It sometimes seems as though this new technology is the major change in the popular-music scene. People may therefore assume that the continuing decline in CD sales represents merely a shift to music downloads. In fact, the decline is greater than that explanation would allow. People are buying less music today than in previous years. While the effects of downloading are often discussed, it's not just the music-delivery system that has changed. What we have long considered to be mass culture has increasingly become a collection of niche cultures.

Where Have All the Rock Stars Gone?

This episode is awesome. Behold the power of radio.

Stories of summer camp. People who love camp say that non-camp people simply don't understand what's so amazing about camp. In this program, we attempt to bridge the gap of misunderstanding between camp people and non-camp people.

Episode 109: Notes on Camp | This American Life

If you read only one or two articles referenced in this week's NYT Sampler post, I recommend that you check out Julian Dibbell's feature story on The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer, and Lisa Sanders' story of medical diagnosis, Full-Body Failure. Both articles are from the Sunday NYT Magazine.

Everyone else started with the bloody diarrhea. Maybe that was the wrong way to think about it.

As a matter of everyday practice, it is the farmers who catch it in the face.

We crave endings for the same reason that some religious sects look forward to the Apocalypse - because it's the ending that gives shape and meaning to the otherwise random events that precede it.

... goat, the most widely consumed meat in the world ...

... as much gratuitous bouncing as the rating will permit ...

"When someone calls you in and says 'I have to let you go,' and offers no explanation, you connect the dots."

Those sounds of silence suggest that the White House is grappling with a dilemma.

US Ambassador Says Iraq Not Hopeless

The question that the conference was really exploring was this: How can we make every African family richer?

Twelve hours a night, seven nights a week, with only two or three nights off per month, this is what Li does - for a living. ... earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less.

Don't you understand that these places can't change and that you're much better off having someone with a heavy hand, who can have some kind of order versus disorder?

"We're kind of saying, What is the next boom?" said the Senator. "I think it is a hard question to answer and I think it's wise for us to talk kind of beyond the boom-and-bust path we've been on. Why does it have to be a boom and bust? When will we get ourselves on a more sustainable path?"

Think about it for a moment. How far do housing prices have to fall before a slump becomes a bust?

"This is all black," said Ms. Wang, dismissively. "... [ Read More (2.0k in body) ]

Many moons ago, I posed the question:

Is there a market for a monthly magazine that is a cross between Vogue and Foreign Affairs?

Well, I recently learned that Jezebel took a cut at what such a magazine might look like:

'Jane's Defence Weekly' is a weekly military mag covering topics pertinent to national and international defense and security, and the main reason our dad was impressed this one time we told him we were writing a story for 'Jane' magazine. Below, we take the pun wayyyy further than we ever probably should have by asking 'Jane's Defence Weekly' reporter Nathan Hodge to interpret world events in the flip, casual, sophomoric voice a 'Jane' reader would understand!

Here's a snippet:

Q: Angelina Jolie was just named to the Council on Foreign Relations. Do celebrities really help solve anything?
Hodge: I think Angelina Jolie would do a better job of winning hearts and minds then say, [former Bush flack] Karen Hughes, who recently did a a listening tour of the Middle East as the lead State Department outreach person for boosting America's image in the Middle East. It was a failure. The problem you have in the military is that there's a belief you can invent a ray gun that you can zap people with and they will like you. The way you want to go about solving conflicts it is by improving your information campaign--winning hearts and minds of people. It's like how we won the Cold War - we won because people didn't want to wear shoes made in Leningrad and wanted to listen to bootleg Deep Purple records.

Q: Are all the celebs trying to heal Africa right now, or are any of them digging missile defense?
Hodge: Do you know who Jeff Skunk Baxter is?

Q: Uh, no?
Hodge: He was in the Doobie Brothers. He's really into missile defense.

Q: Whoa, so he is! Weird.

Oh, Skunk rocks! I heard him rant about how electronic collaboration should be more like great jazz. (Or something. It was a while back.)

That's So Jane's! Miss Universe As A Metaphor For Geopolitics

Doubtlessly, modern technology has radically altered the surveillance process. What it has not done, however, is render physical pre-operational surveillance obsolete. Despite innovative Internet tools, a person sitting in an Internet cafe in Quetta, Pakistan, cannot get everything he or she needs to plan and execute a terrorist attack in New York. There are still many things that can only be seen in person, making eyes-on surveillance vital to pre-operational planning. And, as long as actual physical surveillance is required, countersurveillance will remain a key tool for proactively preventing terrorist attacks.

Surveillance in the Information Age

WSJ ponders the recent FCC case.

