Direct response advertising to strangers is demanding. You pay for your click or you pay for your stamp and then you get a shot at making a sale. No sale, no revenue, no revenue, no more stamps.
As a result, direct marketers sometimes race to the bottom. They sell what sells the first time, and use the words that work right now. If the largest conversion rate is for a flat belly diet, then it’s the flat belly diet that gets sold. The public gets what it wants.
And what does the mass public…
How many debut novels get sold to a publisher for reportedly almost $700,000, stay on the bestseller list for weeks, receive lengthy blurbs from Jonathan Franzen and James Patterson, are the subject of a lengthy Vanity Fair piece describing how the book got written, have its film rights optioned to HBO, and on and on and on?
I’d love to signal independent-mindedness by saying Chad Harbach’s Art of Fielding isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But alas, I enjoyed the book…
Today on the Dish, Andrew assessed Ron Paul’s scrambling effect on America’s left/right binary, heaved at extended exposure to Santorum, worried that the Christianist par excellence would blunt Paul’s impact on the GOP, and was sure that he would almost certainly take America to war with Iran. We kept up on the latest Iowa polls (a state that matters, though South Carolina might not), foresaw some negativity from the Gingrich campaign, noted the end…
To quote Merlin Mann, “You don’t let the guy with the broom control how many elephants are in the parade.”
Harsh to say, but the fact is that great storytellers and artists and ruckus makers manage to insulate themselves from the people they’re going to hassle. And the job of those that are being hassled by the commotion is to be hassled by the commotion. No commotion, no job.
Richard Marshall reviews Alex Rosenberg’s new book, The Atheist’s Guide To Reality:
Rosenberg talks about having fun. Nice nihilism implies that attributing meaning to our lives is just an introspective illusion selected by blind evolutionary processes, caused by photons and fermions blindly operating, working in real time in our brains, that has helped us survive. We attach meaning by these determined operations in our brain which give the illusion that there are actual purposes….
Teenagers are less eager to get behind the wheel than ever before. In 1983, 46% of 16-year-olds had a driver’s license. That figure dropped to 31% by 2008:
The decline in driving by younger Americans is fed by many factors: the high cost of gas and insurance at a time of economic insecurity; tighter restrictions on teen drivers in many states; and roads that are more congested than ever, making driving less fun than ever. But the impact of the internet is big too. “It is…
GTD, 18 minute plans, organized folders… none of them work as well as you’d like.
The reason is simple: you don’t want to get more done.
You’re afraid. Getting more done would mean exposing yourself to considerable risk, to crossing bridges, to putting things into the world. Which means failure.
The leap the lizard brain takes when confronting the opportunity is a simple formula: GTD=Failure.
Until you quiet the resistance and commit to actually shipping things that matter, all the…
It is fashionable these days to decry “food miles.” The longer food has spent traveling to your plate, the more oil has been burnt and the more peace has been shattered along the way. But why single out food? Should we not protest against T-shirt miles, too, and laptop miles? After all, fruits and vegetables account for more than 20 percent of all exports from poor countries, whereas most laptops come from rich countries, so singling out food imports for special discrimination…
“I voted for Obama in 2008 but we need a change. Dr Paul is consistent and honest, which is very hard to find. He is not just telling us what we have heard before,” - Samantha Dunn, a 28-year-old teacher in Iowa, to the Daily Telegraph.
The only standard is impermanence.
It’s very easy to believe that the world we live in has always been this way.
Your ethnic group has always had a similar standing.
Technology has always permitted certain kinds of interactions and is always improving.
Real estate values always rise from decade to decade. (Until they don’t).
A job has always been the standard way to make a living.
Your chosen religion has always been practiced the way you practice it.
People in positions of authority…
