Why didn’t US dollar coins take off, or even take hold, in 1999-2000? Stan Collender, who led the award-winning marketing effort for the popular golden Sacagawea coins, breaks it down:

The reason had nothing to do with consumers refusing to use it: Instead, businesses refused to order the coins and so didn’t have any to give to consumers.

Their reasoning made a great deal of sense. Most large retailers pay to get bills and coins delivered to them by armored vehicle and, because they weigh more, coins are more expensive to deliver than bills. The average retailer didn’t want to spend anything additional for coins when there was a perfect substitute product — dollar bills — that it could get at a lower cost. That meant that, unless they received a Golden Dollar as payment from a customer, retailers had none to use as change. Like almost any other new product, consumers quickly tired of asking for the coins when the answer almost always was no…

There were other reasons. The most prominent was that the manufacturer of the paper for the dollar bills who wanted to keep selling it to the federal government, waged an aggressive anti-dollar coin campaign and trashed the effort every way imaginable. For example, the Mint had to cancel a promotional effort in Boston because the paper manufacturer, which was located in Massachusetts, protested to its senators and the senators demanded that the Mint cancel the effort.

I think everybody who’s breathed the air around economics gets the thesis that money is an economic product subject to supply and demand like any other. But to actually see it broken down as analysis of discrete things — a fiat currency backed by the full faith and credit of the US gov’t but whose weight and materials and cost and durability and shape all turn out to be crucial to its success or failure — man, it’s another thing altogether.

Via @dancohen.

What do you think of when you think of Germany and the German people? Let me guess:

That’s about what I thought. Well, let me tell you: from about the 1770s through the 1920s, the German-speaking world was fucking awesome. Not that you necessarily always wanted to be there, especially when Napoleon came through. But they had Kant, Mozart, and Goethe AT THE SAME TIME. That’s like John Locke, Shakespeare, and The Beatles all just hanging out around England, kicking it.

And it wasn’t like it was just a handful of philosophers, composers, poets, and scientists. It was one after another. And an industrial boom. And the formation of a new empire, when everyone else was beginning to walk back the whole empire thing. The Germans were pumping out babies like it was their job, but unlike the Brits, they had nowhere to go. So they came to America. (More Americans can claim German descent than any other ethnicity.)

Prussia beat France in a war in the 1870s when France was at the top of the world. And didn’t just beat them — they stomped on them. France was so shook up, it had to have another revolution about it. This was like England beating the Spanish Armada.

The industrial revolution? Yeah, the Brits did some nice things with textiles, and the Americans had a lot of bodies to throw at it (plenty of them German), but the rest of it? German.

The twentieth century was Germany’s to lose. And sweet Jesus, did they lose it.

But the Germans didn’t. Not all of them. Because all of that knowledge spread throughout the world. There’s a great line in The Right Stuff, where one of the Americans claims that the Soviets can’t be ahead of them in the space race: “Our Germans are better than their Germans.” World War II just never stopped for them — the so-called Allies kept fighting each other on their turf, using their brains to do the work.

This history — which the understandably overwhelming memory of the Nazis has effectively wiped out for most Americans — is the theme of Peter Watson’s new book The German Genius. He calls what happened in Germany in this period “the third Renaissance.” Here’s a glimpse:

At Göttingen and Halle in the 18th century, and at Berlin and Bonn in the 19th, Germany invented the modern university, combining teaching with research in both humanities and science — at a time when Harvard and Oxford were conservative and theology-centered. University grads staffed a new bureaucracy of experts, and their work in laboratories and archives made research “a rival form of authority in the world.” The universities also enshrined a new ideal of individual cultivation (the fetishized German word is “Bildung”). Germans from Kant to Mann embraced this “secular form of Pietism,” turning inward to find truths not anchored in reason or revelation — and often, like Mann in 1915, choosing mystical wholeness over messy liberal politics.

So how did all this happen? Well…

There’s a new thesis making the rounds that has already stimulated plenty of discussion about the benefits and costs of copyright laws. It comes from the German economic historian Eckhard Höffner, his work summarized in a Der Spiegel review titled “No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany’s Industrial Expansion.”

