Still, when the early news broke yesterday, a conspiracy theorists co-worker of mine made the off-hand quip, “watch him turn out to be Muslim, possibly a sleeper terrorist that the right wing will use to their advantage.”  Odd, very odd.  Not that I believe that line of thinking. It’s just a tragedy all-around.

Nidal Malik Hasan’s religion says nothing more about Islam extremism than Timothy McVeigh’s and the Unabomber’s actions say about white men.

Still, I was a bit taken aback by this magazine, Girls and Corpses, that is the amalgamation of sexy girls and dead bodies, because it acts no differently than Equire or whatever gentleman’s magazine you prefer to read.  If I were still nine years old, this magazine would have been my sweet spot.

Well, the site has relaunched and though I haven’t given the new version a go, it looks like they’ve managed to license content and keep things on the up and up with the content providers.  The layout is a bit different than I remember it being, but nothing radically so.

According to a press release:

The sources within the platform are a bit different than you may remember, but we are very excited to announce that we are launching the platform with licensed content from over 100 TV and Radio sources from around the country.  There will be at least one television news source in each one of the top 50 US cities, where the majority of the sources allow you to search, clip and share their broadcast news content.We’re also excited to unveil an entirely new site design.  Picking up where we left off, we’ve brought to life many of your suggestions from the beta.  The new site will have:

• Daily featured clips
• The ability to cross search each of our sources simultaneously
• The ability to conduct local market or regional searches
• The ability to generate instant local or category based RSS feeds
• The interactive display of all clip closed caption content for easy quoting for your blog
• A new section called “As Seen On” where we will feature your Redlasso blog posts
• A brand new Redlasso blog where we will feature great content, our members sites and Redlasso updates
• New Facebook and Twitter pages, and much more coming soon!

It’s always difficult to gain traction after losing it, but hopefully Redlasso can do so once again.

“Pitchfork’s position as indie kingmaker was cemented at the decade’s mid-point, but kings don’t always last in indie rock. The twin peaks of the Forkhype range were Arcade Fire’s Funeral, which showed up at No. 2 on the decade list, and CYHSY’s self-titled debut, which was left off entirely,” writes Jacob Ganz. ”That binary seems fitting for a Web site that’s more emblematic of music in the Internet era than any other: Pitchfork in the 2000s has been the story of how effusive praise can avalanche into a kind of canonization, even as the thrill of discovery sometimes ends in embarrassment and revisionism.” 

This is fairly nerdy musical stuff here, looking at the decade-long evolution of arguably the one music publication that still matters.

Eyeball created PBS’s new branding and it looks fantastic.  I love the simplicity of the slogan “Be More” and how evocative the color scheme is.  Well done.  As part of the campaign, which will roll out on September 27 during Ken Burn’s new documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, Eyeball designed 630 different on-air, online, and print elements to push the new branding into the public’s consciousness.

You can check out other images and videos of the rebranding campaign at Eyeball’s site.

William Safire, a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon and a Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist for The New York Times died on Sunday. He was 79.

His conservative politics aside, it’s pretty badass to be remembered as the “oracle of language” upon passing away:  “There may be many sides in a genteel debate, but in the Safire world of politics and journalism it was simpler: There was his own unambiguous wit and wisdom on one hand and, on the other, the blubber of fools he called ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’ and ‘hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.’”

PETA’s campaigns have always seemed slightly counterintuitive.  [via]

He was everywhere yesterday talking about all sorts of topics.  Here he is with  Meet the Press’s David Gregory. Watching this video is somewhat painful and just another reminder why everybody hates the press more than lawyers and child molesters.

Obama will also become the first sitting President to appear on David Letterman’s show, so he’s got that going for him tonight.

Possibly continuing a trend from just about every major news organization, ESPN rolled out ESPN Boston today.  There are no other cities to date, but it would seem like Boston or New York would be the logical places to roll this out. 

Of course, they have Bill Simmons participating, but also Peter Gammons makes an appearance and they’ve managed to poach Mike Reiss from The Boston Globe to be their new Patriots writer/blogger. 

It’s an interesting experience from ESPN and if any sports media company has the cache and wherewithall to put local sports sections out of business, they would be it.

In a classic double-middle-finger salute, Gawker Media has decided to publish the piece with a Russian translation for the world to read.  Or at least Russia. 

