Rav Casley Gera

For suburban kids hitting their stride during the Clinton years, there weren’t very many love songs to choose from. There was plenty of raging against the machine and Pavement-style irony to go around, but romance was generally the subject of mockery. In order to break through the era’s postmodern glaze, you either had to be an outcast, or be too comically self-indulgent to notice the world around you. Billy Corgan, at least for a time, was both.

I’m not sure if “Luna” should really be in Nerve.com’s 25 Greatest Love Songs of the 1990s, but it’s hard to disagree with the above.

God she’s fascinating. Under different circumstances I suspect she might have made a formidable politician.

This image of a Montana mountain at Sunrise really is something.

I have to tell you that, over the course of several years, as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors, when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that, for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.

Barack Obama

Well, he got there in the end.

Buzzfeed’s Katie Notopolous risks taking on the prevailing online consensus that piracy is basically victimless, at least for big producers:

I worked at major movie studios for years, and I know exactly the consequences of movie piracy. I was around for several rounds of massive layoffs at studios where thousands of jobs were eliminated. There is a direct and real effect on a large American industry. While Tom Cruise or the president of the studio doesn’t see a dent in his paycheck, you might see the entire accounting department outsourced to trim overhead.

If that sounds too much like a sad Detroit auto industry sob story — the fault of an industry that failed to evolve – here’s the sobering truth that film executives won’t outright say: they ARE adapting. They’re adapting by making terrible movies. And it’s actually a sound business move.

First, several studios shuttered their arthouse imprints like Picturehouse and Warner Independent in the past few years. So no more “good” movies that don’t make huge profits. Then, they cut their slates, meaning that they used to release about 15 movies and year, and cut that to around 11. That’s why sometimes you look at the movie listings and it seems like there’s nothing new and good out that week. It also means each movie has to be more of a sure bet.

That’s why there’s turd torpedos like Battleship based on a toy franchise, and that’s why there will be endlessly unneeded sequels like Hangover Part III. That’s why Katherine Heigl could drive a Lamborghini off a cliff every month for a year if she wanted.

It’s piracy’s fault. Don’t pirate. Don’t give Katherine Heigl a Lamborghini.

To the Editor:

I had the great pleasure of reading your unsolicited critique of the “Ch-Check It Out” music video ["Licensed to Stand Still" by Stephanie Zacharek, May 16]. It took some time to get to me, as it had to be curried (sp?) on goatback through the fjords of my homeland, the Oppenzell. And in the process the goat died, and then I had to give the mailman one of my goats, so remember, you owe me a goat.

Anyway, that video is big time good. Pauline Kael is spinning over in her grave. My film technique is clearly too advanced for your small way of looking at it. Someday you will be yelling out to the streets below your windows: “He is the chancellor of all the big ones! I love his genius! I am the most his close personal friend!”

You journalists are ever lying. I remember people like you laughing at me at the university, and now they are all eating off of my feet. You make this same unkind laughter at the Jerry Lewis for his Das Verruckte Professor and now look, he is respected as a French-clown. And you so-call New York Times smarties are giving love to the U2 because they are dressing as the Amish and singing songs about America? (Must I dress as the Leprechaun to sing songs about Ireland so that you will love me? You know the point I make here is true!)

In concluding, “Ch-Check It Out” is the always best music film and you will be realizing this too far passing. As ever I now wrap my dead goat carcass in the soiled New York Times — and you are not forgetting to buy me a replacement! Please send that one more goat to me now!

NATHANIAL HORNBLOWER

… a.k.a. Adam Yauch. RIP.

I was like, ‘Why did I do that? Why did I get so invested in that Batman story? How much more evidence do I need that the machine doesn’t care about my vision?’

And I got back to work and got a phone call that ‘Firefly’ was cancelled.

poor old Joss Whedon.

If anything is taught at all in the public schools about homosexuality, it should be limited to a simple definition in the 12th grade psychology textbook under crimes against nature, along with incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, human trafficking, beastiality and suicide.

- Salt Lake City resident Michael Jarvis

Latifah’s size makes her less feminine to the white feminine aesthetic paradigm, but she has, nonetheless, starred in blockbuster romantic comedies like “Last Holiday” and “Just Wright.”

