‘On the Media’ Archives
Awash In A Sea Of Memes
Frank Rich gets it right more often than not, and his column in the Times last Sunday swept the entire decade into a neat little dustpan and dumped it in the garbage. His insight is that Tiger Woods is truly the person of the decade, a fraud capping a decade of frauds that started with Enron, wound its way through a phony war, went broke with [...]
Why The American Genius For Math Vanished
Why can’t little Tiffany learn to program? What happened to American genius for math? I’ve been wondering about this for a long time, but suddenly I saw the cause during the World Series last night. Imagine a computer that runs on chewing tobacco. Shouldn’t be that hard — just picture your basic Major League Baseball manager, leaning on [...]
Is the New Yorker on S.I. Newhouse’s DNR List?
Calling in those McKinsey folks to review your profit and loss numbers in the middle of the deepest recession since the 1930s is a little like having Dr. Kevorkian over to offer a second opinion. "No, really, I'm feeling fine. Just a little touch of the flu." "Not at your age. You know, if you were a new publication, you might pull through. But [...]
Now What’ll I Do For Thanksgiving? R.I.P. Gourmet Magazine
My heartfelt condolences to Ruth Reichl and all the other employees and freelancers who made Gourmet Magazine the most-waited for package in our mailbox every month. We have been subscribers, with occasional time off, since the 60s, when few of us would venture to actually cook any of the insanely complex recipes. Now, I wasn’t the actual [...]
Stinkoread, and The New Complete Theory of Peak Book
When I was involved with ...and Ladies of the Club a few eons ago I received an offer for the audio rights for the book. This was to be a condensed version, since the book was more than 1000 pages long. I asked for a sample script from the audio producer, and it turned out to run some 75 pages. You had to laugh. Gone were the inner lives of the [...]
The Failure of Filters – Why We’re Getting Dumber by the Hour
My mother was a live book reviewer in Cleveland, an activity that seems to have gone the way of the traveling magic lantern lecture tent show. Fortunately for Mom, the traffic lights in our community were exceedingly slow, and she always had a book by her side. We joked that she had completed War and Peace just by judicious use of her time at red [...]
Michiko Kakutani Is Destroying The Fabric Of American Culture
Oh to sing the joys of Sunday morning with the NY Times Book Review section, where we can discover which books are going to get their second Times review. This morning the winner was E.L. Doctorow's novelistic treatment of the hoarding Collyer brothers, a story apparently of immense import to the editors of the Times. Our first indication that [...]
The Third Golden Age Begins?: Welcome to the Berliner Philharmoniker
In the golden days of radio the great symphony orchestras of the world broadcast over short and long wave bands, creating pockets of listeners all over the globe. In isolated Japan in the 1940s the young composer Toru Takemitsu learned the ways of Western music from the Armed Forces radio network. In Maine, Charles Ives listened to the premiere of [...]
Auto Tune the Culture
Eleven-thirty Saturday morning in Tiburon, California. The radios are on throughout the house. We’re listening to a live broadcast from London of Beethoven’s Fidelio, the 50th Proms concert of the season, with 26 left to go. The world’s largest music festival — thousands of performers, many world premieres, many of the world’s great [...]
The Netroots Go Deep
We were at the Netroots Nation New Media Summit this afternoon in San Francisco, welcomed by Nancy Pelosi — looking and sounding very much as if she’s getting used to being on top of the world — and followed by a panel of media revolutionaries, who also seem to be getting used to being on the inside after years of being the bleeding edge. [...]
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