The two most helpful items I’ve found for thinking about New York Times subscription prices:
Digital Subscription Prices Visualized (The Understatement)
A Rule of Thumb: Pricing Should Be Simple (Daring Fireball)
I spend a good deal of time reading the Times online and would be happy to pay to do so. But $5 a week to read the Times on a Mac and iPad seems absurd when a measly $3.10 Monday–Friday print subscription affords the same access. (There is of course no home-delivery in my corner of “east-central Illinois.”) That I’m even thinking twice about whether to sign up is a sign, I think, that the paper’s pricing is off.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
New York Times subscription plans
“Trapped” (xkcd)
“But everything’s just signals in my sensory cortices! How can I be sure they correspond to an external world?!” The wonderful comic strip xkcd gets all philosophical.
Elizabeth Taylor (1932–2011)
Elizabeth Taylor’s son Michael Wilding:
Her remarkable body of work in film, her ongoing success as a businesswoman, and her brave and relentless advocacy in the fight against HIV/AIDS, all make us all incredibly proud of what she accomplished. We know, quite simply, that the world is a better place for Mom having lived in it.Elizabeth Taylor, legendary actress, dies at 79 (Los Angeles Times)
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Domestic comedy
Texting forth and back:
Rebecca Black is on Jay Leno tonightRelated reading
But it’s only Tuesday!
All domestic comedy posts
(Thanks, Rachel!)
“Get high on honey”
[“Young swingers use Golden Blossom Honey when they want a lift. It’s loaded with nature’s own quick action energy. Try it. You’ll agree Golden Blossom is groovy — on grapefruit, cereal and ice cream.” From Life, October 17, 1969.]
Try it — sure, try it, just once, and pretty soon you’re not just wanting that lift, young lady — you’re needing it, and more and more of it, day after week after month after year. One jar’s too many, and a hundred’s not enough. Golden Blossom’s street names: ace, buzz, sweet thing, yellowbird.
[Ace: as in comb.]
Monday, March 21, 2011
“Taste worth dying for!”
The Heart Attack Grill in Chandler, Arizona, seems like an outtake from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Key themes: freedom, self-destruction.
[The spokesman just died.]
The decline of the omnivore
“[T]he coveted creature — known for its sensitivity, inquisitiveness and tendency to congregate around galleries and concert halls — is in decline”: Decline of the Omnivore (Miller-McCune, via Arts & Letters Daily).
I’m grateful to my parents for raising my brother and me as omnivores. Every weekend — or so it seemed — our family went off to a museum or historical site. That was hardly the norm on our Brooklyn block, where our day-trips seemed to provoke amused derision among our neighbors. I remember a well-used copy of Murray Polner and Arthur Barron’s Where Shall We Take the Kids?: A Parent’s and Teacher’s Guide to New York City (1961) sitting around the house. Thanks, Mom and Dad.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Saturday, March 19, 2011
A Garry Wills review
“This book, which was featured on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, comes recommended by some famous Big Thinkers”: Garry Wills reviews Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly’s All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age.
For dummies
A Google search that led someone to Orange Crate Art: the mixed up files of Mrs basil e. Frankweiler for dummies. That’s sadder than sparknotes for movies.
If you want to be able to talk and write about From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, read the novel, kid. You’d be a real dummy to cheat yourself by doing otherwise.
A related post
Review: From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
