Talks from The New Yorker Festival Available as Video Podcasts

in Media | October 30th, 2007

newyorkercoverold.jpgIn ear­ly Octo­ber, The New York­er mag­a­zine held its eighth annu­al fes­ti­val in NYC. (Yikes! As I am typ­ing I’m feel­ing my first earth­quake here in Cal­i­for­nia. Appar­ent­ly 5.7 on Richter scale. Details here.) Any­way, the fes­ti­val brings to the stage an impres­sive list of writ­ers & artists (see the full sched­ule here). And while the aver­age New York­er had to pay some­where between $16 and $100 to attend the var­i­ous events, you can now watch a select num­ber of them for free. The free videos fea­ture New York­er edi­tor David Rem­nick speak­ing with Sey­mour Hersh about his inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism and Amer­i­ca’s involve­ment in Iraq and Iran; Nobel Prize win­ner Orhan Pamuk and Salman Rushdie dis­cussing how they approach writ­ing about their respec­tive home­lands, Turkey and India; and Mar­tin Amis and Ian Buru­ma mak­ing sense of his­tor­i­cal “mon­sters” and the psy­chol­o­gy that dri­ves evil. Also Philip Goure­vitch leads a quite thought-pro­vok­ing con­ver­sa­tion with Errol Mor­ris about Abu Ghraib and what did and did not hap­pen there. (Abu Ghraib is the sub­ject of Morris’s next film.) Then, on the lighter side, come­di­an Steve Mar­tin amus­es the crowd by show­ing clips of his stand-up per­for­mances, and film­mak­er Judd Apa­tow talks with film crit­ic David Den­by about his new com­e­dy “Knocked Up.”

You can access these video talks in one of three ways. Watch them online right on The New York­er web site; head over to Itunes where you can down­load them as video pod­casts; or work with the video rss feed.

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Reading Great Books with The New York Times (Starting with War & Peace)

in Books, Media | October 30th, 2007


tolstoy.jpgEar­li­er this month, The New York Times Book Review launched an online Read­ing Room that lets read­ers tack­le great books with the help of “an all-star cast of pan­elists from var­i­ous backgrounds—authors, review­ers, schol­ars and jour­nal­ists.” The first read­ing starts with Leo Tol­stoy’s 1200+ page epic, War and Peace (1865–69), and it’s led by book review edi­tor Sam Tanen­haus and a sup­port­ing crew con­sist­ing of Bill Keller (exec­u­tive edi­tor of The Times), Stephen Kotkin (a Russ­ian his­to­ry pro­fes­sor at Prince­ton), Francine Prose (author of Read­ing Like a Writer), and Liesl Schillinger (a reg­u­lar review­er for the Book Review).

At the out­set, Sam Tanen­haus’ intro­duc­tion leaves the impres­sion that the “Read­ing Room” will offer a fair­ly struc­tured read­ing of Tol­stoy’s text. But that’s not exact­ly how things turn out. Often quite frag­men­tary, the con­ver­sa­tion most­ly oper­ates out­side the text itself and veers in many dif­fer­ent, though often intrigu­ing, direc­tions. At one moment, Francine Prose tells us that Tol­stoy’s account of the Napoleon­ic wars reminds her of today’s war in Iraq. For Bill Keller, it evokes the wan­ing days of the Sovi­et Union. And, for Liesl Schillinger, it’s her youth in 1970s Amer­i­ca. (You can get a feel for the flow and focus of the dis­cus­sion here.) Ulti­mate­ly, what you think of this new project depends on what you want to get out of the expe­ri­ence. If it’s a more struc­tured read­ing (as we were hop­ing), then you may not be com­plete­ly engaged. But if it’s a more free-flow­ing con­ver­sa­tion that moves in and around great works, then you’ll want to join the con­ver­sa­tion. And, yes, there’s a role there for the every­day read­er too. Take a look at the Read­ing Room and let us know what you think.

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A New Model for Investigative Journalism

in Business, Current Affairs, Media | October 15th, 2007

As we’ve dis­cussed before on this blog, one of the major casu­al­ties in the shift­ing new media land­scape is the tra­di­tion­al inves­tiga­tive journalist–someone with the time and resources to research in-depth sto­ries. In response to this prob­lem a new group called Pro Pub­li­ca is propos­ing a nov­el eco­nom­ic mod­el: hire the jour­nal­ists into a foun­da­tion and give their work away to the pub­li­ca­tions where it will make the biggest impact.

