April 2010
13 posts
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Cassette Tapes: Sucky music format, formidable... →
I’ve written quite a bit here about cassette tape worship. In the last decade, cassettes have gone from viable music formats to objects imbued with nostalgia. We melt them and extract their guts in the name of art; we wax poetic about them in books; we buckle our belts with them and honor them on t-shirts or in the form of jewelry. In this article, the NYT’s Rob...
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Newspapers, Magazines and Books! Oh My!
I enjoyed this piece in Fortune about the future of books and newspapers and magazines. The writer, Josh Quittner, starts out with a nice little anecdote about how his 12-year-old recently subscribed to Vogue.
Each month Clem was excited when Vogue arrived. She’d rip into the issue and scamper up the stairs to her chambre à coucher, with enough enthusiasm to do Anna Wintour proud. But...
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Library Saga: News Flash!
I found my library card! Yay! It wasn’t in the wallet (which, as careful followers of this odyssey will know, is no longer in my possession). Apparently, at some point before the wallet went missing, I’d taken it out of my wallet and placed it on my dresser under some magazines. Wasn’t that a clever place to put it?
Excited about my find, I went back to the library this...
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Regarding Fucking the Library
One shouldn’t blog when angry, so I’d like to apologize for the ranting I did in the Fuck the Library post I wrote the other day. However, as my mom likes to say, “there’s always good that comes out of bad,” and in this case, the good was in the response from readers. Thanks to the interesting emails many of you sent, and to the handful of commenters. Thanks...
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An open letter to my husband's boss at Gizmodo
Re: necessary compensation for my husband Jesus Diaz’s work writing about the iPad this weekend
Dear Brian Lam,
I need an iPad. Jesus just left for work and he took his. He just put on his coat, took it and left! He was all, “Honey, you have a MacBook. And you can go use my desktop while I’m out.” He just has no concept of what it is I do all day. He thinks I need to sit...
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Fuck the Library
I am a woman of modest means. Also: I like books. This is why I found myself at the library on this pretty afternoon.
Specifically, I was at the New York Public Library branch on Mulberry Street in Manhattan. All around me today, people are waving their shiny new iPads. I’ve been on the fence about e-readers, but I can see the appeal of reading a book on one of these things. My husband...
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#MargaretAtwood
All the arguing about media formats these days can drive you crazy. Or at least it drives me crazy. The reason? The suggestion that one form of communication is “better” than another—that one will “kill” the other.
I think every technology has its time and place. You can fight it, but what’s the point. Sometimes, I feel bad for formats that don’t have...