Posts tagged as Slate
Today Is A Good Day To Revisit The Idea Of Rewilding North America
"'Rewilding'—bringing elephants, cheetahs, and lions out of captivity to run free in parts of North America—could help save these megafauna from global extinction. More important, it would restore to the continent biological functions lost millenniums ago. The big guys would help stop the march of the pests and weeds—rats and dandelions—that will otherwise take over the landscape. And they would promote the natural processes that generate biodiversity." READ MORE
Slate is Free from Its Cruel Master!
Profound congratulations to Slate for finally stabbing to death its creaky, ancient, and very angry CMS. Called "Gutenberg," it was nearly as old as its namesake. The first rule of Media Club is: never build your own CMS. Someone will build it for you. Speaking of! Now someone is going to build me a Chrome extension to do for New Slate what "Ochs" does for the Times' site. READ MORE
We Need New Ways of Judging the Success of Websites
We have such terrible metrics for judging websites! There's income, and there's traffic, and that's about it. But neither of those take into account burn rate, overall expenditure or organization size, just for starters. One way to look at things might be: unique visitors per month, divided by employees. Size of staff is something of a predictor of size of traffic, it turns out! If you have no staff, you cannot make the traffic, for one thing. Obviously there's a slight variable in this metric—which has to do with number of part-time contributors, freelance and marketing budgets and, of course, certainly at the big behemoth, unpaid contributors. Speaking of, let's look at the Huffington Post! READ MORE
Andrew Sullivan Predicted the Future of the Internet in 2002
Well, it is a little rankling to read about how Slate's Jacob Weisberg INVENTED THE INTERNET. Or, as he puts it, in a "we got new offices" profile of Slate, "We basically invented blogging." Which, okay, no, not really. But you know what? While investigating the historical record, we stumbled across this little bit of history from May 10, 2002, in an article headlined "APOCALYPSE IS UPON THE BLOGGERS OF THE WEB—OR IS IT?," by one Seth Mnookin, then a reporter at the New York Sun. READ MORE
Ass Appreciated
Writing 1100 words on the purported "GIF renaissance"-"the present-day GIF love goes beyond aesthetics and nostalgia. Animated GIFs aren't just throwbacks-they're uniquely suited to some very contemporary modes of cultural consumption, and they perform distinct functions that other formats can't"-seems like an awful lot of work in order to justify showing this GIF of Christina Hendricks' ass, but I've got to give it to the folks at Slate on this one: it's a pretty amazing ass. I mean, I'd much rather this than a contrarian piece on why Christina Hendricks' astounding ass really isn't one of the world's most phenomenal asses. Which was probably their other option. Well played, gentlemen.
Slate Takes Contrarian Stand On Hand Sanitizers
Hand sanitizers don't do jack to protect you from the flu, says Slate. Bonus fun fact: "In 1847, Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that washing one's hands with chlorine between deliveries practically eliminated fatal infections among laboring women. (His colleagues ignored him and later committed him to a mental hospital, where he was beaten to death by guards.)"
et alS, with Cord Jefferson: Obama's Kinda Meh First Year
What were you doing over the Thanksgiving break, friend? Drinking? Eating? Pitying your one cousin who could have been totally cool if your aunt wasn't such a Christian whackjob? Of course you were-and good for you! That's what people do. READ MORE
et alS, with Cord Jefferson: Newspapers Are Doing As Badly As You Think
Oh, look! Ha ha ha. Slate's been at it hard this last week with the counterintuitiveness. That's Slate's "thing," you know, much like there's always one guy at the dinner party whose "thing" is to go on and on about how Mein Kampf is "actually very lucid." Last week, the band Creed was good, instead of being unlistenable Jesus-growling for hockey moms. Then? Newspapers were fine! That's right, newspapers-those shuttering, bankrupt, decreasingly-staffed things everyone throws in the garbage as soon as they get to the top of the subway steps-"aren't doing as badly as you think." Hmmmmmmm. READ MORE
Difficult Listening Hour, with Seth Colter Walls: The Pleasure Principle
So what purposefully counter-intuitive music article raised a lot of question marks for you yesterday? READ MORE
All Up In Your Mouth
Oh, by the way, we were being critical of one of the pieces in this Slate series about dentists, and while we disagree with some of it, also it is only fair to mention that the other recent pieces in the series-such as this, on the lives of dentists, and this, on the cost of dentistry, are fascinating. Apparently tomorrow brings the piece about the insane disparity in rich/poor dental care, which, yes please.
