THING: Copyright: The Elephant in the Middle of the Glee Club from Balkinization. Glee might be the most unrealistic show on TV, now that [something something Lost joke]. How is a tiny extracurricular group able to pay $150k copyright fines for releasing videos of their performances? Let us discuss copyright.
THING:Mind Over Mass Media from the New York Times. You may have heard that Twitter is making you dumb. (Yes, you also probably heard the same thing about mime in 450 BCE, and look how smart that’s made you.) Well, Harvard psychology professor and best-selling pop science author Steven Pinker says Twitter isn’t bad for you, which sounds kind of like Harvard psychology professor and best-selling pop science author Steven Pinker says Twitter is good for you to me!
In fact, there isn’t anything — except for, like, helmetless motorcycling — that can make you dumber or smarter at anything else, so to speak:
Music doesn’t make you better at math, conjugating Latin doesn’t make you more logical, brain-training games don’t make you smarter. Accomplished people don’t bulk up their brains with intellectual calisthenics; they immerse themselves in their fields. Novelists read lots of novels, scientists read lots of science.
Thing:The Revenge of the Brands: How corporate America turned Naomi Klein’s anti-branding manifesto on its head from Reason. Intended as an anti-marketing call-to-arms, Naomi Klein’s No Logo has actually wound up as the blueprint for modern branding. When corporations are tripping over themselves to seem as uncorporate as possible, what’s left to subvert, anyway? Reason argues that, for Klein, “Writing about branding was only an excuse to talk about politics,” which explains her present lack of satisfaction at seeing corporate America playing by her rules. ELSEWHEREINBRANDING:Ice Cube on co-opting the Los Angeles Raiders brand by force in the early ’90s.
Thing:Riders on the Storm by the New York Times. David Brooks, fresh off a 15-minute break spent dumping on Sandra Bullock for being the victim of infidelity, gets back to work by linking to some studies that declare internet users to be surprisingly open-minded clickers. “People who spend time on the most liberal sites are more likely to go to foxnews.com than average Internet users,” and vice versa. Sure, most of that cross-traffic can be chalked up to troll exchanges, but it’s reassuring to think more and more people might be finding common ground every day simply by being adventurous surfers. ELSEWHEREINVIEWPOINTS:Design for the First World, a new blog that flips the “Design will save the world” notion — the idea that well-meaning while perhaps patronizing designers can solve developing-world problems just by being great designers who care really hard. DFTFW is soliciting solutions from developing-nation designers for first-world problems like obesity or having nothing to whine to Twitter about.
Remembering the Beatles: Chuck Klosterman plays really dumb-smart, breaking down the remastered box set released this week by some “Liverpool pop group, a 1960s band so obscure that their music is not even available on iTunes.” With the remasters plus Beatles Rock Band, this week felt like a tiny Beatlemania. It was fantastic. While we’re remembering, here’s an idea: Annual Beatles Day.
Remembering one of the greatest humans of all time. No, not Billy Mays. Norman Borlaug, the agricultural scientist whose contributions have saved literally hundreds of millions of lives so far, died at 95.
A lengthly behind-the-scenes look at the upcoming Beatles Rock Band game: While My Guitar Gently Beeps. Supplemental materials: the game’s more-or-less entire tracklist, and a hands-on.
A 73-year-old Harlem businessman defended himself and his employees from four robbers, neutralizing all four by firing only three shots! Safe to assume New York’s uptown criminals have marked his business with a Do Not Rob tag on their iPhone maps apps.
Who wouldn’t want to run a company just like Netflix’s after reading this leaked internal memo?
Considering Slate’s habitual contrarianism, you’d think their readers would come up with more interesting end-of-America scenarios than these. Arab-Israel war will end America? I wasn’t aware America had been relocated. The toy these uncreative types used to come up with the seeds of the apocalypse is pretty fun to fiddle with for at least three minutes, but here’s the real prize: a social network that shows which scenarios were linked to each other. Apparently, Robot Overlords connects to Alien Invasion. Does that mean the robots are in charge of the aliens, too? The future is rich with intrigue. Still, this week’s finest mother lode of semi-useless data: How Different Groups Spend Their Day. Speaking of spending time, if you can’t waste a solid twenty minutes with this chart, then you are just not cut out for charts of any kind.
Surely you happened to see this Coke vs. Pepsi logo nonsense about 26 times this week. It intends to show, for some reason, that Pepsi’s logo changes every eight minutes while Coke is a solid rock. Here’s the real story: Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi, Revised Edition. Survey says Coke changes its logo every bit as often as Pepsi does. And Coke even changed, uh, Coke itself at one point, lest we forget. Who knew Coke had fanboys?
