Felix

[felixsalmon]

Global Entry #protip for New Yorkers

You have Global Entry, right? Well, you might not know that it expires. Check your Global Entry card! (Yes, it is good for something: it has the expiry date on it.) If you signed up relatively early, it might be expiring quite soon.

As you might expect, renewing your Global Entry status is... not particularly easy. In fact, it requires going in for another interview. But here’s how you can, at least, avoid having to schedule something at JFK:

Start your renewal process months in advance. 

Yes, this involves paying your renewal fee earlier than you might otherwise need to, but it’s worth it. Once you’ve paid your fee, you’ll get a letter inviting you to make an appointment for your interview. The appointment needs to be scheduled within 30 days of receiving the letter: that is, you have 30 days to nail down a date. The appointment does not, however, need to be held within 30 days of receiving the letter. In fact, you can set the appointment up for months in advance.

Which is great, because there’s one actually quite convenient place where you can get an appointment: the US Customs House, at the tip of downtown Manhattan. 

The problem with US Customs House appointments is that they’re solidly booked out as far as the eye can see. Right now, the first available appointment is in January.

But so long as your Global Entry card hasn’t expired yet, you’re not in any rush. So go ahead and make that appointment for January, or February, or whenever you want. Put it in your diary, and when the day comes, just pop down to the financial district, go through the motions, and everything’s a lot easier and less stressful than trying to deal with the airport system. 

[trekonomics-blog]

The cover for Trekonomics, by Jennifer Bostic (design, types) and John Powers (artwork)

[felixsalmon]

So happy to have helped to make this a reality

[felixsalmon]

Oh hai there @potus on Fusion's Snapchat Discover channel

[felixsalmon]

This is the state of the art of targeted advertising. There’s a money-transfer service which thinks I’ll use them because one of their investors is Richard Branson. There’s a business-class airline which thinks I want to fly from New York to London for Thanksgiving. And there’s Microsoft, which thinks I want to see Pitbull in concert at a store opening. Nope, nope, nope...

[felixsalmon]

The NYT Book Review has another one of those covers, this week, where it gives you the very beginnings of three different reviews of three different nonfiction books all more or less on the same subject. Let’s look at the three first sentences:

A great deal of modern popular culture — including just about everything pertaining to what French savants like to call le nouvel âge d’or de la comédie américaine — runs on the disavowal of maturity.

When did the central aim of parenting become preparing children for success?

The notion that adulthood, despite its perks, is little more than a booby prize for surviving the scrapes and trials of youth has more or less become a cultural given in the modern age.

All three reviewers, in other words, have decided independently to follow the same (tired) general format: you pretty much know how all three of these reviews are going to read, just based on their first sentences.

This style is making its way even into fiction book reviews. Here’s another first sentence from this week:

If only for the outsize cultural imprint left by “The Hunger Games,” it is reasonable to argue that young adult fiction has done a far more aggressive job grappling with social inequality than much of what is rendered today in the name of literary fiction, a world where poor and ­working-class characters are so often visible merely at the periphery, if they are visible at all.

Precious few NYT blog posts or news-analysis stories are written in this manner, for a host of good reasons. Is there a single good reason to slap a phrase like “le nouvel âge d’or de la comédie américaine” on the front cover of a Sunday newspaper section, especially when it’s entirely gratuitous? Why run with first sentences which need to be read very slowly, or multiple times, just to understand what they’re saying?

Here’s an idea: Why not try to print reviews which people are likely to actually enjoy reading? We ask that of our books, it’s about time we applied the same standard to our book reviews, too.

[felixsalmon]

Facebook video is evil

When I’m on Facebook, I love to consume Facebook video. The experience is fantastic: they autoplay, they’re all in-app, they’re perfectly smooth, they’re easily snackable, etc. It’s pretty much the best shortform video discovery mechanism on the internet, and Facebook’s algos are serving me up a lot of video now, almost to the exclusion of everything else. 

But here’s what’s hateful about them: as someone who loves to share things I find online, Facebook videos are the worst. Literally, the absolute worst form of content on the internet. There’s a video I’d love to email to my sister. Can I do that? No. There’s a video I’d love to tweet out to my followers. Can I do that? No. Take every single form of communication that we use these days, from email and Twitter to Instagram and iMessage and WhatsApp and Skype and everything else -- yes, even the services which are owned by Facebook. None of them, not one, can be used for sharing Facebook videos. (I’m not sure about Facebook Messenger, because I refuse to download it on principle.) 