Höffner contends (according to the review) that the near absence of copyright law in eighteenth and nineteenth century Germany laid the groundwork for the “Gründerzeit”—the enormous wave of economic growth that Deutschland experienced in the middle and later nineteenth century.

An “incomparable mass of reading material was being produced in Germany” by the 1830s, Höffner notes. Some 14,000 publications appeared in the region in 1836, widely distributed thanks to the presence of “plagiarizers”—competing publishing houses unafraid of infringement suits. The result was a cheap mass book market catering to a huge reading public…

And this “lively scholarly discourse” didn’t just focus on poetry and philosophy. It included endless tomes about physics, chemistry, biology, and steel production—crucial subjects a nation would need to master to launch a top flight industrial revolution.

That’s right. They BitTorrented it.

In the last year, the other two Snarkmasters switched jobs, with Robin joining Twitter and Matt moving to NPR. Well, friends, scratch off number three. Starting Wednesday, I’ll be a full-time contributor for Wired.com, writing about e-readers and emerging technology and all things awesome for Gadget Lab, plus maybe occasional pieces elsewhere in the Wired.com ecosystem. That’s right — me and Jonah Lehrer are going to get this whole fourth culture thing started.

Now, you may have heard that Wired editors Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff declared that “The Web is Dead, Long Live the Internet,” in a magazine cover story that was also featured prominently at Wired.com. Let me tell you, friends, I was delighted to hear the news. You see, writing about the web has always made me feel a little uncomfortable. Not the actual writing — just the explaining it to other people part.

You see, I worked so hard to become an expert on dead media, like the book and the newspaper and cinema and poetry, that writing about something living, even using something living, always felt like the grave robbing the cradle.

Now my portfolio is much tidier. Radio and TV hosts can introduce my credentials in one line: “Tim Carmody, renowned expert on dead media and its future.” It’s probably why they hired me in the first place.

[Actually, they advertised the job, I applied, they gave me a one-day tryout (One,Two,Three), and then gave me the nod at the end of the past week, while I was writing for Kottke. It’s been a heady month.]

Anyways, I hope you’ll stop by and bring the Snarkmatrix love to the comments over there. Tell your friends. Link to what I write, all the time, even or especially when you think I’m wrong. (I’ll be able to explain why I’m not.)

And of course, I’ll still be right here, writing about culture, really old technology, and everything else. The paisley just wouldn’t be right without the blue, orange, and green.

Publishers trying to sell ad space inside their books is like the producers of a TV show selling the commercials that air during the show, or the director of a film picking the previews that appear before the movie starts.

I mean, maybe there are some interesting, creative things you could do with that on a case-by-case basis, that would really add something to the total experience. And product placement (in books, TV, or movies) is something else altogether, because it needs to be incorporated into the narrative flow. But there’s a reason why we have TV networks, movie studios, and theater programmers. They’re really good at these things. In fact, some of them, like Nick Jr, are really good at marketing and incorporating ads in books and DVDs, too. So are Apple and Amazon. People on the creative side aren’t. (And yes, I’m including book publishers in the “creative” camp.)

If anything, even as traditional broadcast television might be beginning a slow decline, we’re seeing the metastasis of the television network model. Netflix, particularly since Watch Instantly, is more like HBO than it’s like Blockbuster. People talk about it the same way; “ooh, did you see that they’re showing all three Die Hards on Netflix?” Someone pointed out recently that Netflix has started producing their own original content. Zach Galifinakis had a comedy special released on DVD exclusively to Netflix. You could say the same thing about Hulu, which is trying to figure out whether it should be Showtime or Fox.

Amazon and Apple are like TV networks too, and not just for video. They’re the channels you tune to to get what you want. The difference is that in the digital age, content frequently appears in more than one place. But 1) that’s usually NOT true for what Apple sells, and Amazon’s been pushing for more exclusive deals too.

