Well, this is happening, and by "this," I mean a Twitter account that consists of running the headlines of a Buzzfeed rip-off website called Pineza.gr through Google Translate. And why not? What does YOUR stupid Twitter feed do for you?
They say you mellow as you age. And yet, this is likely the single cattiest dispatch Bob Morris has yet filed for the Times in his many [redacted] years. "Nearby, under a gnarled old tree, a black granite gravestone for one of the host’s dogs had been littered with empty wineglasses. "
Scarlett Johansson: I just can’t get into “The Help.” I don’t know, I sort of take issue with a white woman writing in dialect, but I feel like I should read the book before I see the movie.
"I am pretty disappointed in this beta. This book just isn't finished! Man, there was a part in Chapter 3 where every time I turned the page, it was the same page again, over and over and over… I kept having to start over from the beginning, nothing made any sense! The translation seems off, like they're having trouble getting the words right." —The publishing of books could ACTUALLY BE WORSE: they could be published like videogames.
Today TED is an insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering—a place where ideas, regardless of their quality, go to seek celebrity, to live in the form of videos, tweets, and now e-books. In the world of TED—or, to use their argot, in the TED “ecosystem”—books become talks, talks become memes, memes become projects, projects become talks, talks become books—and so it goes ad infinitum in the sizzling Stakhanovite cycle of memetics, until any shade of depth or nuance disappears into the virtual void. Richard Dawkins, the father of memetics, should be very proud. Perhaps he can explain how “ideas worth spreading” become “ideas no footnotes can support.
