News That Stays News

World of Warcraft December 7, 2010

The new World of Warcraft expansion, Cataclysm, is now online, and someone you know is probably trying to replicate the feat of Seth Schiesel, a video game critic for the New York Times who became the first player on his server to reach level 70 after the release of the Burning Crusade expansion, four years ago. He did it by playing for 76 of the first 112 hours after that release.

Where Does Google Go From Here? December 6, 2010

What is Google, these days? A latter-day Bell Labs? The next Microsoft? The Economist profiles Google, and wonders how long the center will hold.

The Korean Free Trade Agreement December 6, 2010

A WSJ article about the way the Korean Free-Trade deal was negotiated. The South Koreans thought Obama would accept anything when he was in Seoul, in the wake of the Midterm elections, so they refused to make concessions, and the  US left without a deal. But they’ve now agreed to terms that they refused to consider a few weeks ago, because North Korea has left them scrambling.

The Sino-Soviet Split (part II) December 6, 2010

Russia decided to sell China its best fighter jet, the Su-27, in the 90s, when it was desperate for hard currency, knowing full well that the Chinese would eventually reverse-engineer the design and make its own planes. Still, I don’t suppose they’re happy about it. But then again, anything that gets the Russians howling about intellectual property rights has to have made the world a better place, somehow.

Linked December 4, 2010

1. What we know about China and the Internet, courtesy of Wikileaks.

Li Changchun, a member of China’s top ruling body, the Politburo Standing Committee, and the country’s senior propaganda official, was taken aback to discover that he could conduct Chinese-language searches on Google’s main international Web site. When Mr. Li typed his name into the search engine at google.com, he found “results critical of him.”

2. Old red-carpet gossip: Annie Proulx, the author of the short story that became Brokeback Mountain, trashed Crash after it upset Ang Lee’s film at the Oscars in a bitter piece in the Guardian with wonderfully sharp elbows.

3. A heartfelt article in the American Interest about the psychological burdens that veterans take home with them. Young male veterans of the Iraq war have an unemployment rate of 21.6%, and some 10,000 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now homeless.

How to Write for Videogames December 3, 2010

The WSJ asks Jeffrey Yolahem, the lead writer of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.

Cuteness: Yale CompLit Graduate Conference: Dec 3 2010 December 3, 2010

A call for papers.

Smallness, childishness, cuteness often have an unpredictable effect on the reader or viewer of literature or art that plays with the multiform potential of diminution. This conference attempts to initiate a conversation about some of the most ubiquitous elements of artistic communication: cuteness and diminution. Adorable animals, objects intentionally made small, thoughts and feelings intentionally made twee pervade art, literature, music, advertisement, cinema, interpersonal relationships, and everyday speech. In a way, diminution defines and channels our understanding of the world around us. Our aim is to assemble a cluster of presentations that explore the appeal and the potency of this phenomenon from a variety of angles and disciplines.

Childishness — Diminution as strategy — Diminutives as a grammatical and descriptive category — Diminution and rhetoric — Theories of diminution — Metaphors of diminution or Diminution as metaphor — Pets — Smallness — Cuteness and advertisement — Diminution and genre — Disneyfication in architecture, literature and visual arts — Shirley Temple and her disciples — Cognitive aspects of diminution — Poetic diminution — Diminution and descriptive strategies — Cuteness and/or diminution as narrative device.

If you have a 300 word abstract, you should have submitted it to yalecuteness@gmail.com by October 3. The keynote address will be by Paul Fry.

Credit: Kevin Koai

The Best of Youtube December 3, 2010

A visual history of the past two hundred years- really great demographic work.

A man trying to clear the rattlesnakes out of his garage.

Michael Jackson to China- Beat it, by the People’s Revolutionary Opera.

Credits: Julia, Eddie LaMeire, The Daily Beast

Bacteria Replaces the Phosphorus in its DNA with Arsenic December 2, 2010

Scientists wonder if it’s possible to create a living organism without phosphorus, which up until now was considered one of the six indispensable elements for life (the others: hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur). There are some caveats, but the paper is going to be in Science.

Another wrongfully-accused story November 30, 2010

I find this article from GQ somehow manipulative.  But powerful.