The Life of Riley: BB King at 87

The fat red sun settles itself against the horizon, throwing a last, honey-sweet light through humid evening and over a small crowd on the lawn beside a railroad track that cuts through the cotton fields beyond. A quarter-moon rises and a chorus of cicadas serenades imminent twilight, now conjoined by the sound of the band; the drummer catches the backbeat and the compere announces: "How about an Indianola hometown welcome for the one-and-only King of the Blues: BB KING!"

And on he comes, to applause from people who know him well and claim him as their own – the last of the blues masters a few weeks short of his 87th birthday. "Nice evening, isn't it?" he says, and introduces his nephew on sax. Some of his 15 children (all by different mothers) and innumerable grandchildren are in the audience, though one of his daughters died recently of diabetes, as had BB's mother – a poignant riptide beneath the occasion. "I guess you can look at me," he says from the stage, "and tell I'm the old man. My name is BB King."

Backed now by a lilac glow in the western sky – and looking east towards the village of Itta Bena, where he was born – BB sits down and starts up the show. He reaches "Key to the Highway", and there it is: that one long and trembling note, hanging there in the wafts of barbecue smoke, like only BB King can play it. He rolls his eyes, raises his eyebrows, then stares out into the crowd – and there's a collective gasp, a ripple of applause, and a mutual bond of affection.

This is a huddle, not a crowd, really. The town has come to hear its famous son: mostly black people – in families, many with a picnic – plus a few whites with ponytails, ZZ Top beards or other gestures of nonconformity. There are people here like Alfred Knox – one of 11 children with eight of his own (and 21 grandchildren) – who left Mississippi for Milwaukee when he was 19, the sound of Honeyboy Edwards playing juke joints ringing in his ears, and has now come back with his nephew Gervis to hear BB, to hear and talk blues, talk politics. The usual jocks and suits who wave bottles of Bud and shout at tourist clubs like BB King's own franchise in Memphis are not here for this annual homecoming concert – oddly, but thank God.

Nor, indeed, are some of Indianola's good citizens. Latunya and her friend were in the post office earlier, and said how "We're real excited BB's coming back. Gee, I'd lo-o-ove to go see him play. But I go out Fridays. I don't go out Wednesdays, I only go out Fridays". This is also the town in which the White Citizens Council was formed, political wing of the Ku Klux Klan; and the founders' heirs are probably elsewhere tonight.

The maestro's sonority on guitar is as inimitably perfect as ever. After one long, searing note during "The Thrill is Gone", BB King darts the stare of a clown right into the front rows, as though to say: "How about that!?" But it is BB's voice on the warm breeze that stops a heartbeat – that feeling behind and between the words that is the quintessence of the blues.

by Ed Vuillamy, The Guardian | Read more:

Photograph: Kevin Nixon/Guitarist

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What Happens in Brooklyn Moves to Vegas

The Downtown Project got its unofficial start several years ago when Hsieh realized that Zappos, the online shoe-and-apparel company that he built to $1 billion in annual sales in less than a decade, would soon outgrow its offices in nearby Henderson, Nev. Though Amazon bought Zappos in 2009 for $1.2 billion, Hsieh still runs the company, and he has endeavored to keep alive its zany corporate culture. This includes a workplace where everyone sits in the same open space and employees switch desks every few months in order to get to know one another better. “I first thought I would buy a piece of land and build our own Disneyland,” he told the group. But he worried that the company would be too cut off from the outside world and ultimately decided “it was better to interact with the community.”

Around the same time, the Las Vegas city government was also about to move, and Hsieh saw his opportunity. He leased the former City Hall — smack in the middle of downtown Vegas — for 15 years. Then he got to thinking: If he was going to move at least 1,200 employees, why not make it possible for them to live nearby? And if they could live nearby, why not create an urban community aligned with the culture of Zappos, which encourages the kind of “serendipitous interactions” that happen in offices without walls? As Zach Ware, Hsieh’s right-hand man in the move, put it, “We wanted the new campus to benefit from interaction with downtown, and downtown to benefit from interaction with Zappos.” The only hitch was that it would require transforming the derelict core of a major city.

