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The Millions recently posted a round-up of the most anticipated books for the second half of 2009. Among the boldface names are Dave Eggers (The Rumpus has an excerpt from his forthcoming Zeitoun), Thomas Pynchon, William T. Vollman, and Dan Brown.
Lettercult has a round-up of some notable “custom letters” from the first half of 2009…hand lettered type, calligraphy, sign painting, graffiti….stuff like that. This is one of my favorites:
(via do)
Chip Kidd shares his seven favorite book cover designs (that aren’t his). (via do)
IFC lists the 50 greatest trailers of all time. Trailers are like episodes for Law & Order for me — ten minutes after viewing and I can’t remember a thing about them — so I don’t really have any favorites, but this list seems like a solid collection.
Update: They also polled a number of experts to weigh in on their favorites. The article led me to the Golden Trailer Awards, an annual awards show for the best movie trailers and posters. This year’s winner was the trailer for Star Trek (I’m guessing it’s trailer 1).
CNNMoney tells us about seven great companies to work for. For instance, a Colorado brewing company gives their employees free beer and company ownership.
After one year of work, each employee receives an ownership stake in the company and a free custom bicycle. After five years every employee enjoys an all-expenses-paid trip to Belgium — the country whose centuries-old beer tradition serves as a model for the Fort Collins, Colo., brewery. Oh yeah, and employees get two free six-packs of beer a week.
The Architects’ Journal selected their top 10 structures from the Star Wars films.
Not quite a building, but the monumental quality of its form and its polygonal facades lend this Jawa Sandcrawler a building-like presence. These large treaded vehicles have inspired buildings from a Tunisian hotel to Rem Koolhaas’ Casa de Musica in Porto.
(thx, janelle)
Arika Okrent wrote a book on invented languages so University of Chicago Magazine asked her to share her ten favorite made-up words.
lxmsgevjltshevjlpshev: “179 degrees 59 minutes and 59 seconds of west longitude within one second of reaching 180 degrees west” Now that’s a word!
Death to Smoochy
The Boondock Saints
The Karate Kid, Part III
Cool as Ice
Dice Rules
Basic Instinct 2
Gigli
SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2
From Justin to Kelly
The Hottie & the Nottie
Glitter
Car 54, Where Are You?
Son of the Mask
Leonard Part 6
Lady in the Water
Norbit
Swept Away
White Chicks
Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid
Spice World
Jaws 3-D
Bratz: The Movie
Troll 2
Howard the Duck
Battlefield Earth
The Postman
I Know Who Killed Me
Kazaam
Rambo III
Freddy Got Fingered
Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot
Striptease
Caddyshack II
The Adventures of Pluto Nash
Barb Wire
Ishtar
Bio-Dome
Jingle All the Way
Catwoman
Disaster Movie
Rocky V
BloodRayne
Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
The Love Guru
Crossroads
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas
It’s Pat!
Batman & Robin
Speed 2: Cruise Control
Oobject interrupts the High Line hug fest with a list of nine reasons why the High Line sucks. He missed James Kunstler’s assertion that the whole thing should have remained a railroad.
Five discoveries made while dreaming. A Hindu goddess delivered formulas to mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan while Jack Nicklaus practiced some dreamful attraction.
Wednesday night I had a dream and it was about my golf swing. I was hitting them pretty good in the dream and all at once I realized I wasn’t holding the club the way I’ve actually been holding it lately. […] So when I came to the course yesterday morning I tried it the way I did in my dream and it worked. I shot a 68 yesterday and a 65 today.
Reason recalls the ten most ridiculous Time cover stories, including the infamous 1995 CYBERPORN story, which was the first time I remember the web collectively and vigorously fact-checking the ass of a mainstream media outlet.
The “principal researcher” for the study that inspired Time’s cover was actually an undergraduate, and experts began picking the study apart the moment the issue hit newsstands. Three weeks after the wee, wide-eyed web surfer cover, Time backpedalled — on page 57 — explaining that real experts say “a more telling statistic is that pornographic files represent less than one-half of 1 percent of all messages posted on the Internet” and that, “it is impossible to count the number of times those files are downloaded; the network measures only how many people are presented with the opportunity to download, not how many actually do.”
(via fimoculous)
Roger Ebert shares a few of his “two thumbs up” reviews from the past few months. Among them are Up, Away We Go, The Hangover, and somewhat surprisingly, Knowing starring Nicholas Cage. Ebert was the only major critic that really liked the film.
This list of 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive is pretty awesome. Two of my favorites:
2. Introduce herd effect in highly personalized form. The hotel sign in the bathroom informed the guests that many prior guests chose to be environmentally friendly by recycling their towels. However, when the message mentioned that majority of the guests who stayed in this specific room chose to be more environmentally conscious and reused their towels, towel recycling jumped 33%, even though the message was largely the same.
40. Incentive programs need a good start. A car-wash place gave one group of customers a free car wash after 8 washes, and everybody got their first stamp after their visit. Group B got a free car wash after 10 car washes, with 3 stamps on the card. Both groups needed to make 7 more trips to get a free wash. 19% of the Group A returned, while 34% of the Group B did.
These are all taken from a book of the same name. (via lone gunman)
Independents: They don’t want help. They want a computer terminal they can use themselves. They want up-to-date inventory numbers aligned with an up-to-date store map, so they can go find the book themselves. If the book isn’t in the store, they want up-to-date warehouse information, so they can order it themselves. In other words, they want a bookseller, but they don’t want any of that messy human contact. And they want an online sales site, but they prefer to drive out to a retail location, as opposed to the convenience of using a website at home.