It's the most amusing legal read in a long time ... but, for no reason immediately obvious, unprintable in a daily newspaper.

On keeping polite society separate from Paulie Walnuts society

Edward Tufte is most likely the world’s only graphic designer with roadies.

... on the road, selling steadily, a few gigs a month, year after year ... six-and-a-half-hour presentations, the audience starts cheering when he hits the floor ... "500 people want to talk afterwards, and I’ve exhausted myself ... I have to go hide out. Otherwise it takes hours."

If you are making a presentation, you can probably say everything you need to on a single folded sheet of eleven-by-seventeen copy paper, and you ought to.

Beautiful Evidence is all that and more. Here's Business Week:

"Edward Tufte's Beautiful Evidence is a masterpiece from a pioneer in the field of data visualization. His book is brilliant. The Galileo of graphics has done it again. It's not often an iconoclast comes along, trashes the old ways, and replaces them with an irresistible new interpretation. By teasing out the sublime from the seemingly mundane world of charts, graphs, and tables, Tufte has proven to a generation of graphic designers that great thinking begets great presentation. In Beautiful Evidence, his fourth work on analytical design, Tufte digs more deeply into art and science to reveal very old connections between truth and beauty -- all the way from Galileo to Google."

Tufte and the Triumph of Good Design

Decius wrote:

These articles are short and to the point. ... Unfortunately, many require a subscription to read in full.

I was able to locate alternate sources for the full text of some articles that were walled off at the magazine's web site. Along the way I also found a few other items of potential interest.

A Patently Simple Idea By Sebastian Mallaby

Fighting Poverty: What Works?

Esther Duflo: "Sometimes ideas that become conventional wisdom are erroneous and need to be rethought."

Another day, another $1.08

According to Mr Banerjee and Ms Duflo, the typical poor household in Udaipur could spend up to 30% more on food than it does, if only it stopped devoting money to alcohol, tobacco and festivals.

Save the Russians! By Nicholas Eberstadt [alt]

Time for a Sea Change By Paul Saffo

Why We Listen By Philip Bobbitt

A president does have an obligation to assess the constitutionality of statutes, but when he secretly decides a measure is unconstitutional and neglects to say so (much less why), he undermines the very system of public consent for which we are fighting. Having said that, we also must not be so absorbed by questions of statutory construction that we ignore the revolutionary political and technological events that are transforming the world in which our laws must function.

Jeffrey D. Sachs Gives The 2007 BBC Reith Lectures: Bursting at the Seams, April 11- May 9, 2007

Jeffrey Sachs argues that the world faces challenges on an unprecedented scale - the destruction of the planet through global warming, terrorism, extreme poverty, disease and bad governance.

Excerpts from Spokesmen for the Despised; Fundamentalist Leaders of the Middle East, Edited by R. Scott Appleby

The word fundamentalism, therefore, aptly describes the basic method of the modern religious leader who reaches into the sacred past, selects and develops politically useful (if sometimes obscure) teachings or traditions, and builds around these so-called fundamentals an ideology and a program of action. What we mean by fundamentalism, in other words, is the b... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

RE: 21 Solutions to Save the World

If you were fascinated by the Vanity Fair article, If You Knew Sushi, you'll like this book, too. (It's mentioned in the VF article.)

Publishers Weekly Starred Review:

In this intriguing first book, Issenberg roams the globe in search of sushi and takes the reader on a cultural, historical and economic journey through the raw-fish trade that reads less like economics and more like an entertaining culinary travelogue.

He follows every possible strand in this worldwide web of history, economics and cuisine -- an approach that keeps the book lively with colorful places and characters, from the Tokyo fish market to the boats of North Atlantic fishermen, from tuna ranches off the coast of Australia to the sushi bars in Austin, Tex.

He weaves the history of the art and cuisine of sushi throughout, and his smart, lively voice makes the most arcane information fascinating.

Also see the New York Times review of the book.

From the Philly City Paper:

In case you're wondering about Issenberg's favorite sushi bar (and you know you are), it's Sagami in Collingswood, NJ, where he enjoys yellowtail for its firm-but-oily texture.

At the official web site, the reviews are summarized:

“Entertaining culinary travelogue ... smart, lively voice ... fascinating ... a worthy successor to John McPhee ... eloquent, intelligent, and definitive ... superior literary journalism ... engaging ... splendid ... beautifully written."

The author is writing a blog for Fast Company (only two posts, as yet). He recently had lunch with Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace and, separately, with Andy Leff of incPLACE.

From the Village Voice review:

Most revolting is an aside about a New Jersey broker whose reaction to September 11 was "Sons of bitches! I had tuna on one of those planes!"

Ah, New Jersey.

The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy