Monday Tally is a weekly link round-up of some of my favorite posts discovered over the week. If you have suggestions for Monday Tally, please e-mail sophisticated [dot] dorkiness [at] gmail [dot] com. Enjoy!
Top Picks
If you only have a minute, here are my top picks for this week.
- Why I Hate Amazon and Will Never Ever Buy From Them Again (via Hey Lady! Watcha Readin’?)
- Baraboo’s Circus World Museum featured in upcoming film (via 77 Square)
- The Journalists’ Guide to Analytics (via 10,000 Words)
News You Can Use
This article from USA Today does a really nice job of explaining two of the big competing arguments about what the Internet is doing to our minds – destroying our attention span versus adapting to being more information ready. It starts by contrasting two big books – Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows and Clay Shirkey’s Cognitive Surplus and articulates it well.
The New York Times did a long article on what consumption patterns make us happy, concluding that stuff usually isn’t it. As someone getting ready to move, I’m certain my stuff is not making me happy.
Michelle Obama penned an editorial in The Washington Post about the food bill.
Research from the U of Minnesota found that ovulating women unconsciously chose sexier clothing in order to outdo attractive women. That’s science, for you.
Books and Movies
Local arts paper 77 Square wrote about the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, which has a lot of memorabilia in the upcoming Water for Elephants movie. This is a cool story.
Trish (Hey Lady! Watcha Readin’?) did a provocative post about why she hates Amazon and refuses to buy from them. This inspired me to think more about my buying habits, and formulate some principles about book buying (a future post, still in draft form).
Susan Orlean lists some #booksthatchangekisdworlds that she got from her Twitter followers. There are some amazing kids books I the lists that I haven’t read in forever.
Inception Was an Awesome Movie
Henry Jenkins writes about Inception, and about the ideas of genre and film and gaming. I saw the movie this weekend and thought it was awesome.
If you haven’t seen Inception, go see it right now. Here’s the trailer to persuade you:
If you’ve already seen Inception, then check out this College Humor video making fun of it.
And if that doesn’t persuade you, read Roger Ebert’s very smart review of the movie and take note things he says about genre. I wish I’d thought of that.
Stuff That’s Painfully Obvious
Apple is facing a class action lawsuit from consumers who think that the claim “reading on the iPad is just like reading a book,” is false. All I can say to that is duh, and get over it.
Mark Zuckerburg thinks that privacy settings hurt engagement on Facebook. I think lack of privacy settings and disregard for the value of personal information from Facebook executives hurts engagement on Facebook, but that’s just me.
Stuff That Should Have Been Obvious, But Surprised Me
This Slate piece looks at what it takes to keep Sarah Palin’s Facebook page sanitized with only comments in support or agreement with her posts. In the 24 hours after a post when up, about 10 percent of the comments were deleted. I find this interesting because, for some reason, it didn’t occur to me that politicians would sanitize social media like this. The article compares online comments to highly-orchestrated town hall forums, which disturbs me.
The Blogger’s Toolkit
10,000 Words did a post explaining analytics for journalists, but I think it’s equally useful for bloggers just starting to look at web traffic.
Google finally announced multiple account sign-in for Google accounts! This is awesome news for anyone with a personal and blog e-mail you have to bounce between. I haven’t used it much yet, but am excited to see how it works.
Here are 30 reasons someone might not follow you back on Twitter. Funny and true.
Books for My TBR
- The Girls of Murder City by Douglas Perry, because it’s about the women who inspired the musical, Chicago.
- Higher Education? by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus because it argues for the benefits of a liberal arts education.
- From the Best to the Blonde by Marina Warner (via Amy Reads) because it sounds awesome.
What’s your favorite link this week? Anything major that I missed? Anyone else see Inception and want to gush about how awesome it was?
Comments on this entry are closed.
Hooray, happy to have made your list again 🙂 heh. And that Palin article really surprised me too. Obvious I guess, but I hadn’t considered that politicians would do that. Scary.
Amy: It seems obvious that politicians would sanitize their social media, but it still surprises me.
Inception! Yes! I just saw it over the weekend. Fantastic. The visuals were awesome, the pacing perfect, and the story thought-provoking. And the real kicker – I’ve been dreaming about it ever since seeing it. Crazy, not right dreams….
Trisha: That’s funny. I can’t imagine dreams about Inception, but I imagine they’d be pretty trippy!
We saw Inception a few weeks ago and thought it was great. A lot of fun, and a good entertaining romp that wasn’t completely mindnumbing and just full of explosions. I suspect I didn’t love it as much as some (I can just see some people getting super obsessed with it a la The Matrix), but it was still a good night out at the cinema.
Also, I don’t love the iPad like many others, but to those people involved in the lawsuit, I can’t help but feel there are a bajillion other better uses of their time. Like just reading a book (v 1.0 or otherwise).
Steph: I thought the movie was a lot of fun to watch, and it’s a movie that has provoked some good conversations since then. And I agree — lots a better uses of time than iPad lawsuits.
Interesting article about not spending money. I am quite thrifty and could live pretty comfortably on $24K a year, and I have. The only thing is that it doesn’t leave me much of a buffer in case of car repairs, ruined clothes, etc. That, and I get massively depressed when birthdays and Christmas come around and I can’t get my friends and family the awesome gifts I want to get them.
Jenny: I’ve been reading a lot of things about thriftiness and cutting back material stuff in favor of other pursuits, so I thought that article was interesting. It’s hard to think about the sorts of things I’d cut back on.
Thanks for linking to my post! And thanks for pointing me to Roger Ebert’s review of Inception. I saw the movie last weekend, so reading his review is perfect. 🙂
Trish: Roger Ebert is so smart. I wish I could be him!
You are STILL the coolest. Just recycle this comment for every post. You rock. I did read an interesting article from July about the lack of women in science and engineering that is sending me to new ideas and related links and on and on and on. Hope to post on it soon.
Care: Aww, thanks 🙂 That sounds like an interesting article!
Your college humor link takes me to Ebert’s review, and neither my daughter or I could find a college humor video about Inception. Do you think they already had to take it down?
Jeanne: Thanks for pointing that out. I fixed the link.
That article on analytics is one of the easiest to understand that I have ever read, thanks.
Gwen: I agree — it was very helpful.
‘Mark Zuckerburg thinks that privacy settings hurt engagement on Facebook.’
Personally, I was very peeved when You Tube kept prompting me to merge my You Tube and Google accounts so I could share my viewing habits with Facebook.
NOT.
Julia Smith: I’ve not liked the merging of social networking sites either. I use them for different purposes, so wouldn’t want them all going together.
I love these link posts. You always seem to feature things that I’m very interested in. Thanks for taking the time to put it together. Good luck with your move.
Jessica: I’m glad the posts are helpful. I have fun compiling them, but knowing someone reads them makes it more fun.