I have several events scheduled for the Lurking book tour including Books are Magic (Brooklyn Feb 27), Harvard Bookstore (Cambridge March 5), RiffRaff (Providence March 11), and Skylight (Los Angeles April 8). ❧
Bookmarks
Francesco Zaffarano, senior social media editor for The Daily Telegraph, tweeted a link to his Google Doc that keeps track of the journalists and news outlets that are experimenting with TikTok. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1n2a8dSLE6ZG5Eql_Bt9ayPi14WkZ3-IsviEmlI1f11Q/edit
Conferences present an opportunity for journalists, developers, product managers, and others who work in the news space to connect with one another, learn new skills, and exchange ideas. We’ve collected a list of 21 journalism conferences scheduled throughout 2020. If you’re looking for spaces to meet new people or take your career to the next …
A beautiful, lightweight and customisable cross platform app built for Micro.blog
No matter how far wrong you’ve gone, you can always turn around.
This page helps you to obtain an access token or IndieAuth, that you can use with home-made Micropub clients in IFTTT, Workflow and the like.
This page looks hacky on purpose, use at your own risk. Needs javascript, because it works on your own computer.
You can also save this HTML page to your own computer first, if that makes you feel safer. See the code or file an issue.
If you’re a book blogger, you’ve most likely heard of Edelweiss, the main source for publisher’s catalogs, book review downloads, and inventory management for librarians and book …
The quick and easy way to upload your MP3 to YouTube
John C. Frémont, one of the United States’s leading explorers of the nineteenth century, was relatively unknown in 1842, when he commanded the first of his expeditions to the uncharted West. But in only a few years, he was one of the most acclaimed people of the age – known as a wilderness explorer, bestselling writer, gallant army officer, and latter-day conquistador, who in 1846 began the United States’s takeover of California from Mexico. He was not even 40 years old when Americans began naming mountains and towns after him. He had perfect timing, exploring the West just as it captured the nation’s attention. But the most important factor in his fame may have been the person who made it all possible: his wife, Jessie Benton Frémont.
Jessie, the daughter of a United States senator who was deeply involved in the West, provided her husband with entrée to the highest levels of government and media, and his career reached new heights only a few months after their elopement. During a time when women were allowed to make few choices for themselves, Jessie – who herself aspired to roles in exploration and politics – threw her skill and passion into promoting her husband. She worked to carefully edit and publicize his accounts of his travels, attracted talented young men to his circle, and lashed out at his enemies. She became her husband’s political adviser, as well as a power player in her own right. In 1856, the famous couple strategized as John became the first-ever presidential nominee of the newly established Republican Party.
With rare detail and in consummate style, Steve Inskeep tells the story of a couple whose joint ambitions and talents intertwined with those of the nascent United States itself. Taking advantage of expanding news media, aided by an increasingly literate public, the two linked their names to the three great national movements of the time—westward settlement, women’s rights, and opposition to slavery. Together, John and Jessie Frémont took parts in events that defined the country and gave rise to a new, more global America. Theirs is a surprisingly modern tale of ambition and fame; they lived in a time of social and technological disruption and divisive politics that foreshadowed our own. In Imperfect Union, as Inskeep navigates these deeply transformative years through Jessie and John’s own union, he reveals how the Frémonts’ adventures amount to nothing less than a tour of the early American soul.
Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and Brexit, it is innovation itself that explains them and that will itself shape the 21st century for good and ill. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen, hard to summon into existence to order, yet inevitable and inexorable when it does happen.
Matt Ridley argues in this book that we need to change the way we think about innovation, to see it as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens to society as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan. Innovation is crucially different from invention, because it is the turning of inventions into things of practical and affordable use to people. It speeds up in some sectors and slows down in others. It is always a collective, collaborative phenomenon, not a matter of lonely genius. It is gradual, serendipitous, recombinant, inexorable, contagious, experimental and unpredictable. It happens mainly in just a few parts of the world at any one time. It still cannot be modelled properly by economists, but it can easily be discouraged by politicians. Far from there being too much innovation, we may be on the brink of an innovation famine.
Ridley derives these and other lessons, not with abstract argument, but from telling the lively stories of scores of innovations, how they started and why they succeeded or in some cases failed. He goes back millions of years and leaps forward into the near future. Some of the innovation stories he tells are about steam engines, jet engines, search engines, airships, coffee, potatoes, vaping, vaccines, cuisine, antibiotics, mosquito nets, turbines, propellers, fertiliser, zero, computers, dogs, farming, fire, genetic engineering, gene editing, container shipping, railways, cars, safety rules, wheeled suitcases, mobile phones, corrugated iron, powered flight, chlorinated water, toilets, vacuum cleaners, shale gas, the telegraph, radio, social media, block chain, the sharing economy, artificial intelligence, fake bomb detectors, phantom games consoles, fraudulent blood tests, faddish diets, hyperloop tubes, herbicides, copyright and even―a biological innovation―life itself.
Pedro Pascal, Actor: Game of Thrones. Pedro Pascal is a Chilean-born American actor. He is best known for portraying the roles of Oberyn Martell in the fourth season of the HBO series Game of Thrones and Javier Peña in the Netflix series Narcos. In 2016 he starred in the American-Chinese film The Great Wall alongside Matt Damon.
Publisher of books about cookery, food history and the ethnology of food.
NewsDiffs archives changes in articles after publication. Currently, we track nytimes.com, cnn.com, politico.com, washingtonpost.com, and bbc.co.uk.
NewsDiffs, which was born out of the Knight Mozilla MIT hackathon in June 2012, is trying to solve the problem of archiving news in the constantly evolving world of online journalism.
It was recently added to the thousand sites archived by the Library of Congress.
The New York Times highlighted NewsDiffs in the public editor's column (which had previously discussed the difficulties of revisions in the digital age). The next New York Times public editor even joined us for a 2013 SXSW panel (slides available online)
The changes which have drawn the most attention are the addition of "on this issue" to a New York Times editorial about Obama after the PRISM disclosures, and the disappearance of beef stroganoff from the obituary of a rocket scientist.
You can browse our repository of articles. Or you can take a look at some of the examples of articles that have changed.
If you are a developer, you can check out the Github repository.
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