- Washington Blade

“As a concerned Israeli citizen who lives in the state of Israel with his family and all of his children and grandchildren, I love very much the courage of those who live 10,000 miles away from the state of Israel and are ready that we will make every possible mistake that will cost lives of Israelis.”

Ehud Olmert, slamming Netanyahu’s stance on Iran and his American supporters, in front of an audience of… American Netanyahu supporters.

The audience reportedly shouted “Neville Chamberlain” at the man who spearheaded Israel’s 2008-9 Gaza offensive. Which is insane and depressing.

The Guardian reports on Britain’s ghastly economic outlook:

Official figures showed the economy contracted in the first three months of the year after a poor performance before Christmas. This meant it registered two consecutive quarters of negative growth, the standard definition of a recession. The economy is now in its longest depression for 100 years, with little sign of regaining its previous record output before 2014.

A silver lining was provided by a CBI survey of the manufacturing sector that pointed to a recovery in sales and confidence, albeit from one of its worst slumps on record in January. And a survey by the British Retail Consortium found an increasing willingness by shop owners to hire workers. More than 3,000 jobs were created, mainly by large supermarkets opening new stores.

But HSBC, Britain’s largest bank, offset this news when it announced plans to shed 2,000 staff in its UK retail division over the next year as part of a worldwide redundancy programme. Banks have cut thousands of jobs in the past few years to reduce costs and cope with a sharp slowdown in business caused by the financial crisis and subsequent drop in lending.

The good news: that long-awaited rebalancing is happening. The bad news: manufacturing is growing far slower than finance is shrinking.

And yes, you read that right: the longest depression for 100 years. We’re doing worse than during the Great Depression.

Joe Weisenthal of BusinessInsider has done a wonderful thing by charting UK GDP against the Eurozone and the US. As before, you can see the exact moment Britain changed government and – in that ‘emergency’ budget just a month later – embarked on George Osborne’s breakneck spending-reduction plan. But now you can see how growth in the US and Eurozone – both of which have hardly been without their structural problems (the Eurozone, for Christ’s sake!) but have prioritised growth in their deficit-reduction plans.

As Weisenthal writes: “Basically we have a life test of a country that wants to do what conservatives in the US want to do: reduce national debt. Doing so is a growth disaster.”

Atlantic editor Robert Wright and New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg have had an interesting conversation about procrastination. Duhigg’s theory is that when you click onto Twitter when you’re stuck on a sentence when you’re writing, that’s actually an entirely appropriate response – distracting your conscious brain while your subconscious works on the knotty problem. (This, presumably, is why it’s so socially acceptable for executives to play endless golf.)

The problem, though, as Wright points out, is that it’s never a two-minute Twitter break, is it? It’s a twenty-minute, or hour-long Twitter break, or BBC News break, or Daily Mail break, or The Verge break, or whatever it is you’re into.

Duhigg goes on in another clip to suggest some tools for rewarding yourself for stopping these breaks after an allotted amount of time. But I think that’s missing the point. The thing that makes the internet such a pernicious driver of procrastination – apart from the fact that it exists on the same screen which we’re trying to work on, so is terrifyingly easy to stray into – is that it is essentially infinite, but appears finite.

When I’ve read five minutes of Twitter, I’m not thinking about the five minute’s worth of Tweets I’ve read, or the seven articles I’ve added to my already-overflowing Instapaper queue – I’m thinking about all the Tweets I’ve yet to read. I want to keep scrolling, keep reading. But not in the way that, when my alarm goes off in the morning, I want to stay in bed. It’s not that I want another five minutes of the experience of being in Twitter. It’s that I’ve only gone back through the last three hours of my news stream, and there are so many other tweets from before that time that I feel I ought to read. In my head, there is a manageable amount of information there which I can – and perhaps even should, in order to be an interesting and enlightened person – consume.

In this way, media-based procrastination is different to experiential procrastination. If I take a break by playing solitaire, I may finish a game and immediately want to play another one. But I know that after that second game, I’ll only want to play a third; it’s inherently infinite and thus carrying on is inherently pointless. But with the internet, while there’s always something new out there to read, we usually feel like it’s possible to read ‘all there is to read.’ To scroll through all the new tweets until you get to the ones you read last night in bed. To read through all the new articles on your favourite news site until you get to the ones you read on the bus home last evening. There seems to be a finite amount of new stuff to consume, so you allow yourself to aim to consume it all. You turn what was supposed to be a break from your allotted task into a task.

