Sex and socialism. Women formed the bedrock of the Engels-Marx alliance. For Eleanor Marx, Muriel Lester, and others, the revolution was personal... Nature of the blogging revolution
Bucknell economics professor now leads an Ethiopian rebel arms
Many colleagues at work such as Mark Vale were on the CIA side of the Afganistan war in 1979, while I was on the KGB side of the conflict in Czechoslovak Socialist Army ... In thirty seven years life just changes so much under the bridges of cold war rivers: One wonders where paranoid Ethiopian fighters on all sides of the bizzare conflict will end up in 37 years ...
Google has created a Doodle to celebrate the 37th anniversary of the publication of The Neverending Story. Michael Ende’s children’s fantasy novel was first published in Germany back in 1979. The English translation followed in 1983
The Call LA Times Ever wonder what it would be like to be framed? This six-part series tells all
For your weekend, here’s a deep dive into the tale of the pair of lawyers who lost a massive civil suit over framing a PTA rival. [LA Times]
Taunted for being pretty, woman burns face
Jeremy Corbyn just announced a plan to end one of the biggest scams in modern history Canary
Health Care Is a Right, Not a Business CAF
It's an empty gesture. But so are most symbolic policies, and yet that meaninglessness does not make them unimportant Stereotype threat
Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend's eye.
Some sins are as motes, while others are as beams; some as a gnat, others as a camel. Not that there is any sin little; if it be a mote, or splinter, it is in the eye; if a gnat, it is in the throat; both are painful and dangerous, and we cannot be easy or well till they are got out. That which charity teaches us to call but a splinter in our brother's eye, true repentance and godly sorrow will teach us to call a beam in our own... Conservatives criticize Michelle Obama for bare arms yet stay silent on Melania Trumps nude poses ...Jeremy Corbyn just announced a plan to end one of the biggest scams in modern history Canary
Google now testing search shortcuts new circletastic Media Drgn
The explanatory power of marrying up and marrying down, for men vs. women
Ying Sa, I ate a goldfish (IowaBiz.com). If you think you’ve had a tough time getting to where you are, meet someone who had it tougher
“[This will be] the first time Wired (or any other magazine) has been guest-edited by a sitting president. The theme of the issue: Frontiers. … For this completely bespoke issue, he wants to focus on the future – on the next hurdles that humanity will need to overcome to move forward.” President Barack Obama Wired
Ying Sa, I ate a goldfish (IowaBiz.com). If you think you’ve had a tough time getting to where you are, meet someone who had it tougher
“[This will be] the first time Wired (or any other magazine) has been guest-edited by a sitting president. The theme of the issue: Frontiers. … For this completely bespoke issue, he wants to focus on the future – on the next hurdles that humanity will need to overcome to move forward.” President Barack Obama Wired
“Artist
and author Dennis Cooper re-launched his popular blog on Monday after
months of legal disputes with Google, whom many accused of censorship.
The artist posted a message on the blog’s Facebook account on Friday to
explain Google’s reasoning for erasing his 14-year-old blog.” (It was a 10-year-old post.) Dennis Coooper DCS blog relaunched google censorship
What Were Blogs?
The demise of Gawker.com also marks the end of the
utopian promise of blogging. Here's what killed them.
For the media-savvy members of a certain generation, who came of age as news consumers in the era of 9/11 and are now facing the prospect of middle age, the shuttering of Gawker.com marks more than just the end of an entertaining site that focused on media and political commentary (whose merits and sins can be endlessly debated). With Gawker gone, we have to face the prospect of the end of blogging and of the utopian enthusiasms of our youth.
We were all bloggers, or so it seemed circa 2003. Blogging was where those of us who didn’t trust the Bush administration’s push to war got alternative takes from Juan Cole, Marcy Wheeler, and other informed sources. Or if we were conservatives, blogging was where we fisked (remember fisking?) the lamestream media. Blogging was where a new wave of feminism was born on sites like Jezebel (a surviving Gawker Media property), launching writers like Irin Carmon and Anna Holmes. But blogging wasn’t just for the young. It also energized older writers (Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus) and gave them a much larger audience than they’d had before.