Simon Owens, of Bloggasm, sat down with Nick Denton, ruler of the Gawker Media Empire, to find out why. 

Why did he think Conde Nast was going to such great lengths to bury the story?

“I assume concern for the commercial prospects of their Russian titles,” he said. “And remember that the punishment of disobedient journalists can go beyond the impromptu tax audit. Paul Klebnikov of Forbes was killed.”

Gawker has never been one to back down when republishing controversial documents. When the Church of Scientology tried to get the media company to take down leaked video of Tom Cruise’s evangelizing several months ago, the media company refused.

“I’ve always thought that a site like Gawker — though we try to seek out corruption and hypocrisy in New York — would serve a clearer public purpose in Moscow, Beijing or Riyadh,” Denton said.

If you want to read the piece in English, you still have to buy the magazine.

Anderson, 50, is an accomplished journalist and the reason the piece is being buried has much to do with the nature of “Vladimir Putin’s Dark Rise to Power.” 

The piece “challenges the official line on a series of bombings that killed hundreds of people in 1999 in Russia. It profiles a former KGB agent who spoke in great detail and on the record, at no small risk to himself.”  And yet, GQ’s parent company, Conde Nast, has decided to make the piece go away. You can’t even find it on the internet and you can be sure that no Russians will see it either because Conde Nast is bowing to fear from retrobution from Putin’s government. 

“If you’re worried about repercussions and you bow to them, you’re basically surrendering to the other side,” Anderson says.

By now, both investigators had a clear vision of what had happened. Someone had poured liquid accelerant throughout the children’s room, even under their beds, then poured some more along the adjoining hallway and out the front door, creating a “fire barrier” that prevented anyone from escaping; similarly, a prosecutor later suggested, the refrigerator in the kitchen had been moved to block the back-door exit. The house, in short, had been deliberately transformed into a death trap.

The investigators collected samples of burned materials from the house and sent them to a laboratory that could detect the presence of a liquid accelerant. The lab’s chemist reported that one of the samples contained evidence of “mineral spirits,” a substance that is often found in charcoal-lighter fluid. The sample had been taken by the threshold of the front door.

The fire was now considered a triple homicide, and Todd Willingham—the only person, besides the victims, known to have been in the house at the time of the blaze—became the prime suspect.

This month’s Wired has a story about one man who did vanish, Matthew Alan Sheppard. 

So on a Friday two weeks later, Sheppard drove with his wife, Monica, their daughter, and his mother-in-law to a rented cabin in the foothills of the Ozarks on the picturesque Little Red River, an hour from Searcy. He called it a much-needed last-minute getaway for the family, and for most of the weekend, it was.

Then, in the fading Sunday afternoon light, with his daughter and mother-in-law occupied in the cabin, Sheppard walked down to the dock with Monica and their black lab, Fluke. When Monica looked away, Sheppard helped the dog — always eager for a swim, just as he’d counted on — off the platform and into the Little Red River’s notoriously deadly current. His wife looked back just in time to see Sheppard heave his own 300-pound frame into the river after their beloved lab.

Thrashing in the 39-degree water, Sheppard managed to hand the leash up to Monica, who hauled the dog to safety. But he struggled to swim back to the dock. Flailing desperately, he gasped that he was having trouble breathing. A moment later, as the current pulled him downstream, his head dipped below the surface and didn’t reappear.

A frantic 911 call from Monica minutes later launched a search-and-rescue operation involving more than 60 people. Dive teams scoured the river, and a plane scanned the area from overhead. The next morning, Sheppard’s shell-shocked coworkers brought their own boats up to help with the search. They found his fluorescent orange Eaton cap in shallow water not far downstream. But when 24 hours passed without another sign, the authorities abandoned — publicly, at least — any hope of finding him alive.

And in a twist of gonzo journalism, the author of the piece, Evan Ratliff, vanished himself on August 15.  Clues to his whereabouts will be posted to @nxthompson.  If you find him, you could win $5,000.

Both exchanges are worth reading, if for nothing else than they’re sports food for thought.  The most memorable aspect is Gladwell’s thoughts on sports drafts and his suggestion that there shouldn’t be a draft, but rather college players should go on job interviews with their respective teams.

That suggestion alone, is worth wading through 20,000 words or so.

Can’t wait for the My Life is Awesome companion site.

