In a dramatic move under new tiny millionaire owner Chris Hughes, The New Republic has redesigned its website to take a strong stand against em dashes. Simply everyone is talking about it: sometimes presented as two adjacent hyphens, sometimes replaced by a misused en dash, but always using a type treatment that shortens both em and en dashes, perhaps related to the use of double-justified text, this typography is both innovative and disruptive. As is its daringly large linespacing. Also they eliminated advertising.

Beloved national counterculture tabloid Arthur was a victim of the Great Recession when it published its last issue four years ago, but it has been reborn as a reader-supported broadsheet that will be out in time for holiday stocking stuffers. Jay Babcock is back as editor, Portland's Floating World Comics is the publisher, and Arthur regulars will be back on the masthead, including Thurston Moore and Dave Reeves ("Defend Brooklyn!"). Pre-order it for just $5, and help America's cultural recovery.

"Successful brand actors tend to rave about their time playing the face of a brand. Letting go is another story. For most artists, achieving a huge commercial success, be it a hit song or movie or novel, guarantees another shot at stardom; the opposite is true for most brand actors. Once you’re the face of one major product, no other major product wants you." —I enjoyed this piece about the life of the successful commercial spokescharacter. Maybe print it out for your commute.

It began in France. In 1895, the Gaumont Film Company (the oldest continuously operated film studio in the world) debuted their “Marguerite” logo, the iconic daisy named after founder Léon Gaumont’s mother. The daisy’s design has evolved since then, and so has the art of “bumpers”—those petite vignettes that announce a production studio’s involvement in a project. Universal and Paramount, the respective second and third-oldest studios in the world, swiftly followed Gaumont’s lead; the latter’s “Majestic Mountain” logo is Hollywood’s oldest surviving bumper, the byproduct of Paramount founder W.W. Hodkinson’s doodle of the Ben Lomond Mountain near his childhood Utah home.

Rarely are they consciously paid attention to, [...]

"I can't produce premium shows like 'CSI' without advertising." —Les Moonves makes a terrible, terrible argument in favor of advertising-supported "content."

Zach Braff must have been too busy to do the voiceover for this new Johnson's baby shampoo commercial that just made me gag and lurch towards the bathroom with my hand cupped over my mouth. I bet he's regretting it now, seeing how it came out. (The voice actually sounds a bit like that of "Mad Men"'s Vincent Kartheiser, who used to do a lot of voiceover work in commercials when he was young. But that couldn't be him now, could it?)

Data from StatCounter.

Did you know that most of Firefox's budget comes from Google? That is because Google pays the Mozilla Corporation, the for-profit arm of the Mozilla Foundation, a share of ad revenue gained by displaying Google as the default Firefox search engine. By most, really, one means "almost all": in 2010, 84% of Mozilla's royalty revenue came from Google, and royalties counted for $121 million of the Foundation's $123 million in income. Pretty good sugar.

The agreement expired in November. (It first expired in 2006, was renewed through 2008 and then again through 2011.) The rapid growth of Google's Chrome browser threatened the survival [...]

Here is a disgusting fact you probably don't think enough about, unless you're Michael Bloomberg resting between other public tragedies such as climate change and the slaughter of children: The primary source of calories for Americans is "caloric beverages." Meaning, on top of all the repulsive processed food and industrial fat-meat Americans eat around the clock, corn-syrup drinks provide the largest percentage of calories per American.

Coca-Cola, which adds corn syrup to water at factories around the world, is finally spending your money to buy commercials on the cable-news channels to tell you about this problem.

"Today, we'd like people to come together on something that concerns all [...]

Before the entire economy of Earth collapsed, online reporters who covered the exciting world of "blogs with banner ads" enjoyed speculating on the value of various websites run by a couple of clever weirdos here and there. Was Gawker Media worth more than General Electric? Had PerezHilton.com eclipsed Disney in valuation? Etc. Well, the economy must finally be "great again," because there's a new Business Insider post claiming Matt Drudge's web page is worth "$150 million to $375 million."

