2008

There was a robbery, gunfire and a chase in my neighborhood Thursday. There was an insane number of police cars, when I drove right by that music school maybe 20-30 minutes after it happened, and as I tried to drive down 51st towards Telegraph Ave., that intersection was barricaded for a block in each direction. Sheesh. My thoughts are with the boy and his family. Oakland Tribune: A 10-year-old boy shot Thursday by a stray bullet fired during a robbery…

Slate, November 2007: An upcoming issue of TV Guide has an amusing roundup of the 2008 presidential candidates’ favorite television shows. Nothing too surprising here: Hillary watches Grey’s Anatomy, Barack Obama likes The Wire (for the record, that’s the right answer), and John Edwards says his viewing guilty pleasure is “Fred Thompson on Law & Order.” Also, The Atlantic‘s Mark Bowden has a neat piece on David Simon.

Dear Friends, I’ve been informed that my radio piece on the One Laptop Per Child project will air on Morning Edition tomorrow (Jan. 7)! It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams). New York – 5 am to 9 am Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org Washington, DC – 5 am to 10 am Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org Los Angeles – 2 am to 9 am Pacific – KPCC…

The Economist: Ultimately the OLPC initiative will be remembered less for what it produced than the products it spawned. The initiative is like running the four-minute mile: no one could do it, until someone actually did it. Then many people did.

Turned out my flight was delayed almost three hours. That, plus bags, plus BARTing home — it was a 15 hour travel day. It’s good to be home.

So what does Barack Obama have that the other candidates don’t? Ringtones, baby, ringtones. Seriously.

So the Internet tells me that there’s crazy rain in the Bay, which means that it looks like Becky and my flights will probably be delayed by a couple of hours tomorrow. Argh.

Readers of this blog will note that most of my posts (like the ones from earlier today) are largely lengthy pull quotes from articles that I’ve been reading as of late. It’s not often that I sit back and reflect on what’s going on in my life. But this year has brought a lot of change to my life both personally and professionally. I began a book project and my career as a full-time freelancer in January 2007, and it’s…

Rolling Stone: David Bendeth, a producer who works with rock bands like Hawthorne Heights and Paramore, knows that the albums he makes are often played through tiny computer speakers by fans who are busy surfing the Internet. So he’s not surprised when record labels ask the mastering engineers who work on his CDs to crank up the sound levels so high that even the soft parts sound loud. Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology…

NYT’s Jet Lagged: Jerusalem these days is barely a day away from Santa Barbara. In 36 hours or so I moved from a society that seems to have annulled history — and even parts of reality — to a place a millennium away where the very fury of human hopes and grievances, the constant debate of this world and some other, give reality and history a moment-by-moment urgency that reminds us why the Sabbath and holidays were first called into…