For Hsieh, though, this was part of the appeal. Transforming downtown Vegas would “ultimately help us attract and retain more employees for Zappos.” For the city itself, it would “help revitalize the economy.” More important, it would “inspire,” a word Hsieh uses often. Hsieh closed his presentation at the faux log cabin high above the desert with the sort of fact he seems to always have on hand: up to 75 percent of the world’s population will call cities home in our lifetime. “So,” he concluded, “if you fix cities, you kind of fix the world.”

Most tourists never see downtown Las Vegas. There are a few blocks of mostly run-down casinos, cavernous gift stores and the enormous, glittering LED display overhead called, with hopefulness, the Fremont Street Experience. Less than two miles to the north, there’s the so-called homeless corridor, a patchwork of soup kitchens and air-conditioned shelters that protect the area’s thousands of homeless from life-threatening 115-degree afternoons during the summer. And this is within a greater metro area that has dominated the nation’s unemployment, foreclosure and bankruptcy lists for much of the last four years. Everyone knows at least one person who has left town for Houston, Dallas or Atlanta.

Nevertheless, the Downtown Project is hoping to draw 10,000 “upwardly mobile, innovative professionals” to the area in the next five years. And according to Hsieh, he and his team receive requests for seed money from dozens of people every week. In return, the Downtown Project asks not just for a stake in the companies but also for these entrepreneurs to live and work in downtown Las Vegas. (They’re also expected to give back to the community and hand over contacts for future recruits.) In expectation of all these newcomers, the project has already set up at least 30 real estate companies, bought more than 15 buildings and broken ground on 16 construction projects.

For those entrepreneurs who live in other parts of the country, and most do, the question often comes down to how eager they are to relocate to a downtown area filled with liquor stores and weekly hotels. Less than a year after the project was officially established, about 15 tech start-ups have signed on. The first tech investment went to Romotive, a company developing smart-phone-controlled personal robots. Money has also gone to Local Motion, a start-up that designs networks for sharing vehicles, and Digital Royalty, a social-media company.

by Timothy Pratt, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Brian Finke

The Story of Amanda Todd

We’ll never know, when the fifteen-year-old Amanda Todd, of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, decided to make last Wednesday the last day of her life, whether she expected that that act would turn her into a household name. If she imagined her fame at all, she must have felt ambivalent at the prospect. In her short life, Todd had already learned that notoriety had a dark side. A certain kind of fame had already found her, and with it came a certain kind of life she plainly convinced herself that she couldn’t escape.

In a YouTube video she left behind, Todd told the tale by flash card, set to a maudlin song called “Hear You Me.” Her story is this: A few years ago, she was chatting with someone she met online, a man who flattered her. At his request, she flashed him. The man took a picture of her breasts. He then proceeded to follow Todd around the Internet for years. He asked her to put on another show for him, but she refused. So he’d find her classmates on Facebook and send them the photograph. To cope with the anxiety, Todd descended into drugs and alcohol and ill-advised flirtations and sex. Her classmates ostracized her. She attempted suicide a few times before finally succeeding, last week.

Todd’s suicide is easily analogized to Tyler Clementi’s, mostly because the public has diagnosed both cases as the result of “cyber-bullying.” Yet, as a descriptive term, “cyber-bullying” feels deliberately vague. Somewhere in the midst of the “mob” there is usually at least one person whose cruelty exceeds the tossing off of a stray insult. In Clementi’s case, the magazine’s Ian Parker chalked the harasser’s motives up to “shiftiness and bad faith,” the kinds of things that criminal statutes can’t easily be invoked to cover. But with Todd’s harasser, the malice is unquestionable. Anyone who has ever been to high school knows what they are provoking by distributing photographs like that.

It is a cultural myth—one particular to the Internet—that the methods of a harasser are fundamentally “legal,” and that the state is helpless to intervene in all cases like this. The systematic way the harasser allegedly followed Todd to new schools, repeatedly posting the images and threatening to do it again, makes it textbook harassment regardless of the medium. Indeed, in Todd’s native Canada, cyber-harassment is prosecuted under the general harassment provision of the Canadian criminal code. And in the United States, most states have added specific laws against cyber-harassment and bullying to their general legislation of harassment. At the federal level, there is the Federal Interstate Stalking Punishment and Prevention Act, which covers harassment that crosses state and national lines. While all of these laws are subject to the limitations of the First Amendment, the First Amendment generally doesn’t protect threats and harassment. If people are not being prosecuted for these acts, the fault lies in the social alchemy of law enforcement, the way the human prejudices of judges, juries, and prosecutors inflect the black letter. Put otherwise, the power is there—the cultural mores are what is preventing the laws from being successfully invoked.

by Michelle Dean, New Yorker |  Read more:

John Register, Pacific Rim Restaurant, 1989
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Pablo Picasso - Reading the Letter (1921)
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Standing Next to Greatness

In my parents’ living room in Boca Raton, Fla., there’s a collection of University of Florida Gators football paraphernalia they like to call “The Shrine.” They have the shrine because my brother Alex played on the team. Well, sort of.

