Like Romans Applauding Lions

Paul Ford:

We don’t tell many people about what we are doing. When we do some say: “Well, it must be fun trying.” Or: “Are you sure you’re doing it right?” I laugh with them; after all, how many times have I said something insensitive while trying to be funny? I don’t talk about the large doses of medicine that I inject into my wife’s buttocks that cause her to inflate like a hormonal balloon. Nor do I discuss how intimacy itself has become such an awkward, uncomfortable thing that it’s scheduled on a Google Calendar named “LadyStuffings” with events that show up in pink.

Clay Shirky:

Writing about the Dallas Cowboys in order to take money from Ford and give it to the guy on the City Desk never made much sense, but at least it worked. Online, though, the economic and technological rationale for bundling weakens—no monopoly over local advertising, no daily allotment of space to fill, no one-size-fits-all delivery system. Newspapers, as a sheaf of unrelated content glued together with ads, aren’t just being threatened with unprofitability, but incoherence.

Andrew Marantz:

I was the only one in my class who had never worked at a BPO. Everyone else had stories from their old jobs, which they called “processes.” Nishant, who asked the lady in Tennessee to pay her hospital bills, had worked in a “collections process.” Nidhi preferred “inbound processes” (taking calls) to “outbound processes” (placing calls) because she didn’t like bothering people. Almost everyone had worked in a process doing “hardcore sales,” which made me imagine a porno starring Willy Loman.

merlin:

This? THIS is how you write a spec.

Alex Pappademas:

Treme’s tendency to sashay right into these traps is frustrating, because you know Simon and his cohorts are capable of better. The Wire, which put a reporter’s-notebook premium on authentic dialogue, sometimes at the expense of clarity, would never have given lines this trite to its cops or its corner-boys. Music is a huge part of the argument Treme makes about the specialness of New Orleans culture, because you can’t taste food through your TV, so every time somebody makes an incredibly obvious statement about that specialness it undercuts the whole project.

Katie is the funniest person evs. Also this gave me terrible Facebook flashbacks.

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