Robert Niles writes on the silliest and most destructive debate in journalism. "They don't know how we make the sausage, or even who makes it. They just want to eat." This also relates to Steven Johnson's Five Things. [via magnetbox]

We don't need another anthology of feminist essays. "They read like progress reports, but also like P.R., calculated proof of feminism’s vitality and diversity. Each new anthology builds the same case from scratch."

A Honda Civic commercial in which a chorus makes all the car sounds.

A nice little parody of old-school idiotic sexism. "In thought, be plain and simple, and let your natural sweetness shine through." We've come a long way.

TMN presents another cool photo gallery, this one featuring aerial shots of Paris.

A slideshow tracking the changing art of Archie comics.

Well, the new iPhone is big, heavy, expensive, and only for Cingular. But damn, it's really cool and I'm glad someone is finally making progress on this whole convergence thing.

Brian K. Vaughan on breaking into comics: "Oh, and "writer's block" is just another word for video games. If you want to be a writer, get writing, you lazy bastards."

A pretty cool Line Rider video, including an insane jump over a busy freeway. And the Jagged Peak Adventure is pretty classic, too. Despite the fact that Line Rider has already jumped the shark (wikipedia), soon, the game will be coming to the Nintendo Wii and the DS.

On the top-selling music of 2006: "Personally, I can’t handle The Fray, John Mayer, Jack Johnson, that Daniel Powter song, James Blunt, any Coldplay since “Parachutes”, etc, etc … It’s all part of some introspective sad sensitive-guy thing that I just can’t buy into. It’s Generation X in reverse."

"Popular performers or groups are pleasing not because of any particular virtuosity, but because they create an overall timbre that remains consistent from song to song." The neuroscience of music.

We're moving beyond the pie chart now: here's a periodic table of visualization methods.

"I confess I've been increasingly dissatisifed with the direction of modern pop, which has more and more privileged screechy and/or whiny vocalists who are utterly unable to play any instrument themselves, and thus, usually, unable to actually write music or songs themselves." Over at Collision Detection, Clive Thompson points to a recent article by Chuck Klosterman about how YouTube is reviving musical virtuosity. Klosterman:

One of those depressing paradoxes about rock 'n' roll: Very often, profoundly exceptional guitar playing is boring to listen to... It's difficult for nonmusicians to appreciate world-class guitar playing through solely sonic means, mostly because a) the difference between great guitar playing and serviceable guitar playing is often subtle, and b) every modern listener assumes production tricks can manufacture greatness. (As a result, radio audiences are automatically skeptical of what they hear.) Guitar brilliance usually comes across as ponderous. But that changes dramatically when one adds the element of video; somehow, watching changes the experience of hearing. There are certain things that sound good only when (and if) you can see them. And YouTube lets you see them.

Two comments on the side:

One, for great example of YouTube sanctifying musical skill, check out the video of Stanley Jordan playing "Autumn Leaves" that I linked to earlier. Seeing is believing there.

And two, I'm really curious why Esquire didn't put the links directly in the body of Klosterman's essay--we're talking about the internet, here. Is there a reason to list a plain-text web address buried in a footnote?

Richard Dawkins makes the scientific argument for keeping Saddam Hussein alive. "His mind would have been a unique resource for historical, political and psychological research: a resource that is now forever unavailable to scholars." It's an interesting thought. While there is a lot of good social science work analyzing tyranny, for the psychological angle "the sample size is small."

"Popular performers or groups are pleasing not because of any particular virtuosity, but because they create an overall timbre that remains consistent from song to song." The neuroscience of music.

This is not a eulogy: Leslie Harpold remembered.

I hadn't thought of this, but it's really cool. The signing deaf are making use of YouTube. "Many of them aren’t comfortably fluent in written language. For many more, sign is and always will be their first language. YouTube gives them an easy, expressive, unmediated channel for many-to-many communication."

Coming to a theater near you: a movie version of Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel of growing up in Iran, Persepolis.

There's some cool doppelg?§nger action in these photos tagged with "multiplicity"--showing the subject in more than one place at the same time.

An interview with Steven Johnson.

I came out of college in the late '80s amid the science wars. Literary theorists were deconstructing the scientists, and scientists were making fun of the literary theorists. There was no realm where you'd come into a classroom and say, "This complexity theory might be useful in thinking about the kind of urban system Dickens is describing." If you talked about science, it was entirely to show how it was Eurocentric or something.

I always felt like that was a total waste of time. There were obviously insights that both domains could productively share. A lot of what I've been trying to do since then is figure out what those connections could be, and figure out a way to work them into the books.

[via... Steven Johnson]