I wonder about it’s viability as a longterm alternative to both Gawker and The Huffington Post, especially since it’s based around an optimistic tone and its insistence on posting only six stories a day. 

It’s a ballsy business decision, going against the status quo and for that he should be commended.  Especially considering that 90% of content driven sites make their money by artificially inflating pageviews with truncated front page posts, publishing 30 posts a day — when only 10 – 15 are post-worthy — relying on spurious rumors, tipsters and press releases to do their work. 

It’s certainly worth keeping an eye on because its voice and mission are so different.  There’s plenty of intelligent snacking to do.  One article that caught my eye was on voluntourism, where people vacation and volunteer at the same time. 

Voluntourism. Sure, the ideal “vacation” for half of American tourists would be to indulge themselves at a spa, but you’re no ordinary American tourist. “Volontourists” devote anywhere from a single afternoon to their entire trips doing charitable work.  Although the typical set-up is a sort of mini-Peace Corps (i.e. building schools and digging ditches), there seems to be something in it for everyone — from reef cleaning for scuba divers in Aruba to meat donations for hunters in Alabama. Companies like Global Imprints (full disclosure: Carlos’ sister’s company) let you put your professional skills (i.e. legal, medical, engineering) to work while you’re working on your tan. So if you’re, say, a delayed-start lawyer who wants to do a little good-will lawyering, now you can.

It’s a customizable fountain of information, a much better way to consume news than their other endeavor. 

It’s still curious that the New York Times is one of the few old school newspaper companies that actually seems interested and invested in the manner they deliver news through technology.

Rather than be a list of updates related to the topic you’re searching, now it’s going to be a real-time data source. 

For example: If you want to learn about swine flu, you’d search Twitter and turn up not only a list of opinions, facts, and news that people are Tweeting, but also information from the sites they linked to in their tweets–in this case it may well be other news sources, medical reference texts and so on. Similarly if someone tweeted a link to their blog post, you’d find data from that post appear in Twitter’s search results also.

This seems almost inevitable if you’ve ever used Twitter as a source of news information.

Here, Pontin, draws the distinction between the newspaper as print object and journalism.  It’s a distinction that has often gone overlooked by many proclaiming newspapers are dead.  The tangible print aspect and old business model of newspapers are certainly dead; however, the blood of the paper – journalist and reporting – will never stop flowing.

Pontin does an excellent job factoring in the three facets of the industry: content, advertising, delivery platforms. 

5. The most important publishing platform of the future will probably be lightweight, thin, flexible screens that use electronic ink. That’s because the editorial distributed to such screens will be as interactive as that on today’s websites yet retain the fonts, graphical design, and illustrations and photographs of traditional media (a wonderfully rich visual grammar that art directors labored over for centuries). But publishers must not become fixated on platforms; they must regard them as mere distribution channels favoring different kinds of content. Again, publishers should offer their readers as much choice as is reasonable. Over the next decade, they should distribute editorial content to personal computers over today’s Web, to small devices like the iPhone, to larger devices like Amazon’s Kindle, to electronic-ink devices as they emerge, and to print publications (at least for a little longer).

The industry doesn’t need major readjustments, as some would think, but often is the case that it just needs fine tuning and vision.  Pontin is rational and practical in his manifesto, something that those shouting “print is dead, print is dead” do not fully grasp.  [via @vanityfairer]

So, he’s having some financial troubles (as so many are, especially freelance writers/independent bloggers) and has decided to sell T-shirts to make some scratch (a small part of me felt his pain when he succumbed to adding advertising recently, which if you knew how long he held out on doing that…)  I would highly recommend checking out the site and then helping him out.  Buy a T-shirt or make a donation.  I’m leaning towards the blue shirt myself.

You can’t really search by city and hopefully they’ll add more sources to the list – you’ll see what I mean when you go to the site; for example, you can break things down by news outlet (NY Times or Huff Post, etc.), but after that there isn’t much funcionality. 

Seems like a no brainer would be for a company to start this type of service by city (like the Gothamist network but Twitter instead of blogs) to aggregate news, government offices, traffic, arts events, famous citizens, etc.  After the site gets set up you really wouldn’t have to do much beyond general maintenance.  Any investors would to help me make this reality?

[via Rex]

How was one to go about scanning a book quickly and efficiently without destroying it? It was a problem that vexed book scanners for years until Google came up with this solution.

Turns out, Google created some seriously nifty infrared camera technology that detects the three-dimensional shape and angle of book pages when the book is placed in the scanner.

New Scientist has more on this patent and it’s breakthrough scanning technology.

Of course, Astley, received a second lease on life thanks to the whole Rickrolling phenomenon.  It seems in recent months that he’s accepted the reality of the situation, moved beyond disbelief into something of gratitude. 

More entries can be found here.

Also?  It was an internet vote, and many of the /b/tards helped push him over the top.  PC Magazine has more.

How’s this for anagramal conspiracy–the first letter of the first 21 names on the list spell out the phrase “marblecake also the game.” Music Machinery claims to have the details on the hack, which, like all great things in this world, was supposedly launched on 4chan’s /b/ board.

But he’s starting to take his place amongst the pseudo-badboy authors of yesteryear.  He defaced a poster belonging to the Syrian Nazis and all hell broke loose:

But later that night, three of our “scoop” brigade–Jonathan Foreman, Michael Totten and Christopher Hitchens–got involved in a street brawl with some thugs of a Syria-loving skinhead party called the SNPN after Hitchens rather gallantly insulted their swastika flag. On our way to a meeting with Minister of State Nissib Lahoud, Hitchens showed me the gashed knuckles and bruises suffered during the punch up. The attackers had apparently come out of nowhere on posh Hamda Street, where they had gone to buy shoes. “I was on the ground,” Hitchens said, “and getting it in the head.” It was a miracle they didn’t pull Kalashnikovs.

To which the Abu Muqawama blog later noted, “it’s widely known that since the May 2008 events the SSNP guys have behaved like thugs in Hamra (where the ass-kicking took place). But seriously, would you roll into East L.A. and start writing over gang signs? I mean, is that smart?”

No, no it’s not.  But it makes for a growing legendariness.

Very cool new design for the NY Times website: Article Skimmer. Much better than navigating the homepage, right?

Use the space button to navigate between sections and if you hover over a story and hit shift then it’s supposed to bring up a larger version of the story.  Except it doesn’t quite work right.

I would like to see it do something akin to Newser (or the HuffPo’s quick view) and when hovering over the article it shows the entire story or the first three grafs and not just the square in a larger picture.  You’ll see what I mean when you go to the site and play around for a few minutes.

Seems to strike a nice balance between the hompage and an RSS feed.[via Rex]

New York Magazine’s Will Leitch, formerly of Deadspin, has a sorta funny story about the time he went on Bob Costas’s HBO show and got verbally abused by author Buzz Bissinger.  Leitch was basically called out for writing on the internet.  And the above clip doesn’t really do the exchange justice.

There may have been spittle involved.

We milled around the green room. If you’re the type of person who cares about such matters, the following people were extremely friendly: John McEnroe, Michael Wilbon, Selena Roberts, and Mike Tirico. The following people were less so: Jason Whitlock, Cris Carter, Joe Buck. I talked to Braylon Edwards, who seemed as confused as anyone else as to why he was on my panel but jokingly pointed out how much better he looked in his suit than I did in mine. And, pacing around the room, clutching a folder of Deadspin printouts (though I didn’t know this at the time) like it was a talisman, was Buzz Bissinger. David went over to talk to him first, and left about fifteen words in with a grimace and a heads-up: “He’s locked and loaded.” Then, with the show about to start, Buzz walked over to me.

“Hey, it’s good to meet you, sir,” I said. “This should be fun.”

He didn’t even look at me. “So, you’re a Cardinals fan?” he said, with a smirk. “Yes,” I said. “They’re pretty much our family religion.”

He walked away, not even acknowledging my response. This was not going to end well.

And end well it didn’t, but it was Bissinger who ended up looking like an old man fool for not understanding the internet, well not getting it, really.  And the picture painted of a try-too-hardy Costas, obsessed with his lack of height, is well, unflattering might be a word I would use except that word is too kind for this portrait.

The NY Times has a timeline map showing what people from around the country said on Twitter during the Super Bowl broadcast. I like the emoticons tab but they also should have included a profanity tab.  I don’t know if it’s the people I follow on Twitter, but it seemed like no one was interested in the game as much as the commercials and Bruce Springsteen’s crotch at halftime.

Of course, the Superbowl tweets weren’t nearly as interesting as Henry David Thoreau liveblogging the game.