"U.S. food companies are reaching children by embedding their products in simple and enticing games for touch-screen phones and tablets. The new medium is far cheaper than Saturday morning TV commercials and could prove as effective."

"Comfortable" is a flexible term. Any one person’s threshold for comfort can differ from another’s. For the individual, comfort is relative: a heat wave in Edmonton, Canada, say, no longer agonizes after one has endured a heat wave in New York. When a person says "comfortable," they often mean "pleasant." Other times "comfortable" translates to just "bearable" or "satisfactory." While the word "comfortable" doesn’t change, a person’s definition of it can, and usually does, with time—that is, with age and experience. It might happen gradually, incrementally, with constant comparisons between then and now. Comfort itself is relative, its meaning elastic.

The word "comfortable" has been thrown around since the Middle [...]

A humpback whale off the coast of Nova Scotia is magic.

Or…

"Ongo," founded in 2009, was going to be the centralized newspaper paywall system. Companies like the Washington Post, the New York Times Company and Gannett poured in a few million dollars to find a solution to delivering ad-free news to people who would pay for it. They launched their product in January of 2011, and at the end of this month, they will close their doors (and, as you do, lay off their employees). Here's the now-former CEO, Dan Haarmann, on his way out the door, talking to Nieman Journalism Lab: “I hate advertising in my news. I cannot stand people trying to send me a mortgage or [...]

We tend to be dismissive about certain "studies" in these parts, particularly when they are sponsored by industries which tend to benefit from their findings. But our cynicism should not be read as a blanket castigation of all research. Some studies are indeed valid and remarkably worthy of note, particularly ones which show that "online advertisements are as just as effective as TV commercials and much more likely to encourage a purchase than print ads." In fact, I can think of few scientifically-proven discoveries with which I agree than "online advertisements are as just as effective as TV commercials and much more likely to encourage a purchase than [...]

"When it comes to winning modern wars, a robust marketing campaign is as important as a military campaign. But while Israel has long been aware of this, the Palestinians have never been quite so PR-savvy."

0:05 Man who looks like Seth Meyers and mimics facial expressions of Ed Helms gets dumped at restaurant by needlessly cruel woman. 0:08 He goes home to dark apartment to cry and masturbate to internet porn on Macbook Air. 0:10 Ends up on Citi Private Pass page and decides to pay for sex.

Something is going on with the Internet, and, once again, it's fun, but maybe not that fun. There's a rash of actually quite cool new "products"—services, websites, "apps" (sigh)—and they have a lot in common. From our pals at Branch to things like Medium and Svbtle (oh that name) and on back to Pinterest, and then forward to a few other projects in development, well… there's a visual language going on, for one thing, and it's like John Herrman writes: It's an internet where every blog is Daring Fireball, where every post looks like Instapaper, where every discussion is led by its rightful leaders, and where [...]

"The campaign strategy, which reaches consumers on other devices, includes a Web site where women can learn more about the wines, watch short videos, and play a question game called Chill Chatter. The game is meant to 'inspire juicy conversation' with questions like, 'Would you rather be overweight and pretty or skinny and ugly?' The videos show 20-something women sitting on a rooftop, talking about dating and updating their Facebook statuses and, of course, drinking wine." —Ladies, are you actually this stupid? Tell us in the comments! Also, where do you weigh in on the fat/pretty-thin/ugly thing?

I hope you're sitting down: "Sexy advertisements are up in magazines from Playboy to Time and Newsweek to Esquire, according to new research from the University of Georgia. Since 1983, the percent of ads using sex to sell products rose from 15 percent to 27 percent by 2003. Though sexual imagery is used to sell almost everything, even banking services, the bulk of the increase has come in ads for impulse buys: alcohol, entertainment, beauty supplies." Even more shockingly: "Women are overwhelmingly the vehicles by which advertisers portray sexuality, the researchers found."

Photo by conrado, via Shutterstock

This ad for Britain's Secret Intelligence Service is actually pretty great.