At the beginning of Keillor’s hilarious new novel, Evelyn sets in motion a circus of zany events when she dies in her sleep — despite the fact that she’s an inveterate insomniac. In a no-nonsense note to her daughter Barbara, Evelyn stipulates that she wishes to be cremated, with her ashes sealed up in a bowling ball and “dropped into Lake Wobegon off Rocky Point.” What’s more, in the same letter Evelyn unapologetically reveals that for years she’s been conducting a passionate love affair with a retired TV weatherman.
Google & Privacy
It’s been fun and edifying watching Google’s PR engine at work. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, has been evangelizing the need for “international privacy standards.”
Google’s most powerful PR tool to-date is the comforting and accessible video series featuring Maile Ohye, a personable young woman who is a senior support engineer, giving a chalk talk about what information Google captures when you search, how it uses that information and how you can control it. The two videos in the series to-date are designed to be very comforting.
The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Towards Free
The DRM walls are crumbling. Music CD sales continue to plummet rather alarmingly. Artists like Prince and Nine Inch Nails are flouting their labels and either giving music away or telling their fans to steal it. Another blow earlier this week: Radiohead, which is no longer controlled by their label, Capitol Records, put their new digital album on sale on the Internet for whatever price people want to pay for it.
The economics of recorded music are fairly simple. Marginal production costs are zero: Like software, it doesn’t cost anything to produce another digital copy that is just as good as the original as soon as the first copy exists, and anyone can create those copies. Unless effective legal (copyright), technical (DRM) or other artificial impediments to production can be created, simple economic theory dictates that the price of music, like its marginal cost, must also fall to zero. The evidence is unmistakable already. In April 2007 the benchmark price for a DRM-free song was $1.29. Today it is $0.89, a drop of 31% in just six months.
Sputnik 50: A talk with the BBC’s Reg Turnhill
Reg Turnill was working for the BBC in 1957 when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the World’s first orbiting artifical satellite.
Turnill went on to cover the space race and travelled to the Soviet Union for the press conference following cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s orbital flight and eventually was based in the US to cover NASA’s Moon programme.
He got to know the German rocket engineer Werner von Braun, who had developed the Nazi V-2 weapon, and also came to know many of the US astronauts.
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Mayor Bloomberg’s Manifesto
Mayor Bloomberg, aka Mayor Mike, made a few important points that are as relevant to business as to government yesterday in his Keynote Address at the Economist’s Conference on The Future of New York City as the World’s Business Hub.
1) A Mayor (or any leader) cannot be short term focused nor obsessed with photo opportunities. One has to be as excited about completing a new water tunnel for the City as about glamorous new buildings in Lower Manhattan. Infrastructure upgrades cannot wait; his Administration put more money into the water tunnel project than the five previous mayors combined.
The Need for New Maps
If it were not for Rand McNally, I wouldn’t know I was in Europe, separated by an ocean from my family and friends. As far as I’m concerned, the urban culture of Berlin is closer to the culture of New York City than it is to, say, the German hinterland, to say nothing of the American hinterland. It is only through a certain way of looking at the world — from the privileged view of the orbiting satellite, in this case — that it appears the way it does. Our traditional maps, from the rough sketches of the Middle Ages to the latest map/satellite hybrids of Google, place geographic proximity above all other considerations in terms of importance.
But what about cultural proximity? Lifestyle proximity? “Energetic” proximity? What about the fact that I can take a direct flight (more or less) to any world capital, but to get to a mid-sized city in the States, I have to take two or three? It costs more money and takes more time to get from Denver to Upstate New York than it does from Denver to Amsterdam, Paris, or Milan — wouldn’t that make Denver CLOSER to the European capitals than it is to small cities in its own nation? That is my contention.
Prosecutor Over-Reaching
Dee Hall covers an issue vital to our democracy – over zealous prosecutors:
A Wisconsin State Journal investigation, however, found instances in which court records and transcripts back up his critics’ claims that he has crossed ethical lines. Stretching back to the early 1990s, Humphrey has been the subject of criticism accusing him of ethical lapses, poor judgment and unreasonably aggressive tactics. Critics have included defendants, defense attorneys, judges and three of the four district attorneys who’ve supervised him.