“All these books are also packed with art, and many contain long sections of photo and design illustrations that were intended to be essays in themselves. So each of these books is not only about looking at the world, but is also full of images for you to look at,” writes Annalee Newitz at io9.  “These books are a terrific way to learn more about what’s going on beneath the surface of things – and to celebrate the ambivalent power of design and media.”

To be honest, I’ve managed to escape my entire life without having read any of these books.  I know, I know, right?  It’s almost crazy in a way.  But now that Penguin is reissuing these books, complete with the typo title of Marshall McLuhan’s book restored, now is as good as time as any to delve into these titles.

Penguin Press art director Jim Stoddart explains the thinking behind the re-releases: “Part of Penguin’s creative publishing direction includes refreshing some classic creative texts that still sell many thousands of copies each year, despite their tired covers and designs that haven’t been touched for decades.

“I approached Yes Design to work on unifying these four books into a timeless and dignified series, while also taking much care to complement the integrity of the original texts.”

YES studio from the UK did the design work and it is scrumptious.  More can be found on these reissues at CR Blog and Design Sojourn.

The internet has altered the way that people process information, find information, share information, and schools by still relying on books as their fundamental source for knowledge/information have failed to engage students in a way that the internet does.� It’s a losing battle until they change their mode of attack.

I guess, in many ways, this longish piece in the New York Times this morning looking at the internet and literacy has also failed.� It’s a 3,000 word (estimate only) look at how teenagers process information, which inevitably is dubbed “reading.”� They argue that kids no longer no how to read or even bother to do so because of the internet.� Oddly, the whole point of the article: that kids don’t read in a linear fashion anymore.

Ironically, I didn’t even read the entire piece, but skimmed through it looking for relevant parts, interesting points, etc.

Few who believe in the potential of the Web deny the value of books. But they argue that it is unrealistic to expect all children to read �To Kill a Mockingbird� or �Pride and Prejudice� for fun. And those who prefer staring at a television or mashing buttons on a game console, they say, can still benefit from reading on the Internet. In fact, some literacy experts say that online reading skills will help children fare better when they begin looking for digital-age jobs.

Some Web evangelists say children should be evaluated for their proficiency on the Internet just as they are tested on their print reading comprehension. Starting next year, some countries will participate in new international assessments of digital literacy, but the United States, for now, will not.

Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author�s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.

Just because kids don’t read in a linear fashion anymore doesn’t mean that they can’t or won’t read.� It’s just that they’ve changed the way they want to access information.

So why would you republish the article in a newspapery linear fashion?� Wouldn’t it have been more bold of the NYT editors to repurpose the print article and illustrate their point by creating a multimedia extravaganza?

What everyone has lost sight of in the madness of the New Yorker’s satirical cartoon of Sen. Obama dressed as Osama and Michelle Obama dressed as a member of the Black Panther Party is the actual article about Obama’s swift rise to power.

It’s a long article, almost 18-pages, which is enough to think that no one commenting on the <sarcasm> insane reprehensibleness </sarcasm> of the magazine’s cover won’t actually read the damn thing. Which is a shame, for it’s a thoroughly researched and enlightening portrait of an ambitious/ruthless politician knocking on the door to the nation’s highest political office.

As Nate from FiveThirtyEight put it, “Well, no shit he’s ambitious. For any American to go from a relatively unprivileged childhood (or a privileged one for that matter) to be on the doorstep of the Preisdency by the time he’s age 46 requires a perfect storm of luck, intelligence, and ambition. Obama has ample amounts of each.”

He goes on to say that after finishing the article, it’s more notable for what it doesn’t say about Obama. In that he’s sort of a boring politician – not driven to ascend to the White House by some Oedipal complex (like Dubya) or the desire to get blow jobs (like Clinton).� He’s just. Sort of. Ambitious.� And unafraid of tossing those aside whom he has no use for anymore.

The upside is that he is intelligent, without being an academic; he’s not radical by any means (hence the irony of the cover); and finally, he is in no way corrupt.� Something of a bonus considering how utterly corruptible and morally bankrupt the last president has been.�� Though I suppose Dubya’s legacy shouldn’t enter into this article.

As for the cover, yeah it’s provocative and certainly makes for easy water-cooling fodder. But its downside is that the discussion seems to end at the cover and not what’s on the inside of the magazine. Which is a shame because Ryan Lizza has really done his homework. Can’t wait to dive into this one again on my lunch break.