The solution? Somehow, to visualise the internet not as an in-tray of information to be scanned, triaged, and either addressed or discarded; but as a river of information to be dipped into and out of at will. The irony is that, the sillier the aspects of the internet you look at for procrastination purposes, the less likely you’ll be to convince yourself that you ‘need’ or ‘should’ keep on with them past the two- or five- or seven-minute mark. It’s easy to convince yourself you ‘should’ keep up with what your Twitter contacts were saying 12 hours ago, in case you miss something interesting. It’s hard to say that about watching the latest video of an anaesthetised child saying the darnedest things.

Reading news might seem more worthwhile but, if it means you take longer away from the actual task your’e supposed to be doing, it’s a cost, not a benefit. Of course, the same could be said, for most of us, for writing blog posts. But that’s another post. One I really should write later, before I finish this article I’m supposed to be writing.

The BBC reports on stupid plans for stick-on contactless payment cards:

The British Retail Consortium BRC estimates that accepting cash payments costs shops on average 1.7p per transaction, but a bank charges the shop on average about 9.2p per transaction for debit card transactions and 37.1p for credit card transactions.

As someone who avoids cash like the plague, I worry about the effect of growing debit card use on small shops. But it’s clear that credit cards are the real problem. I wonder if local stores can be convinced to retain their £5 minimum spend for credit cards, but lower it to £1 or £2 for debit?

I’m a little surprised that the Daily Telegraph agreed to let Save the Children CEO Justin Forsyth ‘report’ the findings of his own organisation’s research into aid effectiveness – isn’t this inherently better billed as an opinion piece? – but the facts speak for themselves, and are cheering:

Four million fewer children aged under five died in 2010 than in 1990. Over 50 million more children were enrolled in school in the last decade. 131 countries now have over 90 per cent immunisation coverage for diphtheria, tetanus and major preventable childhood diseases such as measles, compared to just 63 in 1990…

The Guardian’s Larry Elliott analyses the decline in aid from OECD countries last year:

The golden era for aid is now over, for the time being at least. Pledges made at Gleneagles in 2005, when the economic outlook was benign and western countries were flush – have not been met. The financial climate is now a lot more hostile, and politicians in rich countries are finding it hard to justify spending more on poor people in poor countries when they are cutting spending on poor people at home.

Because the Make Poverty History campaign was so successful in cementing support for 0.7% in the UK, it’s often forgotten that the Gleneagles commitments have been largely abandoned by several of the G8 since the economic crisis.

Much ink has been spilled over the fact that the confirmation of Jim Yong Kim as World Bank president maintains the tradition of the US president choosing a countryman to head the institution. But it also means a more qualified female candidate has been beaten to an important international role by a less qualified male.

This despite the fact that development has become more and more focused on women and girls in the last decade.

Just saying.

Representatives of Harvey Weinstein:

We appreciate that Bret Easton Ellis took the time to go see ‘Bully’ and tweet a review. We look forward to reviewing his next project as well.

Don’t piss off the punisher.

From Escapist Magazine, a Bio of Nintendo legend Gunpei Yokoi:

Since the late ’70s, Nintendo had been experimenting with the home videogame market, and by 1983, the company was ready to release its first gaming console, the Famicom (NES). But that was the same year the infant videogame industry, wracked with price wars and a glut of crappy titles, crashed spectacularly. Faced with indifferent customers and bargain bins brimming with videogames, retailers refused to stock more consoles. Nintendo realized it needed a clever marketing ploy to trick store owners into supplying the Famicom.

Again, Yokoi saved the day, this time by devising the Robotic Operating Buddy, or R.O.B. (the Famicom Robot in Japan). Released in 1985, the R.O.B. was a one-foot tall toy automaton that didn’t do much of anything, except consume AA batteries at an alarming rate. But the R.O.B. was bundled in the NES Deluxe Set, which also included a console, a Zapper gun, two controllers and two games (Duck Hunt and Gyromite). This clever packaging convinced retailers that the NES was not a videogame console but a robotic toy, and stores hesitant to stock other videogame products ordered the Deluxe Set instead. The trick worked: In its first year, the NES sold more than 1 million units, and having served its purpose, Yokoi’s R.O.B. was quickly dropped from the line-up the next year.

