wnyc: Why should On The Media’s Brooke Gladstone be the next coach of the Brooklyn Nets?
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wnyc:

Why should On The Media’s Brooke Gladstone be the next coach of the Brooklyn Nets?

TarenSK: Why Aaron died

tarensk:

Last week, I awoke to find Aaron with me. He was sitting next to my bed, grinning his cheekiest grin, holding my hand.

For a few minutes, I savored a sweet uncertainty: Were the last few weeks all a nightmare, and Aaron was still with me? Or was I awaking inside a dream state, and in the real…

  • 60 Plays

Nice Marketplace piece about something we talk about here sometimes:

Do entertaining Superbowl ads actually convince anyone to buy anything?

Sarah Palin’s Fox Career in Numbers

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Over the course of her tenure at Fox, Sarah Palin was paid $15.85 per word. Those words included 111 Amens, 28 hecks, 9 darns, 7 hells, 2 damns, and a mere 2 You Betchas.

(Numbers via Eric Ostermeier, h/t Romenesko)

breakingnews: France orders Twitter to help name ‘racist’ tweeters AFP: A French court has ruled that Twitter must hand over data to help identify people who post racist or anti-Semitic tweets. The decision comes despite the social network having refused in the past calls to police its millions of users. Photo: A close-up view of the logo for the microblogging website Twitter on June 1, 2011 in London.
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breakingnews:

France orders Twitter to help name ‘racist’ tweeters

AFP: A French court has ruled that Twitter must hand over data to help identify people who post racist or anti-Semitic tweets. The decision comes despite the social network having refused in the past calls to police its millions of users.

Photo: A close-up view of the logo for the microblogging website Twitter on June 1, 2011 in London.

Google founder Eric Schmidt’s daughter Sophie wrote about visiting North Korea

Looks great, right? All this activity, all those monitors. Probably 90 desks in the room, all manned, with an identical scene one floor up.

One problem: No one was actually doing anything.  A few scrolled or clicked, but the rest just stared. More disturbing: when our group walked in—a noisy bunch, with media in tow—not one of them looked up from their desks.  Not a head turn, no eye contact, no reaction to stimuli. They might as well have been figurines.  
Of all the stops we made, the e-Potemkin Village was among the more unsettling. We knew nothing about what we were seeing, even as it was in front of us. Were they really students? Did our handlers honestly think we bought it? Did they even care?  Photo op and tour completed, maybe they dismantled the whole set and went home.  

When one of our group went to peek back into the room, a man abruptly closed the door ahead of him and told him to move along.

Highlights from the world’s most trainwreck-y live New Year’s Eve broadcast, starring Jamie Kennedy. 

Really hoping Amazon’s patent for a cellphone airbag system is an actual, we-are-going-to-make-this patent. 
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Really hoping Amazon’s patent for a cellphone airbag system is an actual, we-are-going-to-make-this patent. 

My name became a verb, and I regard that as one form of immortality.
Robert Bork, would-be Supreme Court Justice, on our show back in 2005. 

Source: onthemedia.org

Our Twitter stream (and probably yours) is dominated by news of the shooting in Newton today. The NRA hasn’t chimed in, but they quietly canceled today’s Live Q and A with a pro-gun country musician. 
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Our Twitter stream (and probably yours) is dominated by news of the shooting in Newton today. The NRA hasn’t chimed in, but they quietly canceled today’s Live Q and A with a pro-gun country musician. 

This 1988 John Stossel expose, NUTS FOR NINTENDO, is pretty sobering stuff. 

For more on the brain-deadening scourge of the video game, here’s our hour on gaming.

First I need to completely guard the place where I’m watching the show. I have to block the windows with curtains and closely guard the entrance door. Then I lock the door and listen with an earphone on a low volume so that no one outside can hear what I’m watching. Because there are frequent inspections, I make sure I can move the moment the inspectors come. The whole scene of me watching drama is worthy of a real drama show.

This Freedom House Intermedia AudienceScape’s report on North Korean’s secret consumption of foreign media is pretty damn compelling. 

(Sorry bout the misattribution, thanks FJP)

Jazz great Dave Brubeck died today. Here's a nice radio piece that opens with him rehearsing with a couple of young music students.

Buzzfeed has a statement from Tumblr on the issue. It sounds ominous.

There is a viral post circulating on Tumblr which begins “Dearest ‘Tumblr’ users”. If you have viewed this post, please log out of all browsers that may be using Tumblr immediately. Our engineers are working to resolve the issue as swiftly as possible. Thank you.

The Swedish company Top-Toy group (a Toys R Us licensee) just released a gender-neutral catalog. Their sales director: “We can’t decide what the big toy makers’ boxes should look like as their products are made for the global market, but we can make changes on our own boxes and in our stores.”