Dan Harmon Poops: HEY, DID I MISS ANYTHING? »

danharmon:

Kids:

A few hours ago, I landed in Los Angeles, turned on my phone, and confirmed what you already know. Sony Pictures Television is replacing me as showrunner on Community, with two seasoned fellows that I’m sure are quite nice - actually, I have it on good authority they’re quite nice, because…

NBC should have just pulled the plug. Or, NBC should create a show where they create a show that does poorly in ratings, but has a pretty vocal fanbase. Then, in that show, after three incredibly smart, funny, entertaining seasons, fire the show runner by not telling him (or her) after NBC picks up this smart, funny, entertaining show for a fourth season. It could be a drama that’s funny. Or, even better, Netflix can create a show about NBC creating a show creating a show, and we just keep going down the rabbit hole.

The fourth season of Community will be like the fifth season of The West Wing: good, but missing something. In the West Wing, it was Aaron Sorkin; for Community, it will be Dan Harmon.

Why Music and Social Are Perfect Together »

The music industry has a love-hate relationship with digital media. On the one hand, the Internet obliterated the music industry’s business model. But, on the other, digital has proven an amazing tool for artists to spread their work and connect with fans. Digiday spoke with Russell Wallach, president of Live Nation, about the future of music in a digital world.

Has the transition from analog to digital been a net positive for musicians?
From a pure ticket-sales perspective, music has never been more popular. We sell 80-plus percent of our tickets online. We’re seeing explosive growth in the sale of tickets via the mobile device. Combine that with social media, we continue to see great opportunities for new and innovative ways to market shows via online, mobile and social, and new and innovative ways for fans to purchase tickets. To me, that equals long-term, creating revenue for the artist. For mobile technology, fans will have the opportunity to purchase merchandise from their seat. Before the show, purchase content and other products of the artist — clearly the new social and e-commerce are providing new ways for bands to generate revenue.

Click through to read the rest of the interview with Live Nation’s president, Russell Wallach.

“The complexity of a society’s technology has little to do with its level of social complexity — something that we, in our era of rapidly changing, seemingly overwhelming technology, have trouble grasping. Every society, big or little, misses out on “obvious” technologies. The lacunae have enormous impact of people’s lives — imagine Europe with efficient plows or the Maya with iron tools — but not much effect on the scale of a civilization’s endeavors, as shown by both European and Mayan history. The corollary is that widespread and open trade in ideas is the best way to make up for the lacunae. Alas, Mesoamerica was limited in this respect. Like Europe, it was an extraordinarily diverse place with a shared cultural foundation. But where Europe had the profoundly different civilizations of China and Islam to steal from, Mesoamerica was alone in the world.”

Charles C. Mann, in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. (pg 255)

G.O.P. ‘Super PAC’ Weighs Hard-Line Attack on Obama »

People are crazy. 

“The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,” says the proposal, which was overseen by Fred Davis and commissioned by Joe Ricketts, the founder of the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade. Mr. Ricketts is increasingly putting his fortune to work in conservative politics.

The $10 million plan, one of several being studied by Mr. Ricketts, includes preparations for how to respond to the charges of race-baiting it envisions if it highlights Mr. Obama’s former ties to Mr. Wright, who espouses what is known as “black liberation theology.”

The group suggested hiring as a spokesman an “extremely literate conservative African-American” who can argue that Mr. Obama misled the nation by presenting himself as what the proposal calls a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.”

A copy of a detailed advertising plan was obtained by The New York Times through a person not connected to the proposal who was alarmed by its tone. It is titled “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good.”

The proposal was presented last week in Chicago to associates and family members of Mr. Ricketts, who is also the patriarch of the family that owns the Chicago Cubs.

Slave Graves, Somewhere, Complicate a Walmart’s Path »

Dianne O’Neal still lives on the rustic cattle farm that her husband’s family has owned since his great-great-great-grandfather purchased the land in the 1830s. She still stays in a log cabin built from chestnut trees that his ancestors chopped by hand.

But one aspect of the family’s long history here in northern Alabama is not so well preserved: Coffee Cemetery, an overgrown one-acre graveyard where the ancestors of her husband, Edward O’Neal, and their slaves are buried.

That has become a pressing matter in Florence because Walmart plans to build a store right next to the graveyard. The O’Neals’ biggest concern is that nobody knows exactly where their ancestors’ 80 slaves are buried.

The slaves were owned by Gen. John Coffee, a friend of President Andrew Jackson’s and a surveyor who drew the state’s border with Mississippi. And there is archaeological and historical evidence that suggests his slaves’ graves may be precisely where Walmart plans to pave a driveway to the new store.

“Our history is in traditional print media,” said Smith. “What we set out to do was to disrupt ourselves in a sense. We decided that we wanted to be a digital media company participating in the high-growth markets and digital media. We went about the process of thinking through the questions, how do we disrupt our own company if we were challenging digital brands attacking us?”

Atlantic Media Company’s president, Justin Smith, explains how it has evolved from a 155-year-old traditional media company into a nimble digital juggernaut. It’s most recent entrant into the digital media space, Quartz, may be its boldest move yet.

Read the rest of the article at Digiday.

“There is no nice way of saying it,” Mrs. Engelman said. “Our community protects molesters. Other than that, we are wonderful.”