The only way to share a Facebook video, unless you’re a super ninja when it comes to embed codes, is to share it on a Facebook page, nearly always your own. But I don’t want to share videos with all my Facebook friends, that’s not how I use Facebook. And so Facebook video is a constant exercise in frustration, where I can share the way I don’t want to, and I can’t share the way I do want to. I can narrowly see how this might be good for the FB ecosystem, but it’s surely really bad for the FB brand as a whole.

[felixsalmon]

“The worst situation is when people confuse dry and sweet,” Mr. Flosse said. “It happens quite often. They say, ‘I’d like to have a sweet wine.’ They don’t mean a dessert wine. So you have to describe exactly what you think they’re thinking, then you bring a wine, and they say, ‘I don’t like that.’ ” His solution is to bring a sauvignon blanc, a chardonnay and a viognier and let them try. Their choice? “It’s almost always the chardonnay,” he said. “It’s not sweet. It’s a dry grape.”

NYT

Mr. Flosse is the wine director at A Voce, and this is, frankly, everything I hate about sommeliers in one quote. If you're trying to describe your taste in white wine, and you're not talking about dessert wines, and you use the word "sweet", then I, for one, know what you mean, and what you mean is likely to be something in the general neighborhood of a California-style oaked Chardonnay. But Mr Flosse seems to be more interested in playing some weird kind of gotcha game, where he serves you three different dry white wines, you pick the sweetest of the three, and then he goes "that's not sweet, it's dry!" Ugh.

[felixsalmon]

I do love these Fusion Instagrams.

[felixsalmon]

The wisdom of Devin Wenig

(Or, if you repeat a word often enough, it sounds just as stupid the fourth time)

I just think we’ve hit an inflection point where technology is now so pervasive and so useful that we’re past the tipping point. And the world of e-commerce and commerce are now just seamlessly merged, and everything is omnichannel.

Today we don’t even know what e-commerce means. They’ve just come together, the on- and the offline. Now, every merchant, every retailer must have an omnichannel strategy or they won’t survive.

Nobody has an electricity department in their company; nobody has an Internet department anymore—although they did a few years ago. I suspect that within 24 months, no one will have a mobile strategy. They’ll just have an omnichannel, connected-screens strategy.

I think that in this omnichannel world—imagine, for planning purposes, that everything is for sale in every marketplace, every means, and every channel. We may never get to that world, but it’s a useful planning assumption.

[felixsalmon]

The Wortham / Kardashian chronicles

July 23: Jenna Wortham outs herself, in BuzzFeed, as a massive fan of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood:

I bought 3 of the $4.99 K packs! It’s mostly for the outfits and hairstyles. The good hairstyles all cost so many points! I bought a cute shaggy bob and then I had to get the beige bathing suit thing with the sheer robe to go with it for the Triste launch party at Chateu Nuit. I would say it embarrasses me to admit that, but I’ve stopped trying to rationalize it.

July 30: Jenna Wortham files "Kim Kardashian, an Unlikely Mobile Video Game Hit" for the NYT:

The game is free to download and play, but it sells in-app purchases for things like additional energy and “K-stars,” which can be used to buy special hairstyles, accessories and clothing. Although players don’t have to spend money to advance in the game play, they are clearly enticed to indulge on the fancier items available for sale — imitating Ms. Kardashian’s own high-spending ways.

August 9: Jenna Wortham files "Living Like the Kardashians, via Smartphone" for the NYT:

The game — which may be downloaded free — encourages players to spend their real-world money on “k-stars,” a game currency that enables them to buy extravagant clothing and hairstyles for their avatars in this virtual world.

[felixsalmon]

My last name is Salmon also. I've never met another Salmon before. "Salmon" as in a person with that last name, not the pink fish that swim upstream to mate and whatnot. ANYway, hi. Probably out of line or something, Idk, but nice to meet you, fellow Salmon (again not the fish). Question: how is your's pronounced?

