Posts by matt

Will Google never stop coming up with the goodness?? Introducing Google Gulp. That logo is hott, too.

“I know that I only knew him for a day, and much of that time I was wasted and he was a little drunk, but I do remember liking it when I looked into his eyes and I liked it when he put his hand on my back when we were in the car to make sure I was doing okay. I really liked how he held my hair back when I was throwing up.” — Buffy06, LJ Poet Laureate

A new literary magazine hopes to bring the long tail of blogging to the world of scholarly criticism. May it fare well, and may it all be much, much shorter than this ridiculous inaugural post. (Glossary: Long tail.)

The RAND Corporation has released a report taking a comprehensive look at the effectiveness of US anti-drug policies. Asking, specifically, “Why do they suck so much?”

Short answer? ‘Cause we mostly apply one solution — incarceration — to a thousand different problems. But that’s not news. Here’s some stuff the RAND study points out that struck me as enlightening. (I’ve also gotta plug the Mark A. R. Kleiman book Against Excess, available in its entirety online. It was prominently cited in the RAND study, so I searched for it, and there it was.)

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This page contains the single freakiest animated gif I have ever seen. Even freakier than the bunchie.

I have long thought that casting James Van der Beek as the lead in the movie Rules of Attraction was a giant missed opportunity. The lead character is supposed to be this sardonic, aloof, drugged-out playboy lusted after by almost everyone who sees him. The creators of the movie clearly cast Van der Beek in the role to subvert the loser-ish image he’d cultivated as Dawson in the television show “Dawson’s Creek.” (Dawson was on an image-remaking kick at the moment, having just come off the hit football movie Varsity Blues.) I never believed him for a second as the protagonist of RoA.

Everyone who’s seen Cruel Intentions, Igby Goes Down, or Gosford Park knows that Ryan Phillippe exists on this earth for the sole purpose of playing that role. He’s been decent to mediocre in everything else, but I just know he would have taken that role in that movie to some unimaginable height, making it much, much more than the fun, hot trifle of a film it ended up being.

Now Hollywood’s gone and delivered Giant Missed Opportunity #2.

In June 1967, the Supreme Court handed down a hugely controversial unanimous opinion in Loving v. Virginia, forcing all the states to allow interracial marriage (at the time, 16 states banned it). That December, Hollywood came out with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

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We provide free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches.

J.D. Lasica, Marc Cantor, the Internet Archive, and the folks behind Drupal have launched OurMedia.org, which they hope will become the hub of the grassroots media revolution. Robin’s already posted EPIC up there, so we know that when 2014 actually rolls around, we can look back and laugh at how far our predictions diverged from reality, as we perform remote upgrades on our Digital Consciousness servers and sip calorie-free nanolattes in massively multiplayer gridcaf

A fat girl’s rhapsody.

All right, just like last year, here’s all the 2005 National Magazine Award finalists I could find online. Excerpts or articles behind subscription walls are in brackets (I’m not sure if all the Atlantic articles I bracketed are actually behind subscription walls; but I figured it was safer to assume, so try them even if you’re not a subscriber.)

Vanity Fair was a strong contender in the awards this year, but puts none of its content online. (At least NMA-nominated columnist James Woolcott has a blog now.) If not for The New Yorker winning 10 nods and putting most of its content online, this list would be pretty useless. In fact, I didn’t include the Photo Essay category, because The New Yorker‘s entry, “Democracy 2004” by Richard Avedon, is the only one available online.

If you come across anything I missed, add it in the comments!

LEISURE INTERESTS

Golf Digest:

– The Ultimate Guide to the Ultimate Buddies Trip

National Geographic Adventure:

– [ Grail Trails ]

O, The Oprah Magazine:

– Attention Shoppers!

Runner

To attain the rank of grand master of memory, you must be able to perform three seemingly superhuman feats. You have to memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour, the precise order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards in the same amount of time, and one shuffled deck in less than two minutes. — Slate