The new ini­tia­tive, head­ed up by Paul Steiger, head edi­tor at the Wall Street Jour­nal for 16 years, will spend $10 mil­lion annu­al­ly to sup­port a news­room of 24 jour­nal­ists and 12 oth­er staff in New York City. The mon­ey comes from Her­bert and Mar­i­on San­dler, for­mer heads of Gold­en West Finan­cial Cor­po­ra­tion, a big play­er in mort­gages and sav­ings.

It seems like­ly to me that Pro Pub­li­ca will suc­ceed in attract­ing some high-lev­el tal­ent, both because of Steiger and because many jour­nal­ists have come to fear for their jobs in the shrink­ing news­rooms of tra­di­tion­al papers. The real ques­tion is how well this sys­tem will work in dig­ging up and deliv­er­ing qual­i­ty report­ing. What do you lose, and what do you gain, when your employ­er is no longer a “paper of record” but a pri­vate foun­da­tion fund­ed by peo­ple with their own polit­i­cal agen­das? On the oth­er hand, it’s easy to argue that every news­pa­per already has some kind of polit­i­cal posi­tion, so maybe Pro Pub­li­ca will be no dif­fer­ent.

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The Future of Collaborative Culture?

in Media, Stanford, Technology | October 12th, 2007

wales3.jpgI just heard Jim­my Wales, founder of Wikipedia, speak­ing at Stan­ford Law School today. Wales is work­ing on some new projects that he hopes will har­ness the com­mu­ni­ty-dri­ven col­lab­o­ra­tion of Wikipedia. He’s already had some suc­cess in branch­ing out from the ency­clo­pe­dia idea with Wikia, which is a “wiki farm” com­pil­ing infor­ma­tion on a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent sub­jects (some of the most suc­cess­ful so far relate to video games).

What Wales spoke about today, how­ev­er, is a new col­lab­o­ra­tive search project. The con­cept is still in its ear­ly stages, it seems, but the idea would be to har­ness the intel­li­gence and ded­i­ca­tion of human beings to pro­duce search results sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter than Google’s. This rais­es a few ques­tions:

Is Google bro­ken? It’s amaz­ing what Google pulls up, but maybe we’ve all got­ten so good at work­ing with an imper­fect sys­tem that we just tune out the spam and mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions that still crop up.

Is a col­lab­o­ra­tive social mod­el the appro­pri­ate solu­tion to this prob­lem? Peo­ple are good at com­pil­ing ency­clo­pe­dias, but they may not be good at emu­lat­ing search rank algo­rithms. Also, Google is pow­ered by mil­lions of servers in dozens of data cen­ters over the world man­ag­ing petabytes of infor­ma­tion. In oth­er words, this may be a technology+money busi­ness, not a people+transparency busi­ness.

These issues aside, Wikipedia is one of the most amaz­ing things to come out of the whole Inter­net exper­i­ment, so I’m excit­ed to see what Wales comes up with. Has search become a basic ser­vice? Would it work bet­ter as an open-source sys­tem?

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Satirizing Ahmadinejad: The New Yorker Picks Up Where SNL Left Off

in Current Affairs, Media | October 8th, 2007

The satirists are get­ting a lot mileage out of Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad’s dec­la­ra­tion that Iran is gay-free. Last week, Sat­ur­day Night Live spoofed Ahmadine­jad, as we not­ed. Then, The New York­er par­o­died Ahmadine­jad on the mag­a­zine’s cov­er with one of its famed car­toons. (The image includ­ed a not-so-oblique ref­er­ence to Lar­ry Craig, the con­ser­v­a­tive US Sen­a­tor who recent­ly got caught up in some mens’ room high jinks. Unfa­mil­iar read­ers can get the scoop on Craig here.) Of all the inane com­ments Ahmadine­jad has made, and there are many, it’s inter­est­ing that the satirists have cho­sen to focus on this one. Deny­ing the exis­tence of gays in Iran is no more empir­i­cal­ly absurd than deny­ing the Holo­caust. So why the empha­sis on the sex­u­al­i­ty com­ment? Because Ahmadine­jad has been play­ing the anti-semi­tism card for some time, but the homo­pho­bia card is rel­a­tive­ly new, hence mak­ing it wor­thy of atten­tion? Or is it because sex­u­al­i­ty offers an always con­ve­nient way to take a polit­i­cal ene­my down a peg? Or since there’s no good way to sat­i­rize a geno­cide, per­haps sex­u­al­i­ty becomes a good default. Ok, I’m stumped. Note to self: think twice next time before over-ana­lyz­ing jokes. Speak­ing of jokes, make you check out the footage we post­ed of Woody Allen doing standup in 1965.

