The media site Owni.fr hasn’t quite figured out this e-book thing yet, but it’s throwing resources toward “livrels” anyway in a bid for a future French audience.
Tag: 2011
Has The Web Killed Movie Criticism?
“Only a fool would say that there’s not good work being done on the Internet. But the nature of the medium, the way it has reshaped journalism and public discourse, makes it harder for that work to matter.”
At The Kabul Museum
“It is difficult not to write about the Kabul Museum as a lament, and perhaps it was ever thus. The single white marble door on your left as you enter probably comes from the Kabul bazaar, burnt by the British in 1842 … [and the] museum bears the scars of the rocket that hit it in the spring of 1993. … And yet it is not a depressing place.”
Who Was Nostradamus And Why Do People Keep Paying Attention To Him?
“His name and work have permeated our experience of doom and destruction, but the man himself is almost a cipher. Getting any kind of reliable understanding or impression of him takes some work.”
Why We’re Failing At Big Innovation
“Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age. Any strategy that involves crossing a valley–accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance–will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.”
Degas’s Debt To Newfangled Photography
“Degas’s enduring images of dancers owe much to the radically experimental world of early photography and film. Ann Dumas, co-curator of [the exhibition] Degas and the Ballet, explains how photographic inventions helped him so eloquently animate his figures in pastel and paint.”
What GPS Means To Our Sense Of Place
“If each successive era has closed an old realm of exploration while opening up another, then what are we to make of the innovations in navigational technologies that have just gotten underway in earnest over the last ten years?”
Down With Bestseller Lists, Says Michael Dirda
“I think it’s bad for readers, bad for publishing, and bad for culture. Above all, despite appearances, the best-seller list isn’t populist; it’s elitist. … The best-seller list functions, in essence, as a restraint of trade, a visible hand that crushes the life out of the literary marketplace.”