“‘The end-of-history effect may represent a failure in personal imagination,’ said Dan P. McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern who has done separate research into the stories people construct about their past and future lives. He has often heard people tell complex, dynamic stories about the past but then make vague, prosaic projections of a future in which things stay pretty much the same.”
Category: Arts & Culture
Andrew Sullivan and The Dish part with Daily Beast, seek paying members for ad-free content
Will gregarious online readers get used to the idea of tiny monthly payments to some of the sites they value most highly? I’m guessing that Sullivan has forged a big enough name and readership that this will work for him. I’m just not sure how long the coattails will be for smaller sites and blogs.
An interview with actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers from 2000, unpublished until now
This lengthy interview with Jonathan Rhys Meyers in 2000 was intended for a now-defunct magazine. It’s being published here for the first time.
In age of new media, where are our civic spaces?
I don’t really have any clear answers here, but there are obvious dangers in Facebook — a for-profit corporation with astonishing reach that’s under incredible pressure to add users and sell ads — being our dominant public space on the web.
Mayans in Georgia?. . . Here we go again
If there were credible evidence that the Maya mysteriously migrated to north Georgia (really?), then legitimate scientists would be all over it.
Savannah Film Office documents a year of local film and photo shoots
If you click on through the picture embedded here, you’ll be in a great album on the Savannah Film Office Facebook page with behind-the-scenes images of the plethora of major projects that shot in Savannah in 2012.
RIP Charles Durning — an incredible life
I don’t normally post links to obituaries and the like, but today’s news about the death of Charles Durning contains some stunning and moving details.
Merry Christmas and a few thoughts on Newsweek’s final print cover, first published on Twitter
I can’t imagine too many of you will be checking in here today. But Merry Christmas to those who do. I know it’s not the end of the year, but today feels pretty nostalgic anyway.
New book by Savannah poet Patricia Lockwood gets raves in The New Yorker and Chicago Tribune
In addition to praising Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, The New Yorker says that Patricia Lockwood “is one of the few people who makes Twitter seem like it needed inventing.”
Alexis Madrigal in The Atlantic: Home Page Design Advice from October 1991
“Both the cover model and the card model are totally valid ways of thinking about a home page. […] We really haven’t gotten beyond thinking about home pages with one or the other of these analogies.”
Instagram backs off new policies that would have allowed commercial sale of users’ pics
I’m not an Instagram user — not yet, anyway — but I’m not entirely reassured by the waffling language here of “not our intention” and “we’re going to remove the language that raised the question”.
7 movies from Savannah Film Festival pick up Golden Globe nominations
It’s always interesting each year to see how the various selections from the Savannah Film Festival fare in the Golden Globe and Oscar nominations.
As usual, the 2012 SFF did pretty well. Kudos to the festival organizer
CNN covers Georgia’s growing film industry
The CNN reporter George Howell didn’t really get out of Atlanta for this report, but it’s still well worth a watch.
Connecticut state police address misinformation on social media
“Misinformation is being posted on social media sites,” Lt. Paul Vance says, before noting mimicry and pretense online. But from the time of the shootings on Friday until at least late Saturday, mainstream media outlets were posting all sorts of inaccurate information that had allegedly been confirmed by officials.