I have a R.O.B upstairs, and while it’s clearly a gimmick, it’s sad to realise it’s such a cynical marketing tool.

A cheering trend, for sure, but the numbers in America are still astonishingly high, no?

(via The Economist)

TIME:

Former Senior Airman Brian Kolfage, a security forces airman, holds his wife, Ashley, on his lap as the couple looks out over the water on Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii. Kolfage was one of the first Airmen deployed to Iraq in 2003 at the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom. During a trip to the chow hall, a mortar flew over the walls of his camp and landed less than 10 feet from him. Kolfage barely escaped with his life and is the most injured surviving Airman from any war. Sept. 9, 2011.

Remarkably, SrA Lauren R. Main’s photo is only in third place in Time’s 2011 Military Photographer of the Year competition.

The Verge:

“After more than 250,000 votes, Consumerist readers ultimately decided that the type of greed exhibited by EA, which is supposed to be making the world a more fun place, is worse than Bank of America’s avarice, which some would argue is the entire point of operating a bank.”

Not that the internet takes video games too seriously or anything.

Revealed: The Artwork of Kurt Cobain

This is a lot better than I was expecting.

Freshers’ week is completely different to the rest of university life. Ask any student and they will tell you that freshers’ is the only time when everybody talks to everybody, without any social hang-ups or pretensions. There is definitely something that changes once it is over. Cliques begin to form. The very large rugby boys all end up together endlessly discussing the complexities of protein powder. Girls studying English flock together in a sea of berets and roll-up cigarettes. The Pippa Middleton RAH set battle it out to see who has the most horses and the most surnames. Everybody from London keeps on being friends with everybody they previously knew from London. And, in Bristol at least, a handful of bewildered Northerners form a Rugby League scrum and take refuge in nostalgic memories of pies and coal.

Not that much has changed in the last ten years, clearly.

>> “Don’t cut freshers’ week, we need it”

Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in western popular culture, but in reality, our cynicism advances the desires of the powerful: cynicism is obedience.

- Alex Steffen

Tony Benn used to say that the government should take over the Times and run it along the lines of the BBC to combat press bias.

He kind of got his wish: the BBC website is now the main news source for a quarter of the population, more than any newspaper.

Yes, the election was at exactly the point things tipped downward.

Data from ONS, via The Guardian

TIME Magazine has just published one of those perennial ‘X ideas that will change X’ issues that magazines love so much these days. Specifically, this time it’s ’10 Ideas That Are Changing Your Life.’ Environmental correspondent Bryan Walsh has contributed Episode 9, ‘Nature is Over’ (£).

It introduces any readers out there who haven’t heard of it to the idea of the ‘anthropocene,’ the theory that human activity now has such a vast influence on the Earth’s climate that we’ve entered a new geological epoch. And it argues that we need to abandon a ‘protect the wilderness’ model of environmentalism for something more interventionary, seeing the planet as a single ecosystem and actively managing our impact on it. “Our ability to comprehend the full extent of the human impact on earth puts us in a unique position as planetary gardeners, a responsibility we have no choice but to take on,” he argues.

Hmm. I’m not going to try to delve into this one here, though the idea of the anthropocene seems to me a compelling one. What’s really striking about the article, though, is the impressive collection of novel (to me at least) statistics and factoids Walsh summons to emphasise the sheer scale of humanity’s influence on the Earth’s ecosystem. Here are a few:

• Homo sapiens has been around for “less than 1% of 1% of the earth’s 4.5 billion-year history.”
• “Almost 90% of the world’s plant activity now takes place in ecosystems where people play a significant role.”
• “38% of the earth’s ice-free land has been cleared and cultivated for farming.”
• The biologist E.O. Wilson describes the rate of humanity’s growth as “more bacterial than primate.” (He has presumably been watching The Matrix.)

And my personal favourite:

“Today the total human biomass is a hundred times as great as that of any other large animal species that has ever walked the earth.”

Which, I mean, well.

Well, it’s official: Google+ is a failure. At least, it’s been declared one by the influential blog TechCrunch.