Twitter, too, isn’t microblogging or an archive of content — it’s a broadcast channel that carries its own water-cooler. And in blogs, Gawker (which already actually is a media network, including Gawker TV) is redesigning itself for bigger screens. highlighting “must-see” content to catch casual drop-in readers, a synthesis of blogs, magazines, and television

So that’s the new world: no more dot-coms, no more blogs, no more revolutionary retailers.* Instead, it’s all channels. We TiVo a handful of favorites and let ourselves flick through the rest.

* Obviously, all of these things will continue to exist and thrive. It’s just these are no longer the only metaphors/terms of art we have to talk about these emerging powers.

Paul Carr at TechCrunch has the best take on the “ads in books” hysteria kicked up by the WSJ (original article conveniently paywalled) I’ve read yet. It’s even smartly titled “Eat Pay Love“:

The crux of the argument is this: books are the only word-based medium currently free of advertising (unless you count the pages full of ads for other books at the back of most mass market paperbacks). This isn’t – as you might think – because ads kill our enjoyment of literature (many magazines publish fiction surrounded by commercial messages) but rather because until now it’s been difficult to sell ad space in books. The lead times in publishing – and the shelf-life of paperbacks – are simply too long to deliver timely commercial offerings: who hasn’t experienced the amusement of picking up an old paperback and being invited to send off for the previous title in the series for just 25c?

But now, thanks to e-readers, all that is changing. With electronic books, ads can be served dynamically, just like they are online – not only does that remove the problem of out-of-date ads being stuck in old books, but it also allows messages to be tailored to the individual reader. Those reading the Twilight books at the age of 14 can be sold make-up and shoes and all of the other things teenage girls need to attract their very own Edward. Meanwhile, those still reading the books at 35 can be sold cat food. Lots and lots of cat food.

Why, that sounds fantastic! What’s the problem again?

It’s a compelling argument, but like so many compelling arguments made about the future of books, it’s also hampered by consisting almost entirely of bullshit. For one thing, publishers are really not geared up to sell ads: they’d have to recruit armies of ad sales people who would be forced to actually sit down and read the novels and historical memoirs and chick-lit-churn-outs that they’d be selling against. Not going to happen.

Now that’s very true. That scenario will not happen.

If only there were some large company with a dominant position in the e-book business that had lots of demographic data about what you read and other things that you buy online who could whip up a smart software algorithm that automatically generated product recommendations based on this information, who’d be willing, I don’t know, to electronically host and deliver these ads in the e-books on behalf of the publishers, in exchange for a fee, or better terms on each sale of a book.

Yep, if there were a company or three like that in the e-book market today, then we’d be talking about something.

Today on Twitter I asked if “Tim Carmody” or “Timothy Carmody” sounded better as a writing byline. I had to explain that my last name is pronounced CAR-muh-dee (a dactyl, stress just on the first syllable) rather than car-MOE-dee. There are other various mispronunciations and misspellings — many people who hear my name think it’s spelled “Carmondy” — but that’s the usual one. And this is one of the strange things about the ambient intimacy of the internet — people you interact with regularly, even intimately, don’t know the sound of your voice, how tall you are, or how to pronounce their name.

Anyways, riffing on my name brought up other stories. For instance, I’m named after my great-uncle, who (like me) was named Timothy Brendan Carmody, but unlike me, was called “Ted.” I was “Timmy” growing up, and my brothers and sister and cousins still call me Timmy. (None of the grownups do, for some reason.) Everyone in my family has an -y at the end of their name: we even call my brothers Sean and Kevin Seanny and Kevvy. My mom is Roxanne (Roxy) and my dad is Jim (as a teenager, Jimmy). I’m the third of four kids; my sister is the oldest and was the toughest kid in my neighborhood growing up. She lives in New York now and designs handbags.

