Brooklyn Restaurants, Band Names, Brooklyn Nets, Twitter, Dance Notation, Roman Slavery
What Happens When A Restaurant Dies
Tyson Ho | Serious Eats | 4th February 2015
"Here's what happens. You talk to the landlord and the restaurant owner and get permission to scavenge. There's always a dispute with the landlord and the restaurant over when the keys need to be turned in and a new lock is placed on the door. It's always shorter than the restaurant owner thinks. I target the mid-level utility items such as pans and blenders, knowing that the staff will take all the high-end stuff" (1,600 words)
Like A Lead Balloon
Michael Erard | The Morning News | 5th February 2015
It isn't only domain names. We are running out of band names. Because Google. “The problem with Google is that it makes us painfully aware of how unoriginal we are. Before web search, two bands could use the same name in happy ignorance as long as they were serving different geographical and stylistic markets. Now if anyone anywhere is using the name you want to use, you’ll find out” (2,700 words)
The Fatalist
Louisa Thomas | Grantland | 5th February 2015
Portrait of Irina Pavlova, right hand of Mikhail Prokhorov, owner of Brooklyn Nets. "She would make a perfect hostess. It seems almost cruel to say so; she is one of the highest-ranking women in professional sports; she is entrusted with the authority of one of the world’s more powerful men. Were she a man, it would be hard to imagine her fielding texts asking her to escort rich businessmen to their seats" (8,500 words)
How Twitter Found Its Money Mojo
Steven Levy | Backchannel | 4th February 2015
Twitter hasn't got the hoped-for billion users yet, but it does have the billion dollars in revenues. "Twitter has cracked the code to making money on the net." For which, thank chief executive Dick Costolo, who arrived in 2009 when revenues were zero. He hired a physicist called Kevin Weil; Weil started with the idea of selling analytics; then he had a better idea; the ads would appear as tweets (4,400 words)
How To Write A Dance
Anna Heyward | Paris Review | 4th February 2015
Before video, choreographers relied on sketches and symbols to record dance movements. Louis XIV commissioned the first dance-notation language in 1680. The main 20C languages were Laban and Benesh, but neither was adequate for ballet: "The problem of combining solo variations with a corps de ballet to provide a chart of an entire ballet movement reduces the complexity of the problem to the apoplectic" (1,740 words)
Managing Slaves In Ancient Rome
Jerry Toner | Aeon | 5th February 2015
"Slaves were a substantial investment, and this moderated the harshness of their treatment. Each one cost a lot of money, enough to feed a family of four for two years. Treating them too severely simply damaged the value of your assets and reduced the expected return. The Romans thought that such cruelty might generate a short-term increase in performance, but it would soon wear out the slaves" (2,590 words)
Video of the day: Love At War
What to expect: Behind the scenes. Making 15 seconds of animation takes three weeks of work (4'14")
Thought for the day
In art the only thing that counts is the bit that cannot be explained
Georges Braque