The first shock came when Mordechai Jungreis learned that his mentally disabled teenage son was being molested in a Jewish ritual bathhouse in Brooklyn. The second came after Mr. Jungreis complained, and the man accused of the abuse was arrested.

Old friends started walking stonily past him and his family on the streets of Williamsburg. Their landlord kicked them out of their apartment. Anonymous messages filled their answering machine, cursing Mr. Jungreis for turning in a fellow Jew. And, he said, the mother of a child in a wheelchair confronted Mr. Jungreis’s mother-in-law, saying the same man had molested her son, and she “did not report this crime, so why did your son-in-law have to?”

Really good look into Ultra-Orthodox Jewry in Brooklyn from the NYT.

"I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don't Ask Don't Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married,” Obama told Roberts, in an interview to appear on ABC’s “Good Morning America” Thursday. Excerpts of the interview will air tonight on ABC’s “World News with Diane Sawyer.” »

CBS Goes Solo in Social TV »

TV is social. That much we know. What’s unclear is what will form the social backbone that enables it to come to life easily and seamlessly for viewers.

The obvious answer is Twitter and Facebook. There are new, dedicated social TV apps like GetGlue and Miso. But you can bet that the content creators, which have poured so much money into creating the content that binds this audience, want to have its piece of the action. That’s one way to read the news yesterday that CBS launched its own social platform, CBS Connect, as a way to tap into the social sphere and harness the conversations around its entertainment lineup.

According to Marc DeBevoise, gm of CBS Interactive Entertainment, the idea for a social hub grew out of its exploration with other social toe-dipping events, most notably its Tweet Week (where CBS talent would tweet back and forth with their followers) and Social Sweep Week (where stars would post and share videos, and video chat with select viewers) events. After seeing the success of these two experiments, The Eye Network placed its chips on a centralized location.

“The concept is aggregating social conversations — Facebook and Twitter — into one place around all of our shows, enabling people to slice and dice the conversations they want by show, character and actor,” DeBevoise said.

Video of my grandfather singing “C’est Magnifique.”

From a post I wrote after recording this:

When I hear his thick Hungarian accent belt out Beseme Mucho or C’est Magnifique (video below), I’m not only happy to be here – because let’s face it, if he doesn’t get out of Europe, I don’t exist – but reflective on how much he’s seen and what we can learn from our elders. I’ve written before about some of his aphorisms, but the one that always amazes me is his “hope, hope, hope.”

At times it sounds like a defeatist plea, but the more I think about it, the more I believe it’s an optimistic call. That without hope, we have nothing. That hope can be dangerous, but ultimately, is a positive light in an otherwise dark tunnel. That things are, as the lyric goes, C’est Magnifique:

Inside The New York Times’ Skunkworks »

I got a peek behind the curtain:

Inside The New York Times building, there’s always a hum. And it’s not solely emanating from the multi-floor newsroom. It comes from the 28th floor, where Michael Zimbalist and his team of roughly a dozen staffers of the New York Times R&D Lab are sequestered from the rest of the The Gray Lady’s reporters, executives and staff. The NYT R&D Lab has the vital task of looking around corners and finding the future of how news and information will be delivered and consumed. Zimbalist and his team wanted to be in the building with the rest of the company but also wanted a distinctive space that would make it clear that the R&D folks are not part of the normal operations.

The R&D Lab looks at what the intersection of news information, consumer behavior and technology will be like in the next three to five years. There are some out-of-the-box projects, like its Surfacereader (a table-top news reader) and an in-progress database of New York Times content. The lab, up and running since 2006, would seem a curious luxury in an era of austerity in newsrooms, even at the Times. In fact, the company recently laid off 50 non-newsroom people. What’s more, it’s not as if the R&D unit hasn’t had any breakout successes in its seven years of existence.  It has.  But, according to Zimbalist, the goal of R&D is to understand how news may be consumed in the future and to push new ideas inward (rather than product development).

After a long and remarkable life, my grandfather passed away this morning at the age of 94. Some thoughts. »

The thud of the dirt that first hits the pine box. That’s the sound that always gets me. As does the site of the shovel, slowly maneuvering from hand to hand, and then lifting up the dirt from the mound that rests besides the grave. We’ve all been through this; it’s one of life’s interesting tid-bits that no matter our station, we will invariably go through the ritual of burying a loved one. Sometimes, we witness the event through watery eyes. Others, we solemnly watch from the back, our thoughts meandering. And no matter if it’s sudden, or a long time coming, it hurts just the same.

The first funeral I remember attending was of my uncle, my father’s brother. I was 11 and two weeks prior, moved from my comfortable surroundings in Long Island to new, uncharted (for me) waters in New Jersey. He was 36, two-plus years older than I am now. Over the next year or so, there seemed to be more funerals than I care to remember: my grandfather (mother’s father), my great-grandparents (father’s maternal grandparents), my uncle (mother’s mother’s brother). And then it was a long time before I had to visit a cemetery. A friend’s father, and then my wife’s grandfather, and then both of my grandmothers all passed away a few years apart. And now, what should hopefully be the last time for a long time that I have to attend a funeral, my grandfather; my father’s father.

I put together some thoughts over the last few days, as I knew this was coming. Still hurts, but as he always said, “Take it day by day and always hope, hope, hope.”