Uncle Ted was my paternal grandather’s brother. The story I always heard was that my grandfather, Patrick Carmody, left the family farm to his younger brothers because he thought they were too stupid to do anything but farming, while he could learn how to do something else. He came to the US through Canada after World War II and eventually got a job as an electrician for Detroit Edison, the power company. He grew up just a mile or two away from my grandmother in County Kerry, but they met in Detroit. My grandmother worked at Henry Ford hospital as administrative staff for years; she just passed away last fall, my last living relative I knew who 1) was born in Ireland and 2) lived within Detroit’s city limits. My grandfather’s name was Patrick; my grandmother was Ellie O’Neill.

My mom’s dad was named William Francis Xavier St Onge; his father was French Canadian, his mother Ojibwa Indian. (My cousins on my mom’s side all have dark hair and skin; it’s amazing what marrying a full-blooded Irishman washes out of your offspring’s complexion.) He grew up in Ironwood, MI, in the upper peninsula, and had a ridiculous number of brothers and sisters. He served in the Army Air Corps in India and Indochina during World War II and worked in a tool and die shop after the war. My grandmother was Phyllis Benhauer, and I think sometimes Phyllis Hitzfield (after her stepfather), before she was Phyllis St Onge. Her father Ralph Benhauer was sheriff of Dade County, Florida, but after her mom found out he was cheating on her, she packed up her two small children and moved to Indiana to take a factory job. We called my great-grandmother “Okie-dokie Grandma,” because she used all sorts of eclectic old slang. She was 5’1″ and played semi-professional basketball.

My parents met in Detroit, naturally, in high school. They both went to single-sex Catholic schools, my dad on the west side in a mostly Catholic/Mexican neighborhood, my mom on the east side in a mostly Italian one. (As a consequence, if I grew up with any kind of ethnic cuisine apart from my grandmother’s ritual Irish gastropunishments, it was these three. Plus Greek, because everyone in Detroit eats Greek food all the time.) They married when they were nineteen — six days after my dad’s birthday, in fact, a date which is almost exactly nine months before my birthday.

My dad just retired from working for Wayne County, first at the jail for thirty-odd years, then for the county executive (the sheriff took my dad with him when he ran for the higher office). My mom had a lot of jobs when I was growing up; tending bar, working at 7-11s and butcher shops, then for a Ford dealership for a while while I was in college. She’s a little redheaded lady; my dad has a moustache and looks (and talks) a little bit like Scruffy the Janitor from Futurama, but with glasses.

I played football and ran track in high school and was valedictorian in 1997. I went to Michigan State University on academic scholarship, which is where I met Robin Sloan, who had the same scholarship a year later. We each co-founded hellaciously friendly rival literary magazines, where we both unapologetically published ourselves and our friends. (I even wrote some poems for Robin’s mag.) I got degrees in philosophy and mathematics, then went to the University of Chicago for a year before ending up at Penn’s PhD program in Comp Lit.

Aaaaand… that more or less gets us to where we are. Demographically, anyways.

PS: I totally think this should be a mini-series. For instance, did you know Robin was born in Illinois, or that Matt’s family comes from Guyana? What other stories are they keeping to themselves?

Henry Jenkins interviews Jorn Ahrens, talking about comics and the city:

Are there specific ideas about the city which originate with comics or do you see comics as primarily replicating ideas which are in broader circulation?… What have comics added to our understanding of what it means to live in the city?

I see primarily the coincidence of the historical emergance of an environment of mass society, most clearly accentuated in modern urbanity with its implementation of the modern self, speed, a stone-born-nature, etc. and new types of mass media of which the comic is one. This coincidence, in my view, feeds a very particular and reflexive relation between the comic and the city. The film, too, is involved in this development. However, I see the comic being special here when its frozen sequentiality also corresponds with the frozen architecture of the sublime that the modern city contunally tries to realize…

Comics made the city readable. The city as social realm strongly refers to communication via images. Comics help turning these images into cultural narratives and aesthetics and to create outstanding icons of modern identity, landmarks of our self-understanding that are, by definition, not bound to specific cities or nations.