The State Journal examined more than 2,000 pages of documents, including records from Humphrey’s office files obtained under the open-records law. The newspaper also interviewed more than two dozen attorneys, judges, defendants, legal experts and law-enforcement officials.
The newspaper’s investigation found that the veteran prosecutor:
— Wrongfully kept a young man in the Dane County Jail for a month, even after he was repeatedly notified of the error.
— Made false or misleading statements in affidavits, in correspondence and in court hearings to advance his case or to cover up mistakes.
— Charged two witnesses and had a third arrested for failing to show up for trials that had been cancelled — a tactic his boss had warned him was “an abuse of your authority.”
— Aggressively pursued seven felony charges against a bankrupt father who was $2,846 behind in child support — a prosecution the judge said should “make one wonder about the integrity of (the) justice system.”
— Twice pursued vehicular-homicide charges using speed estimates his own experts told him were inflated.
One of those cases was Humphrey’s failed prosecution of Adam Raisbeck, a 17-year-old from Marshall. Humphrey’s actions in the case prompted a blunt reprimand from his boss, and the misconduct findings that are headed to the Supreme Court.
US District Judge Lewis Kaplan recently expressed concern over “prosecutor’s expansive power”.
Lonely Planet Releases Afghanistan Travel Guide
See where the retreating British Army was massacred! Marvel at Osama bin Laden’s old Tora Bora bunker! Gaze upon the crater where the giant Buddha statues of Bamiyan stood before the Taliban blew them up!
Or maybe not. Tourism in Afghanistan, it’s safe to say, is a tough sell these days. Nobody is touting it as “the new Croatia.” Kabul and Kandahar never figure in the hunt for “the next Prague.” And don’t look for the war-ravaged country in the next installment of “Where in the World Is Matt Lauer?”
All of which makes Lonely Planet’s new Afghanistan guidebook the most eyebrow-raising title of the year.
The 244-page guide contains all the usual write-ups of mosques, mountains and museums, plus colorful maps and 17 pages of enticing photographs. But turn to the “Dangers & Annoyances” section, and instead of the usual cautions about bedbugs and pickpockets you find a warning about “the danger of an insurgency in the south, plus warlordism and terrorist violence in some other parts of the country.”
Film: Sophie Scholl
The true story of Germany’s most famous anti-Nazi heroine is brought to thrilling life in the multi-award winning drama SOPHIE SCHOLL-THE FINAL DAYS. Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film of 2005, SOPHIE SCHOLL stars Julia Jentsch in a luminous performance as the young coed-turned-fearless activist. Armed with long-buried historical records of her incarceration, director Marc Rothemund expertly re-creates the last six days of Sophie Scholl’s life: a heart-stopping journey from arrest to interrogation, trial and sentence.
In 1943, as Hitler continues to wage war across Europe, a group of college students mount an underground resistance movement in Munich. Dedicated expressly to the downfall of the monolithic Third Reich war machine, they call themselves the White Rose. One of its few female members, Sophie Scholl is captured during a dangerous mission to distribute pamphlets on campus with her brother Hans. Unwavering in her convictions and loyalty to the White Rose, her cross-examination by the Gestapo quickly escalates into a searing test of wills as Scholl delivers a passionate call to freedom and personal responsibility that is both haunting and timeless.
On Newspapers: Why a former Publisher Won’t Buy a Subscription
I don’t subscribe to the newspaper my family sold to a chain in the mid-1990s. While I miss the New York Times crossword puzzle, I finally stopped my subscription, because I really wasn’t interested in reading the generic news that has replaced the community coverage we used to provide.
In more than 30 years of newspaper management, I experienced the transformation described in your white paper on Media 3.0, as we faced increasing competition from direct mail, segmented cable and the myriad of other choices served to advertisers.
But there is one underlying reason why newspapers will not be able to take advantage of the opportunities so well presented in your paper: They simply lack the intellectual capacity…