“Could Google+ ever have been anything but a failure?” asks writer Devin Coldewey. Coldewey says that he considers Plus a good product, but “There’s no one engaging with it. There are, of course, some people on it, but it’s hardly at a level that would make it what Google obviously intended it to be.”

Or, as a friend of mine put it to me earlier this week, “no-one goes on there except for you, Rav, Google programmers and the Dalai Lama.”

I think this is a crying shame. Sure, Google+ never had a rat in hell’s chance of being the new Facebook. But it could have been something potentially more important: the new Twitter.

And Twitter really needs to be replaced.

The new public square

Endless column inches have been devoted, deservedly, to Facebook and its impact on the world. And as a tool for helping people connect and organise, it’s without parallel – witness its role in helping kick off Egypt’s Tahrir Square protests.

But on a day-to-day basis it’s on Twitter, not Facebook, that serious civic engagement and discussion happens online. Most journalists and public intellectuals are active on Twitter and barely visible, at least publicly, on Facebook.

A vast public conversation, with serious minds and ordinary Joe’s taking part, all with equal status? That sounds remarkably like the online incarnation of Jurgen Habermas’ ideal of the public sphere. The potential for such a vivid, rapid-fire and radically open conversation is immense. My personal Twitter feed is packed with friends, thinkers and people of note from all over the world. I should be frothing with excitement every day at the thought of logging on and seeing what’s being talked about.

But I’m not. Instead, reading through Twitter seems a complete chore, because it means decoding bizarre IRL-speak, looking at ugly visible web links, and generally feeling like you’re in a late-90s bulletin board.

To pick a random example I noticed this morning: John Kerry. The Twitter feed of a veteran senator and former presidential candidate ought to be fascinating, and he’s certainly engaged with it. But instead I read things like this:

great start to day with prezHS and @IAFFNewsDesk brothers, FF loyal in IA/NH/’04 straight thru today—
John Kerry (@JohnKerry) March 27, 2012

Anyone want to take a turn at translating that?

Of course, some people are better than others at dealing with Twitter’s increasingly tiresome 140-character limit. But the strictures of the medium, rather than simply creating brevity as the founders hoped, have created inaccessible code. It’s no wonder Twitter has a terrible problem with users signing up and never logging in again – it’s just not human-friendly.

A lovely, empty place

Compared to that, visiting Google+ is like moving from a noisy Tower of Babel to a friendly bar where everyone speaks your language. People use sentences. They post links, and you can see a neat preview of the page they’ve linked to. People can comment on your posts easily, and you can easily see what they’ve said.

None of this is unique, of course – Google+ is a Facebook clone to a remarkable extent. But while Facebook is dominant in the field of social – as in, people communicating with their real-life contacts – Google+ could have brought this human-friendly functionality to the public square.

Why has it failed? In part, I suspect, because Google simply didn’t market it the right way. Much of Google’s promotion of Plus presented it as a social tool – for example, users are automatically given ‘Circles’ for ‘Friends’ and ‘Family’, while Twitter encourages you to ‘Follow Your Interests.’ Google even risked the rage of the internet by demanding users sign up with their real names, just like Facebook.

But we didn’t need a new social service – Facebook has this wrapped up. What the web desperately needed was a new public-square service, one which used the same asymmetrical, open model of Twitter but with content that ordinary humans could make sense of. One which managed to combine the speed and vivacity of Twitter with a richer standard of writing closer to that of the blogosphere.

Why didn’t Google promote Plus that way? Sadly, because owning the leading online discussion forum wouldn’t provide it with the vital data it wanted from social. Google created Plus in large part to obtain the kind of data on social connections – who we’re friends with, who we listen to – that Facebook has in spades. That meant encouraging Google+ users to connect to their real-life contacts. Google doesn’t need me to follow a bunch of tech journalists on Google+ to know I’m interested in technology – they already know my search results.

Can Google+ be revived? I fear not. The tech-heavy audience using the service looks all too like the crowd that populated Buzz and Wave, Google’s previous ill-fated social projects, both now cancelled. For the time being, the new public square remains reliant on Twitter, albeit with blogs (like this one) resorted to anytime anyone wants to say anything in more than 140 characters.