longreads:

“Deep Inside Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Taco” —Austin Carr, Fast Company

comediandaveanthony:

This Maron in space thing is great.  Cable channels should do more promos like this.  I’d include network channels but they’d turn this into Maron in Peace and it would just be him sitting, calmly enjoying tea in a Buddhist monk like state because networks go for the worst, most obvious version.  

Now I’m rambling about networks…just watch it.

extremely smart and clever. I’m impressed no marketing person kiboshed it on the fear that people would think Maron is a Star Trek parody

fastcompany:

“My cell phone was blowing up. It was 7:30 in the morning, two hours before I usually get up. It kept ringing, buzzing. I finally checked it. People were sending me pictures of the place I bought, the Imagination Station, on fire. Mary and I got in the car and drove over. It’s two blocks from where I live, and a small crowd was standing around, watching it burn. I didn’t know what to think. Someone suggested it was started by kids shooting off fireworks. I don’t know. We didn’t have any enemies.

“I had a ‘95 Ford Explorer that was stolen the morning after the Super Bowl. So Mary called her family—they live downriver—to see if we could borrow the Suburban. We had that for three weeks before it got stolen.

“Things like this happen in Detroit. The neighborhood doesn’t rally around to stop it. They just do their thing, not wanting to go digging into some hornet’s nest. When I tried to report the first car, it took me three days. I was calling the crime-reporting line, and I kept getting put on hold. It’s just a quagmire of red tape here. So finally I recorded a message and sent it to a DJ I found online, a guy in Croatia. He turned it into a great little techno song that I posted on SoundCloud, ‘Detroit Police Department Stolen Car.’ I was a local hero for a hot moment.

“My friend Zak Meers came by after the fire. We had planned a mural for the Station. I said we should speed the mural up, do something. We painted two words, real big, on what was left of the building: it’s ok! That’s what it says now—just a big two-word press release.”

http://bit.ly/11cCVKn

Reporting by Chuck Salter. Photos by Corine Vermeulen.

murketing:

Really what I like here is the one on the bottom: “El Nuevo Negro Is The New Black.” That is hot.

daveanthonycomedy:

Tickets soon.

I wish I could be in L.A. for this, but given that I’m not, I recommend any L.A.-based folks out there to get yourself to Meltdown to see Dave. He’s one of the best storytelling comics working today, and you can say you saw him before he got the career heat he’s long deserved. 

(via walkingtheroom)

The Frequent Fliers Who Flew Too Much

In a year when Uber and the idea of having your own private driver entered popular culture, when Uber’s cofounder launched BlackJet, an Uber for private air travel, this is a fascinating look at their cultural predecessor—a time when American Airlines sold lifetime tickets and the unintended consequences of that act. A fascinating study in consumer behavior, the state of air travel, and the adversarial relationship between airlines and their best customers.

Free to Be

I was raised on the quintessential 1970s kids album Free to Be…You and Me, and my parents were far from feminists, or even really that jacked into the culture. That’s what a big deal Free to Be became: It could reach all the way into Atlanta, Georgia and a rather cloistered Jewish cloistered upbringing. Dan Kois does a remarkable job reconstructing the creation of the album, its influence, its controversies, and brings it all home by assessing its relevance today. As the father of a 17 month-old daughter, the story resonated deeply in thinking about my own childhood and the inevitable comparison I continually make to the kind of childhood I hope she has. 

Jay McInerney, the New York Fantasy, and Wine

The author confronts the specter of Jay McInerney and his work, particularly his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, which cast a large shadow over the rest of the 1980s and any New York arriviste. Again, this is personal, provoking memories of my Coming to New York story in 1987 and how I also had to come to terms with McInerney’s canon.

The Cranky Wisdom of Peter Kaplan

This delightful profile of the quintessential New York magazine editor and his seemingly endless collection of quirks is wonderful at every turn, for its narrative derring-do and the ideal pairing of writing style with subject matter.   

Ron Conway is a Silicon Valley’s Startup’s Best Friend 

In the tech industry, angel investors dominated the conversation this year, and their stars shone as bright as the entrepreneurs they served. No investor strides the world like Colossus than Ron Conway, the man who put the word super in superangels. This smart, sharply observed profile brings the grand poohbah of tech and his bet-on-everything investment strategy to life, and in the process reveals life at the upper echelons of Silicon Valley. 