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Animated New Yorker Cartoons: A Funny Twist on Einstein’s Relativity

in Media, Video - Arts & Culture | October 5th, 2007

The New York­er has rolled out a series of ani­mat­ed car­toons, which puts in motion its famous car­toons. They can be watched as video pod­casts or as streamed videos. You should def­i­nite­ly head over to The New York­er web site to view the larg­er col­lec­tion. But, if you want a lit­tle taste, take a look below:

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The World Without Us: Author Interview

in Books, Current Affairs, Media, Science | October 3rd, 2007

Ear­li­er this week I spoke on the phone with Alan Weis­man, the author of The World With­out Us. (See our ini­tial piece on his book.) Alan was gra­cious enough to take some time out of his pub­lic­i­ty sched­ule to share his thoughts on the book, the world, his writ­ing process, and more. What fol­lows is an edit­ed tran­script of our con­ver­sa­tion.

Ed: This book address­es what on the sur­face seems to be a pret­ty far-fetched hypo­thet­i­cal: that human­i­ty might sud­den­ly dis­ap­pear. What drew you to this premise in the first place?

Alan: Well, pre­cise­ly that. Most great envi­ron­men­tal writ­ing does not get read by a lot of the peo­ple who ought to be learn­ing about it because the near­er-term pos­si­bil­i­ties just seem some­times so fright­en­ing, or so depress­ing, that nobody real­ly wants to pick up a book to read it.

By struc­tur­ing the book the way that I did, I dis­arm the auto­mat­ic fear that repels a lot of peo­ple from read­ing about the envi­ron­ment. Peo­ple don’t want to read some­thing that seems too threat­en­ing. On a sub­con­scious or even a con­scious lev­el, they don’t want to be wor­ried we’re all going to die. In my book, killing us off in the first cou­ple of pages means peo­ple don’t have to wor­ry about dying because we’re already dead, and that’s a relief in a sense. The idea of glimps­ing the future is irre­sistible to all of us and I estab­lish pret­ty quick­ly that is not going to just be me spec­u­lat­ing, it’s going to be some hard sci­ence writ­ing based on a lot of report­ing, of talk­ing to experts or eye­wit­ness­es whose guess­es will be far more inter­est­ing than most peo­ples’.

The fact that it is far-fetched is real­ly use­ful because on the one hand real­ly it’s a remote pos­si­bil­i­ty that we would leave, that we would dis­ap­pear tomor­row. So peo­ple don’t go into a pan­ic over this book, and it real­ly gives peo­ple enough time to think about these things with­out pan­ick­ing about it. So that’s how this device works, and I think it’s been proven to be very effec­tive. I’m get­ting a lot more peo­ple to read it than just peo­ple who are hung up on the envi­ron­ment.

(more…)

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The New York Times “Opens Up” at Midnight

in Media | September 18th, 2007

nyt-160×160.jpgEffec­tive at mid­night, The New York Times will make the “Times­S­e­lect” sec­tion of its web­site entire­ly free. (It used to cost sub­scribers $49.95 a year.) And it will also free up “its archives from 1987 to the present … , as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the pub­lic domain.”

In mak­ing this move, the paper will be giv­ing up $10 mil­lion in annu­al sub­scrip­tion rev­enue. But it will like­ly make up that mon­ey (and then some) by using ads to mon­e­tize those pages. For more info, read the full arti­cle here. And click here to see what for­mer­ly closed-off con­tent will now become freely avail­able.

Update: Have a look at Deeplink­ing’s piece called Min­ing the New York Times Archive. It pulls out of the archive some inter­est­ing finds, includ­ing reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Oscar Wilde’s Dis­grace (1895), plus arti­cles that sur­vey the dynam­ic art scene of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry.

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