Content tagged with “media”

“This is a portmanteau of the words ‘agitation’ and ‘propaganda.’ Historically, it has been used for propoganda in support of communism. I couldn’t find a definition that made it clear what the difference was between it and ‘regular’ propoganda. The only thing is that the ‘agit’ part of it tends…”

“This was a group of creatives that would meet for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City during the interwar period of the 1920s. Many of them were newspaper writers and columnists, and the subjects of their conversations were often printed in the papers of the day. Later, several actors and…”

“This book was written in 1985. The author died in 2003, and this is a second edition published posthumously in 2005. I don’t know if anything was changed, but it has an introduction by the author’s son (also an NYU professor, I gather). The author doesn’t like television, and he argues for about…”

“I love Nate Bargatze. My wife and I have seen him live twice, and we have tickets for a third time this fall. He’s just so, so funny. He can take any story and make it hilarious, and I have no idea why. Whenever I watch him, I say to my wife: ‘Why is this guy so funny?!’ I can’t explain it. This is…”

“I backed this project on IndieGoGo for about four years until it finally got delivered. It’s a massive book, gorgeously illustrated, and purports to explain everything we would need to know to restart society in the event of an apocalypse. Actually, that’s a little dark. It’s really just a…”

“It was named for Thomas Bowdler. In the 1800s, he published The Family Shakespeare , which was a version of Shakespeare’s plays which he felt were more suitable for families. Wikipedia has some examples of his changes. In Hamlet, the death of Ophelia was called an accidental drowning, not a…”

“ This term will go away when traditional TV goes away, because it means that news is so important that the TV networks ‘break’ into normal programming ”

“This is the precise placing of actors in a film scene. It’s a rehearsal process where actors decide and plan where they will be at each point in the scene, and where they will move during the scene, in relation to the camera. It’s important because an actor has to be in frame, usually facing the…”

“Neither. Both the actor and the city were named (indirectly) for a medieval English hunting ground. The actor, who was born in 1943, is actually named Cornelius Chase. ‘Chevy’ is a childhood nickname. (Apparently, he was also indirectly named after the English land, not the city.) The city in…”

“Before this was a Tom Clancy novel (1989) and subsequent film (1994), it was a phrase taken from a landmark Supreme Court decision. In 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote an opinion for a unanimous court in Schenck vs. United States . Two people were arrested for distributing pamphlets…”

“Broadly speaking, this is an artist who applies or manipulates the color of media. In comic books, the original drawings were done in black-and-white, and a colorist then applied color to them. So the lines of the drawing and the color were done by two separate artists. (See a good example on the…”

“This is a dance style, popularized by the Crips gang of Los Angeles. Technically, it involves pivoting on the balls and heels of the feet to spell out C-R-I-P. Often, the hands are held high, sometimes pointing at your feet. An authentic gang member might make gang signs with their hands during the…”

“Fantastic look at content technology from a content-centric standpoint. If you have no idea about how to structure your content and get it under management, this is your book. If you’re an experienced content management practitioner, you might not get much out of it, except for a burning desire to…”

“This book offers up the premise that the Internet has enabled new methods of original research (new ‘digital methods’) that didn’t exist before. Things like link analysis, search engine indexing analysis, and site crawling analysis. Some of it is interesting, like an extended comparison of the…”

“This is a book about how we don’t like reality anymore. We like the illusion of reality. As a society, we’re addicted to farce. It’s almost hilarious that this was written in 2009. If only the author had seen what was coming. He talks about ‘the illusion of literacy,’ by contrasting it against…”

“When an actor appears at the end of the credits prefixed by ‘and’ or ‘with,’ this is called ‘end billing.’ It’s usually reserved for bigger name actors who have smaller parts. For example, in beginning of the movie True Lies , Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis are the main stars of the…”

“There are books that inform and there are books that inspire. This is both. It’s a delicate balance between practical down-to-Earth suggestions, and large-scale though-provoking visions. Pulizzi navigates the line well. The book gets you thinking about content marketing – specifically, what’s…”

“The definitive history of Friends, from the spark of and idea, all the way through the current day and the lingering fandom. I read ‘I’ll Be There For You’ last year, but I remember that book as being quite strongly about the social justice aspects of the show. This book touches on some of those…”

“This is a style of journalism in which the author’s opinion and perspective is injected into the story. It abandons notions of objectivity and dispassion, and tells stories from a clear perspective, often highly stylized and biased. From an article at MasterClass : Gonzo journalism is an…”

“I very much regret not getting the audiobook. It would have been spectacular to listen to the author read this. This is a memoir. It was made out to be more than that because (1) the cover is funky, and (2) it has a lot of pictures of artifacts (?) of McConaughey’s life, but make no mistake – this…”

“Honestly, I didn’t love it, which I know is heretical, but it was very episodic – just random episodes kind of strung together with very little unifying plot. This is likely due to the fact that it’s a kid’s book, but, still, I just couldn’t get into it. Also, I wasn’t in love with his writing…”

“So, here’s the thing: I thought this book was about Jeopardy (I refuse to add the exclamation point). And I think it’s fair to assume that, given the title. But this book has virtually nothing to do with Jeopardy! . I had no idea who Amy Schneider was when I picked up the book. Given the title, I…”

“To appreciate this book, I think you need to know who David Steinberg is. I didn’t know who he was. The whole thing didn’t make a lot of sense until I did some research on Steinberg. He’s a Canadian comedian. I was born in 1971, so I didn’t know him because his heyday was the 60s and 70s. He was…”