Anne Trubek looks at Superman’s original hometown (his first one on Earth, that is):

In 1933, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster dreamed up the comic strip hero with superpowers. Both boys were from immigrant Jewish families and lived down the street from each other in Glenville, then a booming, overwhelmingly Jewish, middle-class neighborhood, with kosher markets selling Yiddish newspapers on nearly every street corner. At the time, Cleveland was the fifth most populous American city, and a forward-thinking one at that, being the first to install public electricity and trolleys.

Siegel’s father first arrived in Cleveland as a sign painter, but he soon left that profession to open a haberdashery in a less prosperous part of town, only to die from a heart attack when robbers entered his store. According to Gerard Jones’ indispensible book Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, the Siegel family was told that he had been shot in the chest. (Whether this incident was the inspiration for a bullet-proof superhero is unknown but seems plausible.)…

Judi Feniger, executive director of the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, notes that Siegel and Shuster both exemplify the Cleveland immigrant story, as children of parents who may not have spoken English. They had a “working-class ethic that is particularly Cleveland, and particularly Glenville,” she says. In 2008, the museum hosted the exhibit “Zap! Bow! Bam!” about the creation by Jewish immigrants of Superman and other comic book heroes.

Yeah. I’m probably just going to blog about comic books and sports for a while.

In Greek mythology, the Amazons were matriarchal Scythian warriors who came out of the Caucasus and conquered parts of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, as well as islands in the Aegean. There are plenty of stories about them — they worshipped Ares and Artemis, they cut off their right breasts so they could be better archers, their queen Penthesilia fought for the Trojans against the Acheans and was killed by Achilles, Heracles had to get another queen’s (Hippolyta’s) girdle of power, and so forth.

Herodotus thought they were real, and you should never take anything the “Father of Lies” says lightly — but most Greek and Roman historians did too. Leonhard Schmitz (who wrote the encyclopedia entry linked above) guessed that the Amazons’ story came from the fact that the women of inland Turkey and Syria were total badasses, even in the early twentieth century, which didn’t fit the gender conceptions of their Greek, Persian, or Bedouin counterparts. Other people say it was the Minoans. The legend grew from there.

Let’s fast forward to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Wonder Woman is an Amazon superhero, from Paradise Island, where the Amazons are still doing their thing. Later, they change the name of the island to Themysicyra, which was the Amazons’ capital in Asia Minor. Wonder Woman is no one to fuck with, “beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, stronger than Hercules, and swifter than Mercury.” She’s Hellenic/mythological, but also idiosyncratic, foreign, a little bit Middle Eastern — but she still wears an American flag on her butt.

This is a long setup, so I’ll get to it. Check out Miss USA Rima Fakih:

Now here’s Wonder Woman, in an armored action figure inspired by Alex Ross’s graphic novel Kingdom Come:

The reasons to like Wonder Woman are more self-evident, so let me explain why I like Rima Fakih. She’s Lebanese-American, from Dearborn, MI (Robin & I are also from metro Detroit), and she’s probably the first Arab-American or Muslim ever to become Miss USA. She’s also fasting for Ramadan during the Miss Universe competition, but still wearing giant metal wings and standing under hot lights even though she can’t even have a drink of water. Now that’s Amazonian. If they ever do a live-action Wonder Woman, they should see if Miss Fakih can act.

Finally, I agree with io9 — for now, the DC Universe Online trailer will have to do:

Terrific Ask MetaFilter thread:

I found a scrap of paper with these terms on it, listed vertically. I don’t know when it was written, though it’s my writing and would certainly have been within the last 3-4 years. If you can draw any connections between these things, or interpret some of the odder ones (shapiro resp?), it would be wonderful.

The list:

godiva
silver lining
shapes yard
want faith
searches room
shapiro resp (possibly shapivo resp)
honeycombs
petula one
hermits
sons and loves (I’m reasonably sure it’s not Sons and Lovers)
ugly’s (that misplaced apostrophe is quite out of character)
torsin’/dorsin’ (one of the two)

Any guesses before you find out the answer?

Here’s my own first experiment with Storify. (See Robin’s here.) I tried to include a fair amount of the back-and-forth that went into it, but omitting some things and time/place-shifted others for readability.