What’s interesting about the list is that none of the types sound like the ideal book store customer.
Variety polled members of the Television Critics Association for their picks for the best TV of the past decade. Here are their choices for drama series and comedy series:
Drama: Friday Night Lights, Lost, Mad Men, The Sopranos, The West Wing, The Wire.
Comedy: 30 Rock, Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Daily Show, Everybody Loves Raymond, The Office.
Rebecca Blood kicks off her annual list of summer reading lists for 2009.
Update: Here is Blood’s second installment. The entire list (with future updates) is available here.
This post by Greg Hatcher contains two equally interesting parts:
1. A detailed examination of the Star Trek franchise which shows that the film by JJ Abrams is merely the latest in a long series of successful reboots.
2. A list of rules to follow to successfully reboot a franchise, whether it’s Star Trek or Bond or Batman.
Don’t abuse the audience goodwill. Remember, you sell the audience on your story based on certain expectations. Break that unspoken contract and you’re in trouble. No one bought a ticket for Spider-Man 3 thinking they were going to get a romance with musical comedy interludes, yet that’s what it felt like we got.
If you’re doing a new version of a beloved old property, that means you need to figure out what it was people liked and make damn sure it’s in there. That doesn’t mean you have to do it the same way every time, you just have to do it. James Bond movies have been retooled a number of times, but we never lose the license to kill, the exquisite stunt work, the Bond theme music, or the cool cars and hot girls. There’s about a million miles of difference between Moonraker and Casino Royale, but they’re both recognizably Bond movies and they were both successful, because they met the baseline audience expectation of what a James Bond movie would give them.
(via rebecca blood)
When you reach 25, it’s finally time to fully grow up and be an adult.
You must, however, stop viewing carelessness, tardiness, helplessness, or any other quality better suited to a child as either charming or somehow beyond your control. A certain grace period for the development of basic consideration and self-sufficiency is assumed, but once you have turned 25, the grace period is over, and starring in a film in your head in which you walk the earth alone is no longer considered a valid lifestyle choice, but rather grounds for exclusion from social occasions.
The best advice: “Be interested so that you can be interesting.”
Sean Carroll lays out the rules for time travel for movies (but also more generally) based on our current understanding of physics.
1. Traveling into the future is easy. We travel into the future all the time, at a fixed rate: one second per second. Stick around, you’ll be in the future soon enough. You can even get there faster than usual, by decreasing the amount of time you experience elapsing with respect to the rest of the world — either by low-tech ways like freezing yourself, or by taking advantage of the laws of special relativity and zipping around near the speed of light. (Remember we’re talking about what is possible according to the laws of physics here, not what is plausible or technologically feasible.) It’s coming back that’s hard.
I don’t agree with everything on Scott Sternberg’s rules of style list, but a couple of his points are pretty interesting. I’ll spot you this one:
Whenever you start a new project or a new job, don’t tell anyone what you’re working on, because it can change direction a million times and once you start telling the world about it, you get constrained by your own mouth.
but you’ll have to find the others on your own. (via andrea inspired)
Update: A recent study has indicated that people who don’t share their goals are more successful in achieving them.
Researchers report that when dealing with identity goals — that is, the aspirations that define who we are — sharing our intentions doesn’t necessarily motivate achievement. On the contrary, a series of experiments shows that when others take notice of our plans, performance is compromised because we gain “a premature sense of completeness” about the goal.
(thx, sam)
Oobject has collected 15 housing projects from hell.
Despite the title of this list, several of these housing projects were designed by some of the world’s most famous architects and lauded at the time. The undeniable squalor of 19th Century slums combined with modernism to produce and attempt to clean things up and create a crystalline utopia. The end result was often an anti-septic vision of hell, a place devoid of organic spaces and evolved social interaction.
There’s very little information about this online, but here’s what I’ve scraped together. Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight is a documentary on the legendary designer and it will be released in theaters sometime near the end of May. You know, one of those huge summer blockbusters.
I posted about Glaser’s Ten Things I Have Learned several years ago, mostly for point #5’s rejoinder to “less is more”: “Just enough is more”. Rereading it now, I’m much more interested in some of the other points, particularly 1-3.
And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.
How to be a successful evil overlord and avoid all the mistakes that bad guys usually make in books, movies, and TV.
5. The artifact which is the source of my power will not be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragon of Eternity. It will be in my safe-deposit box. The same applies to the object which is my one weakness.
25. No matter how well it would perform, I will never construct any sort of machinery which is completely indestructible except for one small and virtually inaccessible spot.
(via memeticians)
/film has an interesting list of the most influential films of the last ten years. You’d expect to see The Matrix and The Bourne Ultimatum on there but Sky Captain? The Polar Express? The comments contain some better choices.
The Virginia Quarterly Review has a list of the ten most popular titles for the submissions they receive, including Untitled, Night, and Drowning. Interestingly, there’s no overlap in titles from a previous list.
After a thorough review, Typographica has chosen their favorite typefaces of 2008.
Sensationalism aside, it’s significant that the ever-increasing quality in type design these days — dubbed by some as the new “golden age” of type — has caused this year’s list to supersede previous lists in many ways.
Which actor dies the most in his movies? Two problems with this list: 1) lots of spoilers, and 2) where are the women? There’s not a single one in the list.
Update: Cinemorgue is an extensive listing of actors and actresses and how many times they’ve died in movies. (thx, andy)
Science magazines seem to write this list about once a year but they are always fun to read: thirteen things that science cannot explain. This version of the list includes the Kuiper cliff, tetraneutrons, cold fusion, and our old friend the Pioneer anomaly.
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