 Inside the shrine are framed photographs of my brother’s hand clad in championship rings and the back of his head meeting President George W. Bush. There’s a Plexiglas-encased 2007 BCS national championship pigskin, a game helmet and several laminated game tickets. There’s also a painting entitled “A Meeting of Champions,” that displays two alligators dressed in Gators football and basketball jerseys, shaking hands in a swamp. It commemorates the greatest year in Gator history, when the school secured national championships in both sports.

As a 5’9, 179-pound walk-on, my brother was all but ignored by the coaching staff, even though he was required to work out until he collapsed, attend all practices and take hits from huge guys on a regular basis. Alex rarely got to wear a uniform or travel, and he never did get out on that field during a game. Not for one minute. Not for one play. Not ever. For me, though, the most telling aspect of the shrine is a photograph of my brother and Tim Tebow standing next to each other in identical blue and orange football uniforms. If you look closely at the picture, though, you’ll notice that my brother isn’t even standing next to Tebow; there’s another player in between them. My dad snapped the photograph off our television screen at the exact moment the camera’s angle obscured the gap between my brother and the superstar.

Few people ever notice that. My brother’s tentative spot on the team elevated our family from relative nobodies into relatives of somebody who sometimes stood next to Tim Tebow.  (...)

At the time, I was living in my parents’ house, having boomeranged back home for the second time since college. I saw first-hand what it meant to my parents that my brother had become a Gator.

One time I was shopping with my mom at Nordstrom, looking through racks of shirts, when a woman near us found a blouse she liked. “Oh, I’m so excited,” the shopper said to her friend. “This is exactly what I’ve been looking for.”

My mother smiled and scooted closer. “No, I’m so excited,” she informed the strangers. Then she paused expectantly.

“Why is that?” one woman finally asked.

“My son’s football team is going to the national championship,” my mother said. "He plays for U.F. – the Gators.”

Although I got caught up in an interior debate on how to subvert my own genetics, I did catch snippets of the unfolding conversation. “That’s wonderful news,” the women were saying, and they seemed genuinely impressed. Apparently having a son that was a Gator – any Gator – permitted my mother to break the rules of social etiquette. What the hell was going on?

I had friends who attended U.F., and when they heard my brother made the team, they too went ballistic. They insisted that I attend the games to see what it was like to be among the 90,000 people packed into Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, which I was told to call “The Swamp.” Everybody would be wearing orange and blue (two colors I thought looked hideous together) and rocking together to "We Are the Boys of Ol' Florida" when the third quarter ended.

by Ashley Harrell, SB Nation | Read more:

Iron-Dumping Experiment in Pacific Alarms Marine Experts

[ed. See also: The First Geo-Vigilante.]

An environmental entrepreneur whose plan to dump iron in a patch of the Pacific Ocean was shelved four years ago after a scientific outcry has gone ahead with a similar experiment without any academic or government oversight, startling and unnerving marine researchers.

The incident has prompted an investigation by Canadian environmental officials, and in the United States, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it was misled into providing ocean-monitoring buoys for the project.

The entrepreneur, Russ George, said his team scattered 100 tons of iron dust in mid-July in the Pacific several hundred miles west of the islands of Haida Gwaii, in northern British Columbia, in a $2.5 million project financed by a native Canadian group.

The substance acted as a fertilizer, Mr. George said, fostering the growth of enormous amounts of plankton that were monitored by the team for several months. He said the result could help the project meet what it casts as its top goal: aiding the recovery of the salmon fishery for the native Haida people.

But marine scientists and other experts said the experiment, which they learned about only in news reports this week, was shoddy science, irresponsible and probably in violation of international agreements intended to prevent tampering with ocean ecosystems under the guise of trying to fight the effects of climate change.