L.A. Weirdos

My musical tastes tread a narrow band of interest, from the funk and soul bands of the 1970s, to the funk and neo-soul bands of the early 2000s. So it was both surprising and enthralling that I came to “discover” the trio of singer-songwriters Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, and Van Dyke Parks through this Pitchfork essay tracing their early careers and shared DNA. Nilsson is really the discovery, and not surprisingly after this Pitchfork coronation, his name and music popped up again and again later in the year as kind of a hipster, music aficionado touchstone. As the piece delineates their “backward-looking, a little goofy, and restlessly clever” music, as well as their conflicted feelings about commercial success, one marvels at their big-label status and the bygone era that could support their weirdness. 

The Sound and the Fury

The true soundtrack of my adulthood, if I were being honest, has been sports-talk radio. The 24-hour radio format launched just two months prior to my arrival in New York, and just as it took a little time to find its footing, so too did I not wholly embrace it until it worked out the kinks and got the lineup right. Not long after Mike and the Mad Dog took the afternoon drive slot and made sports radio a thing, I started listening religiously. It is what I think about when I think about my last three semesters in college—an ever-present pre-Internet babbling of half-cocked ideas and breaking news that somehow soothed me deep into my 30s. I rarely listen to WFAN now, but this definitive oral history of its creation and early days brought all those nostalgic feelings rushing to the fore and had enough new juicy nuggets even to satisfy a longtime superfan.

Top 5 Ways Bleacher Report Rules the World!

I am not necessarily one to fret about the future of journalism in the digital age. Yes, business models need to be rethought, but the same could be said of print even before the Internet. And at least the people doing the thinking about digital media tend to be smarter than the old-school publishing side folks. That said, this story about Bleacher Report, the highly trafficked sports-opinion content farm that Time Warner purchased this year for a reported $200 million, is both chilling even for an optimist like me and yet at the same time so patently ridiculous that it’s hard not to laugh. This story also features the single-best kicker I read this year.  

Something Close to Madness, Case File #24: The Oogieloves in The Big Balloon Adventure 

There have been a lot of stories at the end of the year about the creative resurgence of Hollywood and the original crop of good movies driving viewers back to the multiplex. That’s great, but failure is always more fascinating than success and there’s no greater failure in the history of movies, on a dollar-for-dollar basis, than The Oogieloves. As the AV Club’s essential Nathan Rabin investigates, “How can a film fail so spectacularly? The answer is crazier than anything in The Oogieloves In The Big Balloon Adventure, and considering the film prominently features a seemingly stoned baby pillow, a giant flying sombrero powered by rhythmic movement, and a sentient vacuum cleaner named J. Edgar, that’s really saying something.” The story of Oogieloves creator Kenn Viselman captivates, as does his wrongheaded ambition to reinvent the live moviegoing experience, at least for children, into an active, interactive adventure.  As Rabin shifts from relaying backstory to reliving the experience of seeing the film, one can’t help but admire the wrongheadedness of the enterprise, as inspired by massive toy sales as a genuine desire to revivify the live movie theater experience. 

Voter Apathy, Ice Cream, and Why I Could Not Be More Excited to Watch the Debates This Month

I read a lot of campaign stories in 2012, and most of them were either kind of dumb or had the shelf life of fresh soy milk (seek it out and see what I mean). Comedian Patton Oswalt writes what should be a disposable piece about why he’s excited about the debates and makes it an epic take on easy cynicism and the emptiness of that pose. And at the same time, Oswalt makes a vigorous case for caring about the political process, and the debates in particular, because of television’s indelible power to make moments. I hope republishes this every four years.  

kylekinane:

This Saturday, November 24th, while your bellies are still full with the meat of flightless birds and the nectar of fermented inspiration, please cast your judgement upon my latest comedic offering, Whiskey Icarus, on Comedy Central.

Beyond excited for this. Kyle is a unique comedic voice and an amazing storyteller (and having met him once after a show, a gracious, self-effacing, cool dude). I am sure Comedy Central’s commercial edits will be maddening but I’ll gut through it and then buy the unedited version as soon as it’s available, hopefully next week. 

buzzfeed:

Heroes, each and every one of them.

I love this but wait for my Adorables and you’ll see I’ve got these superheroes beat. 

My Monster Cereal ice cream trio. Thanks @windattack! You’re a genius

richardrushfield:

Sorry to interject personal/career news here, but for the first time in I don’t know how long, I’ve got some I’m genuinely actually really really excited about.

The Hollywood Reporter reports:

Social news website BuzzFeed is going Hollywood, signing up a pair of former Los Angeles Times…

Richard’s the most astute observer of the L.A. entertainment scene I know. Can’t wait to see the team he builds and the work he does at BuzzFeed.