Stuff I like by Benita
I'm awesome.
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Music For Your Monday: NPR Music is streaming Peter Bjorn and John’s Gimme Some in its entirety. Enjoy!
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This is pretty great, Grand Rapids.
“Newsweek published an article saying Grand Rapids, Michigan, is high up on the list of America’s “Dying Cities.”
So Grand Rapids responded by getting 5,000 residents together to perform an elaborate lip dub of Don McLean’s “American Pie.” Obviously.
Newsweek subsequently offered Grand Rapids a contrite rejoinder, saying the article was picked up as part of a content sharing deal with mainstreet.com and was not penned by Newsweek. “it uses a methodology that our current editorial team doesn’t endorse and wouldn’t have employed,” Newsweek goes on to say. “It certainly doesn’t reflect our view of Grand Rapids.””
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Newsweek: Oh, Daily Beast, get a copy editor.
My friend Jordan sent me this email today:
What’s wrong with this subject line?————— Forwarded message —————
From: The Daily Beast <emails@thedailybeast.com>
Date: Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 3:42 PM
Subject: Cheat Sheet - Hedge-Fund Boss Gets His Just Deserts
To: JordanMy…
“Well, since you asked…
From the Newsweek/Daily Beast Copy Desk: “To quote from the dictionary we use, Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition: Desert (3rd entry as a noun, definition 2): deserved reward or punishment [to get one’s just deserts].”
Related: your tumblrs learned a new word today!”
Whoops, I made a mistake. I stand corrected. And I pissed off a Newsweek/Daily Beast copy editor in the process. I’m so used to seeing it used in that cliche desserts fashion and I admit I’ve never actually used the phrase myself. Grammar lesson learned! Seriously, so embarrassed right now.
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Tina Brown on the End of 'Newsweek' in Print and Future of Newsweeklies -- New York Magazine
All media nerds should read this interview.
A standout Tina Brown quote from the piece:
“But intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike love juicy stories. I don’t care if you have a Ph.D., at some irrepressible level you still want to read about Petraeus’s extramarital affair more than you want to read a piece that gets into the weeds of his counterinsurgency strategy. You want to know about Paula Broadwell more than you do about David Galula—the French military officer who was Petraeus’s strategic inspiration. The perfect example of that was when I sat next to Henry Kissinger one night in the eighties and he opened the conversation by saying, “I loved that piece about Debra Winger.”
There’s a tedious side to American media criticism that holds that if something is a good read—or a good read that’s accessible to a wider range of readers than a few Upper West Side or campus worthies—that it is therefore, somehow, unseemly.”
I like a lot of stuff, including but not limited to words, sarcasm, news, pop culture, bright colors, music, design, baking, books, Detroit, DIY.
