Publishing, American Wages, Turkey, Music Industry, Worry
The Verjus Manifesto
Dan Davies | Medium | 24th July 2015
Advice to journalists. "There’s no sense in writing down to the level of the readers you think are out there. Half the time they aren’t really there, and the rest of the time, they’re not interested in a watered-down version of the real product. Better to write the piece that you want to read yourself, which means pitching the technical content at a level slightly higher than you were comfortable with when you started thinking about it" (877 words)
American Capitalism Isn’t Broken After All
Clive Crook | Bloomberg | 26th July 2015
Conventional wisdom holds that American wages have stagnated for decades, while output and profits have risen; the implication is that owners of capital have seized all the gains. Not so. Pay has risen roughly in line with productivity. Unchanged inequality between 1973 and 2008 would have added $9,000 to the typical family's current annual income. Sustained productivity growth would have added $30,000 (900 words)
Turkey Blunders Into Syria’s War
David Gardner | Financial Times | 28th July 2015 | | Read with 1Pass
Turkey's recent attacks on Isis and Kurdish positions along its border with Syria show how disastrously Turkish attempts to manage the conflict in Syria have failed. Turkey nurtured Isis as a counter to Kurdish regional strength. But Isis has grown beyond anybody's control. Turkey presumably hoped to ensure a stalemate in Syria. Instead it has stoked a war of all against all, into which it is being inexorably drawn (900 words)
Less Money, More Music
Jason Hirschhorn & Liam Boluk | LinkedIn | 26th July 2015
Deep dive into the economics of the music industry as downloading gives way to streaming. Music was the first media format to be upended by digital; record labels have had decades to adjust; but they are far behind their counterparts in video, publishing and gaming. Their cultures and cost structures are stuck in the vinyl era. "What is the underlying value of music? Did streaming erode this value or correct it?" (6,800 words)
Is Worrying A Modernist Invention?
Josephine Livingstone | New Republic | 24th July 2015
The use of "worry" as an intransitive verb dates from the 1860s. Before then you might "worry" at a tooth, but you didn't just "worry". Was it previously called something else, or did people just not think of themselves as doing that sort of thing? Worry seems to be mainly a European invention, which took off in a big way after the First World War, to judge from the explosion in self-help books at that time. Americans prefer anxiety (1,860 words)
Video of the day: Air Pollution In Sydney
What to expect: Public service announcement. Cartoon explaining causes of air pollution (2'30")
Thought for the day
You can have it all, just not all at the same time
Betty Friedan