A burglar in comfortable clothes finds an overlooked plane on the Tarmac. He has a quick chat with the engine and takes off, a slow spiral through a quickly-closing gap in the clouds. Leaving the thing on autopilot for a few nights. Why not? With him are two children, one of whom hates being trapped on the airplane while the other can’t sleep for the excitement. While the burglar sleeps they bounce through the rooms, the one tossing the furniture and the other catching.
The webists met the Times’s schizophrenia with a schizophrenia of their own. The worst of them simply cheered the almost unbelievably rapid collapse of the old media, which turned out, for all its seeming influence and power, to be a paper tiger, held up by elderly white men. But the best of them were given pause: themselves educated by newspapers, magazines, and books, they did not wish for these things to disappear entirely. (For one thing, who would publish their books?)
The Intellectual Situation from the latest n+1, featuring three very good pieces on: the web as social movement, the monetization of the NYT.com, and video games as art (or the impossibility thereof). Interspersed are short speculative sketches, parables which do little to advance the arguments of the above.
Also serves as an introduction to the magazine’s new (and very beige) website. A far more welcoming design, but I cannot get past the color of the thing — a yellowed, crumbling paperback. The website reluctant to abandon the printed page.