While the environmental impact of Mr. George’s foray could well prove minimal, they said, it raises the specter of what they have long feared: rogue field experiments that could upend ecosystems one day put the planet at risk. Mark L. Wells, a marine scientist at the University of Maine, said that what Mr. George’s team did “could be described as ocean dumping.”

Noting that blooms like those that the team observed occur regularly in the region, Dr. Wells said it would be difficult for Mr. George to demonstrate what impact the iron had on the plankton. And Dr. Wells said it was “extraordinarily unlikely” that Mr. George could prove that the experiment met another crucial goal of the project: the permanent removal of some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Plankton absorbs carbon dioxide and settles deep in the ocean when it dies, sequestering carbon. The Haida had hoped that by permanently burying carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, they could sell so-called carbon offset credits to companies and make money.

Iron fertilization is contentious because it is associated with geoengineering, a set of proposed strategies for counteracting global warming through the deliberate manipulation of the environment. Many experts have argued that scientists should be researching such geoengineering techniques — like spewing compounds into the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight or using sophisticated machines to remove carbon dioxide to combat rising temperatures.

by Henry Fountain, NY Times |  Read more:

Grace reading at Howth Bay ( circa 1900) by William Orpen (27 November 1878 – 29 September 1931).
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How Can We Think About Evil?

"Evil" is a strong word, and a provocative one. Nowadays it tends to be reserved for acts of exceptional cruelty: the Moors murders, organised child abuse, genocide. It is not just the extreme nastiness of such acts – and their perpetrators – that makes people describe them as evil. There is something unfathomable about evil: it appears to be a deep, impenetrable darkness that resists the light of reason. To say that a murderer has killed because she or he is evil is really to point to an absence of motive. Far from the usual muddle of human motivation, evil has a cold, horrifying purity. Phrases like "unthinkable evil" or "unspeakable evil" highlight the way the word is used to say the unsayable, to explain the inexplicable.

So how can we think about evil? Perhaps we can't, or shouldn't. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote that we should remain silent about "that whereof we cannot speak" – a quotation beloved of lesser philosophers seeking a convenient way to end an academic paper. On a more practical level, most victims of evil will find that simply coping takes all their energy – and in the midst of their suffering, it may be difficult to disentangle the questions "why?" and "why me?" But the very familiarity of these questions suggests that there is something about evil that calls for thinking. And Wittgenstein's remark about remaining silent can be countered by Martin Heidegger's suggestion that the proper subject matter for philosophical thinking is precisely what is "unthought" and even unthinkable.

The Christian tradition offers huge resources for our thinking about the nature, origin and meaning of evil. This is partly because the history of western philosophy is intimately bound up with Christianity, so that supposedly secular debates on morality and human nature usually involve theological ideas even if these remain implicit. But more specifically, the Christian doctrine of creation makes the question of evil particularly pressing. If the world was designed and brought into being by a perfectly good, just and all-powerful creator, why does it contain evil at all? If God did not create evil, where did it come from? And why would God make human beings capable of extreme cruelty?

In this religious context, the concept of evil becomes elastic, encompassing much more than pure wickedness. The Christian believer comes under pressure to explain the existence of various kinds and degrees of suffering, unpleasantness, deviation and disorder. In their discussions of the "problem of evil", theologians have distinguished between the "moral evil" of human wrongdoing and the "natural evil" wrought by destructive events like earthquakes and tsunamis. They have also had to worry about the apparently imperfect conditions of life itself – our mortality, our finite knowledge, and our limited power – which are sometimes described as "metaphysical evil". Why didn't God just make everything better?

by Claire Carlisle, The Guardian |  Read more:

Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Local Hero and Donald Trump

I make things up for a living. I don't get out much and I haven't allowed a newspaper in the house for thirty years, so I truly live in a world of fiction. I've got by with Louis B Mayer's definition of a documentary being a film without girls in it, while a semi documentary has one girl. Recently however, I've been obliged to confront reality head-on in the form of the film You've Been Trumped.

It turns out that an old piece of fiction of mine, Local Hero, bears unavoidable comparison with real life events in Aberdeenshire where the property developer Donald Trump is building his "world class" golf resort, captured in Anthony Baxter's compelling work of factual observation. I watched the film recently at the Shetland Film Festival. So here's my report from the front, the border between fiction and fact.

