Thanks to a timely permalinking intervention, I caught a NYTmag story from the 16th that I would have missed, about Lewis Hyde and crafting a new notion of copyright. Half-profile, half-summary, it wanders a lot over its five pages, but has great paragraphs like this one:

Thinker-politicians like Jefferson, Adams and Madison were just as familiar as we are with the metaphor that likens created work to physical property, especially to a landed estate. But they thought of that landed estate in a new way

Speaking of Kevin Kelly, I had basically taken for granted that one of us had already posted his call for more visions of the near future, given our recent spate of near-futurism. It appears no one had. Well, that’s fixed.

I’ll definitely back up Robin; check out NYTMag’s Screens issue. (Is there no way to permalink whole issues? Blerg.)

My favorite story, though, is Ross Simonini’s “The Sitcom Digresses,” which traces the genealogy of the digression/flashback in TV comedies from The Simpsons to 30 Rock and ultimately to the postmodern novel. So:

Tristram Shandy ->

Gravity’s Rainbow ->

The Simpsons ->

Family Guy ->

Scrubs ->

Arrested Development ->

30 Rock

This reminded me that while we generally have a pretty good sense of developments in technique and changes in style in movies and literature, TV history is driven almost entirely by content. The sense of form is much looser — I know that Malcolm in the Middle or Bernie Mac are single-camera shows, and look different from Seinfeld or I Love Lucy — but what was the first single-camera sitcom? Who first added a phony laugh track? When did that get discredited?

Who are the great television directors? If we really are becoming people of the screen, we ought to know.

Dating Advice From Obama Campaigners:

Norah, 26

Field organizer for the Democratic primary in Las Vegas, NV and Flagstaff, AZ

What’s the best way to pick up an Obama campaigner?

Volunteer. Campaigners never have time to date anyone they don’t see in the office. Bonus if you shower and dress in clean clothes. No one in the office has time to do that.

What has working on a campaign taught you about relationships?

For one thing, you can’t date someone who doesn’t understand campaigning. But in the real world, it taught me that there are a lot of men in their mid-to-late twenties who are very driven and motivated to succeed. Eighteen months ago, I thought they were all jerks.

The guy I’ve been seeing for a few weeks hasn’t replied to my last email, but has updated his Facebook status since then. Should I be worried?

Yes. Working on campaigns taught me that when you really want something, the best way to get it is to continually call until you get it, whether it’s an endorsement or a date.

Sadly, the rest of the article is kind of a disappointment — nothing you wouldn’t find from a random sampling of twentysomethings.

Nate Silver reflects on his crrrraaazy interview with John Ziegler and comes to the conclusion that the medium is the message:

[A]lmost uniquely to radio, most of the audience is not even paying attention to you, because most people listen to radio when they’re in the process of doing something else. (If they weren’t doing something else, they’d be watching TV). They are driving, mowing the lawn, washing the dishes — and you have to work really hard to sustain their attention. Hence what Wallace refers to as the importance of “stimulating” the listener, an art that Ziegler has mastered. Invariably, the times when Ziegler became really, really angry with me during the interview was when I was not permitting him to be stimulating, but instead asking him specific, banal questions that required specific, banal answers. Those questions would have made for terrible radio! And Ziegler had no idea how to answer them.

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James Fallows on Terry Gross:

[Gross] avoids the common pitfall of highbrow public broadcasting-style interviewers: giving in to the temptation to show off how much she knows and how smart she is in the set-up to the questions.

What she does instead, and what she shows brilliantly in this interview [with William Ayers], is: she listens, and she thinks. In my experience, 99% of the difference between a good interviewer (or a good panel moderator) and a bad one lies in what that person is doing while the interviewee talks. If the interviewer is mainly using that time to move down to the next item on the question list, the result will be terrible. But if the interviewer is listening, then he or she is in position to pick up leads (“Now, that’s an intriguing idea, tell us more about…”), to look for interesting tensions (“You used to say X, but now it sounds like…”), to sum up and give shape to what the subject has said (“It sounds as if you’re suggesting…”). And, having paid the interviewee the respect of actually listening to the comments, the interviewer is also positioned to ask truly tough questions without having to bluster or insult.

If you have this standard in mind — is the interviewer really listening? and thinking? — you will be shocked to see how rarely broadcast and on-stage figures do very much of either. But listen to this session by Gross to see how the thing should be done.

Gross’s Fresh Air interview with Ayers is here.

My friend Bethany Klein, communications professor at the University of Leeds, has a terrific interview in the new issue of Miller-McCune about her research on the relationship between pop music and advertising:

[Y]ou get people flippantly saying, “Sure, what’s the big deal? This is what people do now.” But when you further investigate, you find that everybody has some kind of internal checklist: “What kind of product is it? What’s my relationship to the product? What type of commercial is it going to be? Who’s directing the commercial?” If it truly was just submission to hyper-commercialism and an embrace of advertising, would it really matter? The other interesting tension I noticed in the interviews was that all these musicians were, of course, huge music fans. Many of them saw their own work as not very precious, that it couldn’t possibly be a big deal if they licensed a song, but then if you talked to them about instances in which their favorite musicians had licensed to advertising, they couldn’t help but feel that sadness of a fan about it. There was a difficulty in reconciling these two positions, thinking nobody could possibly care that much about your own work but knowing how much you care about other people’s. In my book, I devote a chapter to The Shins. They licensed “New Slang” to McDonald’s, relatively briefly, maybe just during the Olympics a few years ago. And that case was an amazing example of “Oh, people do still care.” You could see in all the interviews that James Mercer, their singer, did about this — and it got brought up in every interview — he was really struggling with the idea: “What’s the big deal? This is just a commercial — it happens all the time.” And, on the other hand, he could recognize how painful it would be if, say, The Smiths got used in a commercial and how terrible that would make him feel as a fan.

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I’ve always wondered whether the kind of video games you like (or whether you like video games at all) tells you about what kind of person you are. Early arcade games were built around reflexes, patterns, and a relatively limited set of moves, attracting the kind of guys featured in King of Kong. My older brother is pretty good at sports, but unbelievably good at any kind of sports game, even ones he hasn’t played before — even sports he hasn’t played before. Some people’s brains just seem to be wired for certain kinds of games. Me, I’m good at a lot of video games, but I really like Minesweeper, Final Fantasy II, and Wii Tennis.

Clive Thompson writes a little bit about the relationship between the brain and video games in his review of Mirror’s Edge, a new first-person video game that (Thompson says) uniquely leverages human neurology — specifically our sense of proprioception, “your body’s sense of its own physicality”:

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Roger Ebert — yes, that Roger Ebert — is writing one of the best blogs around. Not just about movies either. I think blog-writing has made Ebert’s movie reviews better — more fun, more adventurous. His review of Charlie Kaufmann’s Synecdoche, NY is a delight, and his own summary is the best: “Fair warning: I begin with a parable, continue with vast generalizations, finally get around to an argument with Entertainment Weekly, and move on to Greek gods, ‘I Love Lucy’ and a house on fire.”

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An industrial robot is scripting the bible, stroke by stroke:

The installation ‘bios [bible]’ consists of an industrial robot, which writes down the bible on rolls of paper. The machine draws the calligraphic lines with high precision. Like a monk in the scriptorium it creates step by step the text.

Starting with the old testament and the books of Moses