At the height of the blogging craze, there were even utopian claims made on its behalf: Blogging would give us (finally) the Republic of Letters that the Enlightenment promised, a world where everyone could be a writer and find an audience—an interconnected network where, in true McLuhanesque fashion, a divided world would become a unified global village. Thanks to blogs, journalist Trevor Butterworth wrote in the Financial Times in 2006, “power was shifting from the gatekeepers of the traditional media to a more open, fluid information society.”
When protests broke out in Iran in 2009, conservative writer Michelle Malkin framed it in terms of the revolutionary potential of blogging: “In the hands of freedom-loving dissidents, the micro-blogging social network is a revolutionary samizdat—undermining the mullah-cracy’s information blockades one Tweet at a time.” Malkin was, of course, right to see Twitter as “micro-blogging,” but what she perhaps didn’t realize at that time was that Twitter and other social media were about to render traditional blogging old fashioned.
We were all bloggers, or so it seemed circa 2003. Blogging was where those of us who didn’t trust the Bush administration’s push to war got alternative takes from Juan Cole, Marcy Wheeler, and other informed sources. Or if we were conservatives, blogging was where we fisked (remember fisking?) the lamestream media. Blogging was where a new wave of feminism was born on sites like Jezebel (a surviving Gawker Media property), launching writers like Irin Carmon and Anna Holmes. But blogging wasn’t just for the young. It also energized older writers (Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus) and gave them a much larger audience than they’d had before.
At the height of the blogging craze, there were even utopian claims made on its behalf: Blogging would give us (finally) the Republic of Letters that the Enlightenment promised, a world where everyone could be a writer and find an audience—an interconnected network where, in true McLuhanesque fashion, a divided world would become a unified global village. Thanks to blogs, journalist Trevor Butterworth wrote in the Financial Times in 2006, “power was shifting from the gatekeepers of the traditional media to a more open, fluid information society.”
When protests broke out in Iran in 2009, conservative writer Michelle Malkin framed it in terms of the revolutionary potential of blogging: “In the hands of freedom-loving dissidents, the micro-blogging social network is a revolutionary samizdat—undermining the mullah-cracy’s information blockades one Tweet at a time.” Malkin was, of course, right to see Twitter as “micro-blogging,” but what she perhaps didn’t realize at that time was that Twitter and other social media were about to render traditional blogging old fashioned.
Blogging was fun, and it broke the rules. As founder Nick Denton said in a 2013 interview, “The basic concept of Gawker was two journalists in a bar telling each other a story that’s much more interesting than whatever hits the papers the next day.” Which is another way of saying Gawker tried to harness the conversational informality of blogging, the way the medium bypassed the codified rules of print journalism. But Gawker is dead, undone (depending on which interpretation of history you believe) either by its own hubris or by the vindictiveness of its billionaire foe, Peter Thiel.
A funeral for blogging itself feels not far off—or at least a mid-life crisis. Blogs still exist, but they lack the youthful vigor of 2003. “It seems like the new young people aren’t very interested in blogging,” Kelly Conaboylamented Tuesday at The Hairpin. It’s not so much that blogging is dead, but that it’s splintered beyond recognition. Almost every publication you can think of has blogs, but the impact is very different than the blogs of yore.
The most successful bloggers are now running corporate media empires like Vox, or working for the mainstream media. The first cohort of feminist bloggers have moved on to media development and books. Conservative spleen has reinvented itself as Breitbart.com and Nazi-themed anime memes from the alt-right. Mickey Kaus is now a Trump-thumping Twitter ranter. Andrew Sullivan is an aging rock star, largely quiet although he occasionally appears in New York magazine, where he’s a contributing editor, to warn about the dangers of Democracy or to live-blog political events.
