Song Hia

If we become bored, we should ask if we are operating in the right frame of attention. Or — maybe we are operating in one right frame, where we should be operating in two simultaneously, thus halving the load on each (as sense and sound).

It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment.

Standard media analysis of this incident begins with Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense and the applicability of the “stand your ground” law to Zimmerman. Did Trayvon have no right to be afraid of this strange, large man, with a gun, who had been following him for some time, in a vehicle large enough to abduct him?

Perhaps audiences accept Don’s genius because it’s comforting to revisit a time when irony wasn’t quite as common. Like “The Carousel” Mad Men allows us to step back and remember when straightforwardness was the norm, even when the show’s commercial breaks contain irony-laced advertisements that we are now supposed to accept as cutting-edge.

In some large measure, I think, it’s an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out. So as the Web and artificially intelligent smartphones and the rise of China and 9/11 and the winners-take-all American economy and the Great Recession disrupt and transform our lives and hopes and dreams, we are clinging as never before to the familiar in matters of style and culture.

Iggy Pop, the B-52s, Lou Rawls, ‘Bob Dylan’s kid,’ and Debbie Reynolds all started coming to work with me in my studio because of the songs I wrote for Rugrats. It was the first show where people said, ‘I got a cousin, I got a child,’ like Patti Smith. She sang on The Rugrats Movie and the only stipulation was that she got to bring her kid because her daughter was a Rugrats fan.

We’ve come a long way since the 1970s, but in terms of women’s achievement, NPR is still a notable outlier. Two years ago, Audie Cornish left her post at NPR’s Southern desk to cover Capitol Hill. “My very first day, I walked into a press conference and it was all young reporters,” she says. “Every single one of them was white and every single one of them was a man. I was like, whoa, this is not how we roll at NPR.” In February, the Women’s Media Center’s annual report found that women make up just 18 percent of radio news directors and 22 percent of the local radio workforce overall.

Social media is to the Read/Write Web what sprawl is to the metropolis of modernity: a homogenous, cancerous, rhizomatic junkspace that expands exponentially outward on a sludgy wave of strip malls and sponsored links, greed and induced demand.

But a funny thing has happened since the rise of professionalism. The tenets it embraced—that some people are more qualified than others, that training and apprenticeship have value, that not everyone can or should (or needs to) gain admission into the club—have become unfashionable.

They record CD’s that become “keepers”, the mainstay of your collection, though they may go “out of style” someday…when their cover of “Come On Eileen” came on. I think I came. Great music that won’t be soon forgotten by anyone who’s heard them.

Storytelling is still important, but it’s not enough. The best question I think you can ask is, “What do our customers hate about our category, and can we use digital tools to fix it?

No medium has ever survived the indifference of 25 year olds.

The United States faces a daunting challenge in creating jobs: at current rates, it will take until 2016 to replace the 7 million of them lost during the 2008–09 recession. To regain full employment—finding work for the unemployed and accommodating the 15 million Americans expected to enter the labor force this decade—the US economy must create 21 million jobs by 2020.