YouTube, Negotiation, ISIS, Tweetstory
YouTube And Its Rivals: Small Screen, Big Money
Hannah Kuchler & Shannon Bond | Financial Times | 22nd August 2015 | | Read with 1Pass
Online video is scaling and monetising into a major entertainment industry. Video advertising will hit $8bn this year. YouTube and Facebook lead the market, with a dozen other platforms at their heels. Television and film companies are piling in as investors. Television may soon be a legacy product. “There will be a lot of winners. After all, the average household watches eight hours of TV a day” (1,480 words)
Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued
Patrick McKenzie | Kalzumeus | 23rd January 2015
On the art and philosophy of salary negotiation. "Middle class Americans are socialized from a very young age to view negotiation as something that is vaguely disreputable and engaged in only by poor people.... to the advantage of people who a) you won’t negotiate with and b) who will feel absolutely no compunctions about negotiating with you." Crucially, that includes their own employers (7,000 words)
The Mystery Of ISIS
Anonymous | New York Review Of Books | 13th August 2015
An "ex-NATO official" sets out the reasons why ISIS has, on its own terms, been improbably successful. "Lawrence of Arabia advised that insurgents must be like a mist—everywhere and nowhere—never trying to hold ground or wasting lives in battles with regular armies. Chairman Mao insisted that guerrillas should be fish who swam in the sea of the local population." ISIS's strategy bucks historical insurgency norms (4,590 words)
Slow Poison
Ezekiel Kweku | Pacific Standard | 15th August 2015
Ezekiel Kweku gets pulled over by a policeman on implausible grounds, but he fears contradicting the officer's accusations. "I looked in the general direction of his face without making eye contact"; avoiding arrest or death at the hands of police "is a carefully calibrated etiquette ... based on the centuries of received wisdom passed down by the parents of black children in America" (2,180 words)
How I Quit Spin
Joshua Clover | Slate | 21st July 2015
Don't be put off by the unconventional format (a series of tweets); Joshua Clover's impromptu memoir of quitting a job, New York on 9/11, and threatened lawsuits is engaging, honest and thought-provoking. Clover later explained that the medium was an accident but that "Twitter is a formalism, like the sonnet or the epistolary novel;" the constraint "sets a certain rhythm." For once it works (2,500 words)
Video of the day: Chad Gadya
What to expect: Insanely beautiful rendering of traditional Passover song in embroidermation by Nina Paley and Theodore Gray (2'50")
Thought for the day
Advice is a form of nostalgia
Mary Schmich (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-schmich-sunscreen-column-column.html)