Farhad Manjoo's page on the Internet

Now that I’ve seen News of the Word, I’m sad to see it go — its headlines are such Britty, nonsensical Dada fun!

From the site right now:

Apprentice Zoe: I won Glenn with socks appeal

Harry’s bedder than Jen, says Flo

Boozy bro Andy Carroll gave me black why eye

Cheeky mates show off Lamps’ Chelsea buns

I Moss be mad, wedding’s cost us £1m

My Big Fat Gypsy Divorce at just 19

Peter Crouch’s unAbbey families

Barnes & Noble released its long-awaited e-reader today, and it looks pretty spiffy. What’s more, it’s priced at $259 — $20 less than Amazon’s 6” Kindle.

There’s only one problem: Amazon doesn’t charge sales tax, while BN.com and Barnes & Noble stores do. What’s tax on $259? Where I live, it’s $24.61.

In other words, your checkout screen for a Kindle will look like this:

While your checkout screen at BN.com looks like this:

I’m still fixed on this story.

The AP filed court papers saying Shepard Fairey is lying about simply misremembering which photo he used to create the Obama Hope poster. (Fairey originally said he used the Clooney photo above, and now he’s recanted and says he used the close-up.)

The AP alleges:

“It is simply not credible that Fairey somehow forgot in January 2009 which source image he used to create the Infringing Works, which were completed only a year earlier in January 2008,” according to the papers filed Tuesday. “It also strains credulity that an experienced graphic designer such as Shepard Fairey misremembered cropping George Clooney out of a source image and making other changes … when no such cropping or other changes were ever made.”

But is this right? When I write, I’m always careful to link to and properly quote the source material that I’m using. Nevertheless, a lot goes on in the editing process—a process that goes on while you’re writing—and if you asked me a year later how I was inspired to use some turn of phrase or even where I got a specific quote from, I think I’d very likely misremember.

Look at the two pictures above: Obama’s expression is the same in each. The photos were taken by the same photographer at the same event, seconds apart. All you have to do to the Clooney one to make it into the close-up is apply one Photoshop transformation—Crop. It’s a one-second process.

Fairey is a slippery character—he’s admitted to destroying evidence to cover up which picture he used—but still, it seems entirely reasonable to me that he could have genuinely forgotten which picture he used.

The AP seems to simply misunderstand the ease of editing photos—or, really, editing anything—in the modern age. Copying, pasting, cropping, resizing—these are the bread-and-butter actions of modern info-mining. They are entirely forgettable.

From a Time Q&A:

Aspiring journalists should stop going to journalism programs and go to some other kind of grad school. If I was studying today, I would go get a master’s in statistics, and maybe do a bunch of accounting courses and then write from that perspective. I think that’s the way to survive. The role of the generalist is diminishing. Journalism has to get smarter.

Shepard Fairey says he lied to his attorneys and destroyed evidence about which photo he used to create the Obama hope poster.

When he sued the AP in February (after they’d claimed he’d violated their copyright), he said he’d used a photo of Obama sitting next to George Clooney at the National Press Club — the first one here. The AP claimed he used another image from the same event — a close-up of Obama. Now he admits that he did use that image.

Here’s what I can’t understand: Why did he lie? He and his former attorneys—who withdrew from the case when he fessed up to lying—now say that the particular image he used doesn’t undermine his fundamental fair use right. That seems right to me; both images are from the same photographer at the same event, and each could easily have served as the basis for the Hope poster. If one of them can be appropriated under fair use, so can the other.

But if he believed that, why did Fairey say he used the Clooney image and not the close-up? Does the close-up image make the fair use case more difficult? Why? Was there a reason Fairery lied — or was he just dumb?

Mathew Honan, who did Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle, shares an e-mail he got from Randall Munroe, creator of XKCD:

Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:03:32 -0500
From: “Randall Munroe”
To: mhonan@gmail.com
Subject: Barack Obama (from Randall Munroe of xkcd)


Hi,

Assuming you’re the guy who did barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com:

You should try adjusting the randomizer on your site (barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com) so that it takes you through all the items before repeating one. There’s a subtle probability-related problem that occurs in showing people stuff at random that isn’t sufficiently appreciated.

If you have 1,000 factoids, you know how many you’ll have to show before the reader will probably see a repeat? 38. And when they see that first repeat, they think “okay, I’ve seen most of them.” Even if you write 10,000 entries, they’ll see a repeat on average after 119.

Bottom line, you can make the site much more enthralling if, for each visitor (IP/whatever), you shuffle the factoids and then show them one at a time, so there’s no repeat. This will look almost exactly the same to the reader for the first few refreshes, but it fixes the fact that under the current true randomness, the site looks like it has only 1%-10% as much content that it ACTUALLY does.

This affects a lot of sites, but yours is cute and I thought I’d let you know.

— Randall

(via Ezra Klein)

Samin Nosrat, sous chef at the Berkeley restaurant Eccolo (which has just closed down), tells what it’s like to try to serve local, organic food during the financial crisis:

We did fine for a long time - barely making it is considered fine in the restaurant business - but when the financial crisis hit last fall, we felt an immediate impact. We started to tighten things up; when one cook quit, we divided the extra work amongst the rest of us, shouldering more responsibility and working longer hours for the same pay. And though I’d always monitored food cost like a hawk, I redoubled my efforts to save money without compromising our commitment to sustainable foods.

I re-examined my purchases. Instead of 25-year-old balsamic vinegar, I bought 15-year-old stuff. We stopped buying whole pigs; we couldn’t break even on them because few customers were adventurous enough to order soppressata, zampone or porchetta di testa, dishes we made to use up every part of the animal.

But there were things we couldn’t let go of without compromising taste - extra-virgin olive oil and Parmigiano-Reggiano, for examples. If we skimped on these, our food would suffer. I started to feel stuck: The choice always seemed to be between flavor and expense, and ours was a kitchen motivated by taste. Things started to get tense with our accountants, because our priorities were clearly different.

…..One particularly emotional battle revolved around eggs. A few years ago, Alexis Koefoed of Soul Food Farm near Vacaville showed up with a carton of speckled eggs. After tasting her pastured, tawny-yolked eggs, we began buying them. But investors kept questioning: If we could get organic eggs for $3, why buy Soul Food Farm eggs for $5? They felt customers couldn’t taste the difference.

The next week, we served garlic broth garnished with a poached Soul Food Farm egg. Table after table raved. One woman was moved to tears - she said she hadn’t seen yolks so bright and rich since being on her grandparents’ farm in Taiwan.

But in the end, the reality was the profit-and-loss statement, and we had to let go of the eggs. I almost quit over that. One by one, all my purchasing habits were scrutinized: Why spend the time going to the farmers’ market? Why buy Hoffman Farm chickens when precut breasts are so much cheaper? Why buy fresh squid that you have to pay an employee to clean when you can get pre-cleaned frozen squid?

Frank Bruni, in his last column as NYT restaurant critic, offers this advice for navigating a menu:

Scratch off the appetizers and entrees that are most like dishes you’ve seen in many other restaurants, because they represent this one at its most dutiful, conservative and profit-minded. The chef’s heart isn’t in them.

Scratch off the dishes that look the most aggressively fanciful. The chef’s vanity — possibly too much of it — spawned these.

Then scratch off anything that mentions truffle oil.

Choose among the remaining dishes.