2009

• Phenomenal (and brief) must-read: Clive Thompson on the New Literacy. You know how certain elderly saints o’ the Lord hang on to the notion that all these fly-by-night SMS-chatblogging and social-textbooking fads are bad for the children’s writing skills? That these flash-in-the-pan wikitubers are robbing themselves of literacy with every single e-minute spent deleting spreadsheets willy-nilly on the Wii-game and the digi-puter? Because back in my day we learned how to write Honus Wagner’s name in cursive by torchlight, back when a person applied for a job at the Pony Express without needing an app forum 2.0 motherboard widget WIDGET, and now they’ve got these portable gang phones with the RAM modules and the CNN quiz shows by satellite!?

I’ve been saying it myself for years, but you’ll likely find a new Stanford study a little more convincing: turns out writing — even if it means Flickr-hacking out some status-cyberspams on the whoozy-Twitterzit while uploading entire iTunes to your buddy lists — is good for your writing. Embrace it: the internet is good for you, but even better for your kids.

• Kurt Vonnegut explains drama. I don’t need to say anything more here.
• Seth Godin on what you compare yourself to to what you compare yourself. The best restaurant in the Atlanta airport doesn’t strive to be a great airport restaurant; it strives to be a great restaurant. Otherwise, he hates Atlanta’s airport restaurant scene. “We don’t compare ourselves to other airport restaurants”

BONUS: The Godfather 3 Syndrome, finest of the many things written about Jay-Z and Raekwon this week.

• Repentant KKK leader reflects on the moment when hate succumbed to grace.

  (Grace as in “mercy,” but also grace as in “charm,” right?)

• Thoroughly enjoyed Wired’s series on the ultimate mystery that is the existence, let alone dominance, of Craigslist. More here, here, and here, every bit of it worth marveling at in hushed wonder.
• Young fellow plays an obscure instrument known in southern Philadelpha as a “pens & desk.” While rapping!
  

This reminds me of my semester as a middle school student teacher. There was one kid who didn’t like class stuff, but loved writing raps. Obviously, I encouraged him to write rhymes then.

We had a free period one day, and he was spitting while another kid banged on a table. Most of the other students were trying to read, so I uttered a sentence that may never have been spoken before or since: “Guys, please rap quietly to yourselves.”

It seems the Cash Free Tax Bonanzas For Clunkers Arbitrarily Doomed Property program was a success, if by success we mean lots of people took money that was given to them. The program’s website (Cars.gov), however, doesn’t have a very high MPG rating. So to speak. Masses of dealers are unable to enter their reimbursement claims due to the website’s awfulness. Pressed for comment, The Man said, “Oh boo hoo hoo.”

See: Cash For Clunkers’ Clunky Website

Previously: Bailouts are so Spring ‘09… Web design is where the real money’s at.

PS: Isn’t it a little bit sad that a broken website dominates one of the most competitive keywords?

1. If you only read one Michael Jackson article for the rest of the year after reading 2,138 of them a few weeks ago, make it GQ’s September cover story.
2. Some things on movies:
   • Uncomfortable Plot Summaries
   • This marvel:
     
   • I’ve wondered what it is that’s so creepy about the premise of Inglourious Basterds (revisionist WW2 cheat-code rampage by Nazi-scalping Jews). The Peril of Perfect Evil captures a lot of it. (I wrote about five paragraphs here, but deleted them all. They were pretty good and REALLY rambly.)
3. On an infinitely lighter note, here’s 25 things that are easier to get rid of than Brett Favre.