“This is a polemic to interoperability. Doctorow explains why manufacturers made their products resistant to repair, resistant to integration, and complicated to change. He explains the business rationale behind it all, and some of the really dirty tricks that companies have used to make it a crime…”

“This one was tough. It is exactly as advertised – a detailed historical account of the origins of newspapers, specifically in 14th - 18th century Europe. The problem is, that’s kinda boring. I can’t fault the author, but it’s very, very dry topic. And the book is very detailed. I’m glad I read it,…”

“I love Mindy Kaling so much, but she’s not nearly as funny in this book. The book is sort of an auto-biography, but not very deep, and with the obvious intent to be more funny than anything else. Throughout, she has short chapters which are meant to be funny little essays. Some are okay, but a lot…”

“here’s the thing to understand: this is 400 pages of Seinfeld’s standup. That’s it. It’s very little more than this. I thought this was an examination of Jerry’s creative process. It’s not at all. There’s 3-4 pages of intro about how he decided he wanted to be a comic. The rest is divided up in to…”

“This is the story of the messy end of Sumner Redstone’s life and the struggle for control of his companies: National Amusements, and, by acquisition, Viacom and Paramount. And it really is the story of the end of Redstone’s life. Not even halfway through the book, he turns 60. At about the halfway…”

“I originally thought this was just the transcript of The Last Lecture video, but it’s more than that. It’s an expansion of the principles Pausch discussed in TLL, which basically becomes a book of life advice. Some of it is good, some of it is obvious, but it’s a quick easy read. If you’ve seen the…”

“Devastating analysis of how much we suck as humans, and how easily manipulated we are by social media. It’s a long-range survey of how governments are using social media as a weapon, or force-multiplier, for their own ends. Extensively researched. Seems like a long book, but it is literally 1/3…”

“‘The Last Tycoon’ was the unfinished novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald – he died while writing it. This text is the unfinished manuscript – it ends, quite abruptly, with a note that says ‘The manuscript ends here.’ Following that is a synopsis of how the story was supposed to end, based on notes,…”

“A book which counters claims of Left-wing media bias. Chomsky actually claims the media is biased towards big business and government and provides a ‘propaganda model’ which he claims demonstrates it. The rest of the book is mainly history – Chomsky uses things like some murders in Central America,…”

“‘The Method’ is a style of acting that was popularized by the Russian actor Konstantin Stanislavski. It was made much more popular in the United States by Lee Strasborg. The basic idea of The Method is that the actor should believe they are the character that they’re playing. They should ‘lose…”

“This is a book that I probably read for the wrong reasons, and a book that I was ultimately unsatisfied with. But in the book’s defense, it could never succeed at what I wanted from it. This is a book that asks the question: What do we do with the art of monstrous men? That question above was…”

“An interesting book which explores how humans react to the news on an emotional/psychological level. It discusses the different types of news: political, economic, disaster, cultural, etc. and how we perceive and relate to them. Some interesting points I gathered: The true measure of news is if it…”

“A fascinating book which details an experiment which took place in 1976. Twenty-one subjects in Evanston, Illinois (north of Chicago) were followed for one year. All of the news that was published in the area was cataloged, as was all the news the subjects consumed. They were regularly interviewed…”

“If you were a geek in the 80s, your book has arrived. The author is one year younger than me, and I half-suspect he was simply trying to cram as many 80s geek references into a single book as he could. The result is insanely fun. Everything is there: Wargames, Dragon Magazine, text adventures on…”

“This is an excellent, detailed history of the first 10 years of Saturday Night Live . I was surprised it only covered the first 10 years, but then I further surprised to find that it was written in 1986. (Apparently this book was a tell-all scandal back then. I was reading the Wikipedia page for…”

“This is the producer of a television show who has creative control over the content of the show. The showrunner is almost always a writer, and manages the writer’s room, making the final creative decisions. How the plot unfolds, season over season, is the responsibility of the showrunner. From an…”

“Yes. Shrek was a 1990 children’s book written and illustrated by 83-year-old William Steig. The book was quite different from other children’s book. Said one article : …Shrek! in particular inspires a subversive hope: it pushes kids to question the moral and sexual subtexts of fairy tales they’ve…”

“ Not sure what to do with this book. It’s basically a polemic against the idea that technology can save us from everything. The author is arguing that some solutions are to be found offline. I’m not sure what the point was, honestly. I got about halfway through it before I abandoned. ”

“This is sort of a biography, but more of a coffee table book. It’s a collection of photos of the life of Marshall Mathers (Eminem), interspersed with recollections of his life. It’s actually quite good. He starts by talking about the death of Proof in 2006, who is a rapper I had never heard of. His…”

“Wonderfully complete history of Reddit, from the childhood lives of founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, through the (ultimately tragic) life of Aaron Swartz. The book has short chapters, and is mainly episodic – each chapter covers some moment in the history of Reddit, and they’re all there:…”

“In college, I took Journalism 101 (actually 110; Augie’s numbering scheme is weird), which I just loved. I maintain it was the best class I took in college, and the one that has provided me more practical value than anything else I took. In it, I learned about the gatekeeper effect , which is the…”

“Interesting look at nine factors that are powering the pace of change in the world. I liked the dialectical format – each principle is set against the status quo in an ‘X vs. Y’ format. I feel like the entire book boiled down to, ‘bottom up is winning against top down.’ Well-written, with lots of…”

“This book is odd but lovable. I can’t imagine how it got written. It’s about Star Wars . But not about any particular aspect of Star Wars . Rather, it’s a meditation about the…ideas (?) of Star Wars ? The book was written right after The Force Awakens was released. That was the first film in the…”