Like the fish. Silent l.

[hydeordie]

Got this little gem from my all time favorites Artsy this morning in reference to this little post about the LACMA Calder show. I double checked the links and everything is working. One link is to LACMA and one link is to the Calder show page on LACMA’s site, which is live. Just so we’re all clear, this is what Jack from Artsy wants me to do:

Wants me to change my link from LACMA’s Alexander Calder show page (the show is up until the end of July, so if you haven’t, go!) to the completely unrelated Artsy Alexander Calder page.

Wants me to change my link from a non-profit museum website to Artsy’s for profit website.

Wants me to change a link in a 4 month old post under the guise of work? Can I get that job, I’ll harass bloggers about posts up to 5 years old if I could get paid for it! #Shameless

Oh Jack, you had the time and inclination to find this post and even more time to send me this hyperlink-happy email, but you didn’t have the time to look into how I feel about your company. Thank you though Jack for reaffirming my negative views on your company’s practices because y’all really make trying to succeed in the art/internet business look like the infamous Zoolander/Inside the Computer scene and that shit is priceless to me.

I emailed him back asking these exact questions, think I’ll hear back?

[felixsalmon]

You know you're famous on the internet when you appear on the front cover of a paper magazine, against lots of white space, showing off your hot body.

[t-akver-blog]

[felixsalmon]

quixotess:

You CAN get your quotes on Tumblr to go bold or italicized. If your line breaks are disappearing, you can format that too.

Just write the formatting into the quote. So <b>Bold text.</b> <i>Italics.</i> The formatting for getting line breaks is just <br />, no closing tag. So put <br />

I just did this, it works! Even though the quote does not look like an HTML field, you can put HTML in there. Weird, yet wonderful

[felixsalmon]

Using what he calls the “careless and piecemeal” data of wealth reports, Mr. Piketty calculates that today the richest 1 percent owns about half the planet’s wealth... According to Mr. Piketty’s calculations, the immutable dynamic of returns on capital being greater than the rate of economic growth will concentrate half the planet’s wealth in the hands of the richest 0.1 percent within 30 years, impoverishing not only the middle, but also the upper-middle classes.

The above quotes appear in the New York Times, in an article by Scott Reyburn.

I would like to ask Mr Reyburn, and the NYT: where, exactly, in his book, or elsewhere, does Piketty make these statements?

I have not read all of Piketty's book, and it's hard to prove a negative. But I don't think Piketty ever attempts to quantify global wealth inequality: it's hard enough just to get reliable figures on a national basis. And I'm all but certain that he never extrapolates anything to the point at which the richest 0.1% end up with 50% of the wealth. Neither would he consider such an extrapolation to constitute an "immutable dynamic": after all, his entire final chapter is an explanation of why such dynamics are not immutable.

Reyburn's claims, then, would seem to be narrowly false: Piketty does not say what Reyburn says he says. They're also broadly false: nowhere does Piketty paint some dystopian vision where the upper-middle classes have become "impoverished". 

On top of that, Reyburn also violates the NYT's policy of adjusting all prices for inflation. He talks about a Leonardo bought in 1914 for $1.5 million: what's that in today's money? Reyburn never says; he waves only in the direction of an analysis which said that the purchase was a record price, in real terms, in 1961. Has the record been broken in the last 53 years? Maybe if Reyburn did the math, we could work that out!

All in all, this is shoddy stuff from the NYT. Or, is it from the NYT? Officially, the NYT has merged with the IHT, and they're now a unified news organization. In practice however, stories like this still feel as though they're IHT pieces, which wouldn't see the light of day had they gone through editing in NYC. Is a double standard still in place?

[redhookcrit]

Happier times. Heal up quick Shane!

[felixsalmon]

I was given my first story to check. I vaguely remember that it was something about new mutual fund products, and it was written by a freelancer. It sounded good — that is, until I started checking it. In essence, the entire thing was wrong. Up until that point, words on the page, in their unambiguous black and white, had always conveyed such authority that I didn’t question them. I never read that way again. An editor once said to me that good writers were really dangerous because you could be so seduced by their writing that you simply drank in their unsupported leaps of logic.

This. State of Journalism: The Lost Art of Fact Checking | LinkedIn