Page one of the writer's handbook tells you that it's characters that make a story and not the other way about. This is certainly true of the local heroines and heroes in You've Been Trumped. Although they share a truly awful predicament, it's the special nature of each individual's developing reactions, revealed in measured intimate sequences, that delivers the true human dimension to the events.

In a manifestly bleak scenario these human qualities start to show through. This isn't feel-good Hollywood stuff though; we're watching real lives and livelihoods mercilessly put to hazard by a malign concoction of egotistical bullying, corporate muscle flexing, craven averting of gaze by national politicians right to the very top and crass misreading of events by local authorities including police.

With the rest of the audience that day I came out into the daylight dazed and shocked, with a numb feeling of individual impotence. Our usually unchallenged feeling of smug security as citizens of a mature democracy had been rocked. (...)

This takes me to my very own villain, Happer, in my film Local Hero. Even 30 years ago as a young tyro writer (I wasn't even drawing arcs in those days) I had the nous to flesh out my baddie, to endow with him with enough personal facets to keep an audience interested, and to create for them at least the facsimile of a human being with which to engage.

For a start, there was his name; Felix Happer, Mister Happy Happy. In reality he was the man with everything but happiness. But I gave him interests and foibles; a fascination with astronomy, a love of the night sky, that, granted, became sadly a clinical obsession.

But crucially he had some personal insight. His instincts told him that his untrammelled ego needed a measure of outside control. So he had regular sessions with an expensive abuse therapist who on demand verbally assaulted him, but who by the end of the film was happily quoting for more physical sessions at an enhanced hourly rate.

by Bill Forsyth, The Guardian |  Read more:
Photograph: David Moir/Reuters

Neighbors

[ed. See also:  The Long Shot.]

Bringing the search for another Earth about as close as it will ever get, a team of European astronomers was scheduled to announce on Wednesday that it had found a planet the same mass as Earth’s in Alpha Centauri, a triple star system that is the Sun’s closest neighbor, only 4.4 light-years away.

The planet is the lightest one ever found orbiting another star and — in the words of its discoverer, Xavier Dumusque, a graduate student at the Geneva Observatory — “it will surely be the closest one ever.”

It is presumably a rocky ball like our own, but it is not habitable. It circles Alpha Centauri B, a reddish orb about half as luminous as the Sun, every three days at a distance of only about four million miles, resulting in hellish surface temperatures of 1,200 degrees.

So this is not “Earth 2.0.” Yet.

Astronomers said the discovery raised the possibility that there were habitable Earthlike planets right next door and that methods and instruments were now precise enough to detect them.

“Very small planets are not rare,” said Mr. Dumusque, who is the lead author of a paper being published on Wednesday in Nature. “When you find one small planet, you find others.” He and his colleagues discussed the results on Tuesday in a news conference hosted by the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany.

Astronomers were electrified by the news of the planet, but also cautioned that it needed confirmation by other astronomers, not an easy task.

by Dennis Overbye, NY Times |  Read more:

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Alex Rodriguez, All American

Beyond the superhuman prerequisites—talent oozing out of pores, a decade or so of dominance, preferably a full head of hair—it's not quite clear what fans actually want in their all-time great baseball players. But it is clear that whatever that is, Alex Rodriguez isn't providing it. Which is weird at first glance, but less so when we look at who we're talking about here. For all the things that are permitted of baseball's generation-defining stars—and it's a lot, from transcendently prickly and prickish vanity, to being a colorful but nihilistic and doomed drunk—the one thing they are not allowed, it turns out, is being the way A-Rod is.

Rodriguez has had the tough part of immortality locked down for years—if he hadn't moved, without complaint, from shortstop to third base after joining the New York Yankees in 2004, he'd be regarded as the best shortstop ever to play the game; he probably is anyway. He has won three Most Valuable Player awards, five home run titles, and has a decent chance—he'd only need to hit 23 per season over the next five years—to hit more homers than any player ever to play baseball. Per Baseball Reference's formula, Rodriguez has been worth 111.4 Wins Above Replacement over his career; Albert Pujols, his nearest active competitor, has been worth 22.9 fewer. Rodriguez is not only one of the best prospects ever, he's one of the greatest baseball players in the history of baseball players. Everyone knows this, and it still doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter because whatever the other, ineffable things we seek in our all-timers are, Rodriguez not only lacks, but exemplifies their opposite. All-timers are allowed to be virtuous ciphers whose robo-hearts pump whole milk, but A-Rod, a buff android coated in marzipan and inauthenticity, can't even clear that low bar of dull verisimilitude—it's easy to imagine RoboCop (he works in private security now), John Tesh, and Mitt Romney chuckling together on Skype about how deeply inauthentic and distant and weird A-Rod seems when he's asked to answer even basic baseball player questions.

