Soup: Archive

“To him New Jersey sounded like the most American place you could be. He thought that New Jersey was paradise on earth. He thought that New Jersey is a place where people drink all the time, they have sex all the time and there are no jews.” —

Maziar Bahari describing his Iranian interrogator and revolutionary guard.

Bahari was jailed under the ridiculous assumption that he was a spy because of working with Jason Jones of the Daily Show on this sketch.

Nov 30, 20098 notes

Nov 30, 200915 notes

Nov 30, 2009117 notes

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.” —Gilda Radner (via anditslove)

Nov 30, 2009106 notes

They’re both right.

Murphy’s model sucks and will drive people away from the people who use it, and Pete is a hypocrite for posting ads on Twitter and bashing Murphy for doing the same thing.

Pete’s explanation doesn’t hold weight to me. Unfortunately you’ll never really know if money or favors are traded for tweets or blog posts or magazine articles or newspaper columns for that matter.

It’s ultimately up to the reader to be smart enough to figure it out, the most effective kind of advertising is the kind you don’t even realize is an advertisement, which makes these models more transparent but ultimately more obtrusive and ineffective.

I’m less concerned about ruining the user experience, since it makes it easier for me to weed people out of my reading list by their blatant hucksterism, than I am by the lack of creativity and common sense about effective business models for advertising.

Nov 30, 20094 notes

Nov 30, 20096 notes

“If [Obama] ramps up Afghanistan and delays Iraq withdrawal, he will lose his base. If he does the full metal neocon as he is being urged to, he should not be deluded in believing the GOP will in any way support him. They will oppose him every step of every initiative. They will call him incompetent if Afghanistan deteriorates, they will call him a terrorist-lover if he withdraws, they will call him a traitor if he does not do everything they want, and they will eventually turn on him and demand withdrawal, just as they did in the Balkans with Clinton. Obama’s middle way, I fear, is deeper and deeper into a trap, and the abandonment of a historic opportunity to get out.” —Andrew Sullivan (via southpol)

“In the past the flow of ideas for products was heavily centralized, and based on advertising to build demand. In the future, the flow of ideas for products will happen everywhere, all the time, and products with small markets will be worth making because we’ll be able to find the users, or more accurately, they’ll be able to find us. “Targeting” customers is the wrong metaphor for the future. Instead make it easy for the people who lust for what you have to find you. How? 1. Find out what they want, and 2. Make it for them and 3. Go back to where you found out about it, and tell them it’s available.” —Dave Winer

Nov 30, 20099 notes

I’ll believe it when I experience it.

Nov 30, 200925 notes

“Nick may have been alone in building an entire company based on contract employees, but he’s certainly not alone in media. It’s the dirty little not-so-secret, isn’t it? The way that the New York Times “lays off” its (contract) news clerks every six months for two weeks so that they don’t become full-time employees and join the union and have to get health insurance. TimeWarner, Conde Nast, BusinessWeek, Viacom… I know, or have known, people at all of those companies who were “freelance” and yet, mysteriously had to go into an office every day from 10 to 6 or whatever and do the same jobs as people who were getting benefits. Funny, that! It’s no surprise that nobody has really written this story, because every media company I know of does it.” —The Doree Chronicles

Nov 30, 200944 notes

Jersey at #8 with a bullet.

Nov 30, 20093 notes

Nov 30, 200912 notes

“

Not only is AOL basing its entire dismal future on the most base sort of styrofoam traffic-whoring; it’s not even whoring in a new way. Demand Media, for one, has long been doing the exact same thing, with an algorithm-plus-sweatshop editorial production line that makes Gawker Media look like Aristotle’s School of Taking Your Sweet Time Thinking About Things.

Ah well. Neither useless crap on the internet nor AOL sucking is anything new.

” —Hamilton Nolan

Nov 30, 20094 notes

“If you’re looking for a job right now, your prospects are terrible. There are six times as many Americans seeking work as there are job openings, and the average duration of unemployment — the time the average job-seeker has spent looking for work — is more than six months, the highest level since the 1930s. You might think, then, that doing something about the employment situation would be a top policy priority. But now that total financial collapse has been averted, all the urgency seems to have vanished from policy discussion, replaced by a strange passivity. There’s a pervasive sense in Washington that nothing more can or should be done, that we should just wait for the economic recovery to trickle down to workers. This is wrong and unacceptable.” —

Paul Krugman (via azspot) (via shorterexcerpts)

The urgency to bailout “too big to fail” banks and the lack of urgency to bailout people who WANT to work is criminal.

Nov 30, 2009115 notes

“I could be wrong. I usually am. I was walking to the Awl offices this morning and I saw a poster for Lady Gaga’s Fame Monster. As you know, I have found the success of Lady Gaga not only inexplicable but almost personally offensive. Like, they’re making Lady Gaga a superstar to spite me, Alex Balk, because I cannot understand her at all. The entertainment industry is sending me a signal that I have now aged out of anything they might be interested in providing me. This morning, however, gazing briefly at that poster—it shows two iterations: her blonde version and then the dark-haired version with the fucked-up makeup—it suddenly all became clear: Lady Gaga is dance music’s version of Marilyn Manson. People from every generation want pretty much the same things, just in contemporary packages. So maybe there’s hope. Or maybe that’s more forced optimism. All I know is someone has probably already made the Gaga/Manson comparison, but I’ll be fucked if I’m going to Google it to check. Because I am old, and sometimes the old ways really are the best ways.” —

Alex Balk

You and me both, pal.

Nov 30, 200922 notes

The city’s street gangs are becoming tweet gangs.
Manhattan’s young thugs have turned to Twitter, and the cops who track them are fast behind, the Daily News has learned.

It’s old-school crime meets new technology: attacks being plotted - and thwarted - 140 characters at a time.

One investigator recently warned parents and teens that the bastion of OMG and LOL has been infiltrated by violent crews waging turf wars.

Nov 30, 200934 notes

“What would Martin Luther King, Jr. do? What would your grandmother do? Not send more poor people to kill other poor people who pose no threat to them, that’s what they’d do. Not spend billions and trillions to wage war while American children are sleeping on the streets and standing in bread lines. All of us that voted and prayed for you and cried the night of your victory have endured an Orwellian hell of eight years of crimes committed in our name: torture, rendition, suspension of the bill of rights, invading nations who had not attacked us, blowing up neighborhoods that Saddam “might” be in (but never was), slaughtering wedding parties in Afghanistan. We watched as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were slaughtered and tens of thousands of our brave young men and women were killed, maimed, or endured mental anguish — the full terror of which we scarcely know. When we elected you we didn’t expect miracles. We didn’t even expect much change. But we expected some. We thought you would stop the madness. Stop the killing. Stop the insane idea that men with guns can reorganize a nation that doesn’t even function as a nation and never, ever has.” —Michael Moore (via azspot) (via robot-heart-politics)

Nov 30, 200952 notes

Soup

December 2009

November 2009