever bought the Boston Globe growing up.”
That got me thinking. There’s been a ton written about how Craigslist is wiping out the newspaper classified …