All-timers are also, under certain circumstances and within different generations' parameters for colorful-ness, allowed to be total weeping whiskey-filled garbage bags—from Babe Ruth to Mickey Mantle, the Yankees have had a special fondness for these sloshing four-finger pours of virtuosity. But, for all his travails—which include ill-advised dabblings in performance-enhancing drugs, a frosted-tip hairdo, and actual physical sex with Madonna—A-Rod can't quite pull that off, either. In all circumstances and in every way he comes off alien and affluence-perverted and so perversely and simultaneously self-regarding and oblivious that only the word "Miami" seems capable of summing it all up. His soul is upholstered in teal leather; his whole life is an overly air-conditioned and excessively security-guarded VIP section. This, for better or worse, is the best baseball player most fans presently alive have ever had the opportunity to watch play baseball.

In some ways, this is the fault of all those old, silly baseball biases—A-Rod has been simply too good at this sport, his mastery of it too transparently and transcendently fluent, for the necessary struggle to scan. He hits home runs, and the natural response, upon watching the swing that launched the bomb, is "of course." It was once this way with all those graceful gliding plays at shortstop; it was this way as recently as his outlandishly great 2007 MVP season, during which he was 31 years old. The first sin that Alex Rodriguez committed was an original one—he was born effortless, and fans have never quite forgiven him for that. This is almost a poignant thing, until Alex Rodriguez himself comes into play.

by David Roth, Vice |  Read more:

Windows Pushes Into the Tablet Age

Microsoft is giving Windows its most radical overhaul since 1995 and even its most devoted users won't recognize the venerable computer operating system in this new incarnation, called Windows 8, when it appears Oct. 26.

The minute you turn it on, the difference is apparent. Instead of the familiar desktop, you see a handsome, modern, slick world of large, scrolling tiles and simpler, full-screen apps best used on a touch screen and inspired by tablets and smartphones.

This is called the Start screen and it replaces the Start Menu every Windows user knows. But it's not just a menu, it's a whole computing environment that takes over the entire display, with its own separate apps and controls. The old desktop and old-style apps are still there. But in Windows 8, the desktop is like another app—you tap or click on a Start screen icon or button to use it.

This is a bold move and in my view, the new tile-based environment works very well and is a welcome step. It feels natural, especially on a touch screen, and brings Windows into the tablet era. It may even mark the beginning of a long transition in which the new design gradually displaces the old one, though that will depend on how fast Microsoft can attract new-style apps.

Windows will now consist of two very different user experiences bound into a single package. The idea is it's a one-size-fits-all operating system, which can run on everything from older, mouse-driven PCs to touch-controlled tablets without compromise. Everything from a touch-based weather app to mouse-driven Excel will run on it. That's a big contrast to Apple's approach, which uses separate operating systems for its iPad tablets and more standard Mac computers.

Potential for Confusion

By adopting the dual-environment strategy, Microsoft risks confusing traditional PC users, who will be jumping back and forth between two ways of doing things. Both the new and old environments can work via either touch or a mouse and keyboard, but the former works best with touch, the latter best with the mouse or track pad.

There are even two different versions of Internet Explorer. And many functions are different. For instance, Start-screen apps typically lack the standard menus, toolbars, resizing and closing buttons at the top that older apps do.

The company is gambling that the confusion will be brief and will be offset by the ability, via the old desktop, to run traditional productivity apps like Microsoft Office, which can't be run on the iPad or its Android brethren.

by Walter S. Mossberg, WSJ |  Read more:
Image: Microsoft

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White out of Red

It's been twenty years since the first poster was created, but The Economist's iconic White out of Red ad campaign is now available to buy as a series of limited edition screen prints.

We're used to seeing illustrators and designers present their work for sale as prints, but this is the first time we've seen an advertising campaign presented in this way. Sonic Editions, founded by Russell Blackmore (a previous employee of The Economist), has formed a partnership with the newspaper to print some of the most iconic posters from their White out of Red ad campaign, with each iteration hand framed, and available in a limited edition of 250.

