We can agree to disagree about Sasha Frere-Jones. David Remnick and I like him, and I’m increasingly convinced we’re alone in that regard. But few critics derive as much pleasure from discussing pop trifles, or do it with as much pizzazz. Clearly I was not about to let his paean to Beyonce go unremarked. Best observation: “‘Single Ladies’ is an infectious, crackling song and would be without fault if it weren’t the bearer of such dull advice. The wild R&B vampire Sasha is advocating marriage? What’s next, a sultry, R-rated defense of low sodium soy sauce?”

Low-sodium soy sauce! Swish!

Google buys a defunct paper mill, which it’s turning into a data center. I can’t help but think of the missed opportunities:

1. Google Blank: DIY Search and Document Creation.
2. Okay, that was too cute. How about Google Paper Services for Enterprise? Google sells you its Apps suite, tech support, AND the paper you print your documents on. And everything you photocopy ends up in a Google search engine.
3. Google File: (im)personal archive services.
4. Google is going to print its own money.
5. New team-building exercise: all Google employees to collaborate on a five-act play with at least 500 speaking parts.
6. Google Airplanes.
7. Googlegami.
8. Google Trading Cards: collect all your top searches!
9. Google Direct Mail: We store your documents, email, and contacts, AND will send your letters for you!

So many possibilities.

It turns out that there is more money in the inner city than we thought:

In its 2004 report on the city of Cleveland, Social Compact detected a residential population that was 24 percent higher than 2000 Census figures indicated. In studying the new immigrant hub of Santa Ana, Calif., for a 2006 report on that city’s disadvantaged communities, Social Compact found an average household income 40 percent larger than that captured in the 2000 Census — a discrepancy Social Compact says can be partially explained by a thriving informal economy many traditional economic models don’t capture.

In an interview with Miller-McCune.com, Social Compact CEO John Talmage attributed the difference in the numbers to his organization’s mining of data from a variety of sources — including tax rolls, utility accounts and credit companies — rather than relying on computer models based on incomplete or unreliable data. The approach tends to emphasize the economic opportunity — rather than the poverty and deficiency — to be found in low-income neighborhoods.

America’s inner cities, according to ICIC’s Web site, represent $122 billion worth of retail purchasing power.

Read more…

Oh, why not. She had me at the paisley fire. This video for this movie was shown at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishers conference today:

A synopsis might help:

Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by email. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as “The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told.”

Dan Visel at if:book, in a post titled “Wikipedia Before Wikipedia,” looks at the Trictionary, a grass-roots trilingual dictionary (English, Spanish, and Chinese) created between 1978 and 1981 by high school students on New York’s Lower East Side.

Here’s some text (from Tom MacArthur’s 1986 book Worlds of Reference):

The compilation was done, as The New Yorker reports (10 May 1982) “by the spare-time energy of some 150 young people from the neighborhood,” aged between 10 and 15, two afternoons a week over three years. New York is the multilingual city par excellence, in which, as the report points out, “some of its citizens live in a kind of linguistic isolation, islanded in their languages”. The Trictionary was an effort to do something about that kind of isolation and separateness.

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From The Atlantic Monthly:

Can we not devise a system of liberal education which shall find its foundations in the best things of the here and now? Literature and art are all about us; science and faith offer their daily contributions; history is in the making to-day; industry pours forth its wares; and children, no less than adults, are sharing in the dynamic activities of contemporary social life. Not in the things of the past, but in those of the present, should liberal education find its beginnings as well as its results. Fortified by the resources, interest, and insight thus obtained, it can be made to embrace areas of culture and power which are relatively remote and abstract.

David Snedden, “What Of Liberal Education?,” January 1912.

Read more…

An intriguing aside from a long Silicon Alley Insider article:

I do wonder whether Twitter’s success is partially based on Google teaching us how to compose search strings? Google has trained us how to search against its index by composing concise, intent-driven statements. Twitter with its 140 character limit picked right up from the Google search string. The question is different (what are you doing? vs. what are you looking for?) but the compression of meaning required by Twitter is I think a behavior that Google helped engender. Maybe Google taught us how to Twitter.

I’m not sure if there’s enough evidence to make the claim that Google taught us how to Twitter (did it then also teach us how to text?). But I wonder what else Google might have taught us. Has the nature of our Google queries changed over time? Do we type fewer words? More? How does our use of Google compare to the first generation of search engines?

Have people always talked about creativity this much? I mean the details of it — craft, process, practical wisdom. My memory says “no,” but then, my memory is short.

Everybody’s been pointing to Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on the culture of creativity and genius.

Ze Frank has been thinking out loud about creativity and collaborative projects.

Imogen Heap sits in her home studio in vlog after vlog and talks you through her creative process — insecurities and all. (This is my favorite example because it’s not just reflective, it’s real-time.)

Argument: It is the responsibility of the artist in the 21st century to speak and write like this. Sure, you can still lock yourself in your studio and indulge in the agony and ecstasy of isolation if you want, but that’s sooo 20th century. The new world favors the public artist, the artist brave enough to speak plainly not only about ideas and inspiration, but about fear and hesitation as well.

I’ve been rediscovering my slow cooker. While my boyfriend was visiting over the last week, we made bananas foster, chicken and dumplings, and sloppy joes, all in the crockpot. (Let’s just say it was not a week of healthy eating.) Given the effortless deliciousness that came out of the crockpot after a few hours of cooking, I started to wonder if anyone had made a blog devoted purely to slow cooker recipes. Did I even need to ask?