Originally created by Abbott Mead Vickers, the first poster in the campaign was "I never read The Economist", and the newspaper has continued to use this as an ongoing format.

via: Creative Review |  Read more:

Signs, Signs, Everywhere a Sign

With a bit less than three weeks to go before the election, let's pause to think about a little-discussed element of today's high-tech campaigns. Consider the humble campaign yard sign. Is there a more retro and prosaic feature of American electoral politics?

One day, as our dog and I walked along a low-volume-traffic street in Newton, Massachusetts, I saw a "Scott Brown for Senate" sign that hadn't been there the day before. Within a week, the same block had two "Elizabeth Warren for Senate" signs pop up on neighbors' lawns. Then, in rapid succession, a couple more signs for Brown showed up.

I began to wonder what motivates people to engage in this particular form of political participation. Are they simply making a bold statement of preference for candidate or party? Are they hoping to persuade others to be like-minded?

Or is there something more aggressively oppositional happening? When the initial sign is quickly followed by a flurry of others, are the newer-sign folks essentially giving a middle-finger salute to the neighbors down the block? Oh yeah?! HERE's what I think of your Obama!

Political scientists haven't paid much attention to this whole question. That's sort of amazing to me, in light of both how long yard signs have been a staple of American campaigns and what a public form of political participation it is. But into this void have stepped two intrepid scholars, Todd Maske and Anand E. Sokhey, authors of a paper titled "Not in My Front Yard! The Displaying of Yard Signs as a Form of Political Participation." They surveyed people in Franklin County, Ohio, who posted yard signs during the 2008 campaign.

Their study confirms much of what one would intuit about the subject. Maske and Sokhey found that "partisanship, ideological extremity, and political activism are characteristics of most individuals who engage in yard sign posting" and that people who engage in this form of political participation believe in "the power of yard signs to convey messages and information."

The authors only obliquely address what I think of as the "F-U Theory" of Yard Signs. Their findings, dampening my fun, suggest that far more people (93 percent) feel that "showing pride" is an important motivation behind their sign posting than feel that "letting the neighbors know" where they stand (75 percent) is important as a motivator. But they also found that people who live in politically heterogeneous neighborhoods are more likely to say they're "letting the neighbors know," and that people "whose neighbors have a sign in their yard are more likely to cite this motivation, whether the neighbor displays a sign for the same or the opposite candidate."

by John T. Tierney, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Photo: Reuters

The Strangest Newspaper-Business Story I Have Ever Read

I really want to just tell you about this utterly strange business decision in the Seattle Times. But I thought it might be more instructive -- and more fun? -- to ask what you would do in their situation so that you can appreciate the severity of their challenge ... and the eccentricity of their decision.

YOU ARE: a media company executive. You own the Seattle Times. Profits are endangered. Ad dollars are down. Political ad revenue is down, especially. Your job is to find a solution.

FIRST: Consider some obvious possibilities. You can hire more sales people to pitch advertisers, including political campaigns. You can ask your current sales team to try harder, target smarter, pitch pithier, innovate! You can pinch pennies and layoff expensive editors, cut your travel and reimbursement budget, stop publishing on certain days, shrink your circulation, that kind of stuff.

SECOND: Consider some slightly less obvious options. You can invest in a new section that concentrates on the software revolution to attract targeted advertising for a Seattle audience. You can supplement revenue with new business divisions that you think could be profitable in a year or so, like an events arm or an annual conference.

What do you DO?

While you're thinking, here's what the Seattle Times Company did. It bought two advertisements in its own paper on behalf of political campaigns. It's as if The Atlantic replaced a "house ad" for The Atlantic Wire with a square that said "Exxon: Just a great, great company." As Dylan Byers reports:

The ad is part of an independent-expenditure campaign with no coordination between the paper and the campaign, according to a statement from The Seattle Times. The ad appears on page B6 and says [Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob] McKenna is a "choice that will make us all proud" and praises the candidate's time as Washington state's attorney general. The advertisement states that "no candidate authorized this ad. It is paid for by The Seattle Times Company."

Try telling an old, long-time Seattle Times reader that a Seattle Times Company endorsement in the Seattle Times is not in fact a Seattle Times endorsement but in fact an Seattle Times Company "advertising initiative." (Predictably, readers and journalists are angry.)

by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic |  Read more: