multisonic

The Times has taken a do-or-die stand for hard-core, boots-on-the-ground journalism, for earnest civic purpose, for the primacy of content creators over aggregators, and has brought itself back from the precipice. And if that does indeed end up being the case, there’s one unlikely person who deserves most of the credit: Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. Sulzberger has a great story to tell. After all, it was he who made what appeared to many to be a quixotic bet on quality at precisely the moment when the world looked like it was moving in the other direction. But after years of public excoriation, he’s highly wary of telling it. (“Think of him as an abused dog,” one of his colleagues told me. “It’ll take him a while to trust again.”)

You’re 3.7 miles away, watching this controlled explosion in a rocket with human beings on top. It’s the biggest explosion you’ve ever seen, but you’re hearing … swamp sounds. Strain your ears, but that’s all you hear — swamp crickets. People are weeping softly around you and Mission Control is saying what it needs to say, but in between you’re hearing peaceful swamp. You have time to notice the quiet, wrinkle one eyebrow, and think to yourself, (I had one friend who actually said it out loud, but everyone at least thinks it), “Hmm, it seems so bright and smoky — you know, I would have thought there would be some noise.” Right as you say the word “noise” in your head, right as those synapses connect, you get hit in the chest. You don’t exactly hear it at first, it almost knocks you over. It’s the loudest most wonderful sound you’ve ever heard. Megadeth’s double bass drum Quaalude thunder sounds like the Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s tasteful twenty-two-incher next to this. You can’t really hear it. It’s too loud to hear. It’s wonderful, deep and low. It’s the bottom. For a bass player or a drummer nothing could give more joy. It’s a squealy lead guitar player’s worst nightmare. Pete Townshend said that music should be loud enough that you can’t think of anything else, but it took an explosion to make him deaf. This is a real explosion and it’s controlled and it’s doing nothing but good and it makes your unbuttoned shirt flap around your arms. It’s beyond sound, it’s wind. It’s a man-made hurricane. It’s a baseball bat in the chest. It’s so loud. It’s so loud you can’t even call it loud. You start cheering. You start yelling. You start crying. You are yelling from the depth of your little lizard brain. You’re yelling because stinkin’ animals have done this. You know the alligators are cheering and the birds and the Good Sams and every living thing on the planet is cheering. We’re all cheering together because Earth animals are going into space. You can feel your throat getting raw, but you can’t hear yourself scream because the shuttle is so stinkin’ goddamn loud. The ground shakes and it’s loud. Warfare could be louder, but this is the loudest totally good thing you will ever hear. The loudest good thing you will ever feel.

At one point, the heat begins to get to Gary. Understandable, because his outfit, a sequined, black, full-length robe with a crown on his head and a silver chain, wasn’t designed for New York City heatwaves. Nevertheless, as a past President of the Imperial Court of New York, he proudly wears his formal attire. Damian too is dressed in a fancy white admiral’s jacket with an elaborate gold lapel hanging across his chest. Damian is all smiles, making sure that others knew how happy he was. With every picture, the couple beams, glowing in the way that one expects a couple to glow on their wedding day. 90 minutes later, Gary and Damian reach the steps leading to the Clerk’s office. Over the din of a “if you’re gay and you know it, stomp your feet” chant from the line behind them, the couple climb the steps. Damian nervously mentions that his heart is racing and works to fill every moment with excited conversation. Gary acts reserved and makes jokes about his last chance to run away. “No one could take this from us,” exclaims Damian proudly as he walks through the doorway. “Yes! Yes!”

Lion is the eighth landmark new-big-cat-name release of Mac OS X in a little over ten years. There’s a pattern to these releases. Rumors, anticipation, release. Many things have changed in the interim. Apple’s industry stature, the size of the Mac user base, the relative position and importance of the Mac in Apple’s overall product lineup, the App Store. But one thing has stayed the same: John Siracusa’s splendidly deep, obsessively detailed, spot-on accurate reviews of each release. Lion, happily, is no different. (But from the things-that-have-changed department: this time you can buy Siracusa’s Lion review as a $4.99 Kindle book. (And make no mistake — it’s book-length.) Use that link and Siracusa himself will get an extra kickback from Amazon.)

While we try to hunt down the exact coordinates in hopes of a good read (and a good story), we thought we’d tally a few of our favorite unconventional and unusual bookstores from around the world, whether they be aquatic, underground, holy or just plain strange looking. After all, even us indie-bookshop devotees could use a little extra weirdness in our lives, and in our novels. Click through to see our picks, and let us know if we’ve left your favorite unconventional bookstore off the list!

To: H. R. Haldeman From: Bill Safire July 18, 1969. IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER: Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice. These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding. They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by the nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown. In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man. In ancient days, men looked at the stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood. Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts. For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind. PRIOR TO THE PRESIDENT’S STATEMENT: The President should telephone each of the widows-to-be. AFTER THE PRESIDENT’S STATEMENT, AT THE POINT WHEN NASA ENDS COMMUNICATIONS WITH THE MEN: A clergyman should adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to “the deepest of the deep,” concluding with the Lord’s Prayer.

THE Royal Shakespeare Company doesn’t travel light. In mid-June a convoy of 46 shipping containers began to arrive at the Park Avenue Armory, having made the journey by truck and boat from Stratford-Upon-Avon to the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Multimedia One container was filled with flat-packed hoop skirts and World War I uniforms. Another held a life-size model of a wild boar and a 12-foot bear suit with glowing eyes. A third stored 20 wigs, 15 mustaches and several cans of litchis to serve as Gloucester’s savaged eyeballs in “King Lear.” But that was just for starters. As it happens, the company also packed a million-dollar theater. For its six-week stint at the armory beginning Wednesday, co-produced by the Armory and the Lincoln Center Festival in association with Ohio State University, the company will perform five plays in repertory (as well as two plays for young audiences) on an almost exact replica of its new main stage in Stratford. Exploiting almost every inch of the Armory’s 65 feet of usable height, this three-tier auditorium seats 975 and boasts a thrust stage that extends far out into the audience, allowing for greater interplay between actors and spectators. The portable theater’s ingenious design incorporates most of the shipping crates to raise and support the stage and to create a backstage storage area. The original Stratford stage took more than two years to build; the armory one must be assembled in just two weeks.

In one part of that stretch, between East 53rd and 59th Streets, more than half of the 500 apartments are occupied for two months or less. That is a higher proportion than in resort and second-home communities like Aspen, Colo.; Palm Beach, Fla.; Virginia Beach; and Litchfield, Conn.

“Some people might feel they rather live in a building with more of a social environment,” said Gary Malin, president of Citi Habitats, a real estate brokerage firm. “Other people might say, ‘Less people in my building means less wear and tear on the facilities.’ ” Among the latter is Michael Gross, who wrote the book “740 Park,” about one of those apartment buildings, he explained, where every owner “has five homes” someplace else. “It’s lovely,” said Mr. Gross, who lives on a block of West 58th Street where about 1 in 6 people lives only part time. “A fully staffed building, empty elevators and you never run out of hot water.”

Good question…here are articles that delivereaders are enjoying this week… New Yorker: Looking for Someone NY Mag: The Big Trade NY Review of Books: The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why? THR: Late Night’s Late Bloomer

One high-definition DVR and one high-definition cable box use an average of 446 kilowatt hours a year, about 10 percent more than a 21-cubic-foot energy-efficient refrigerator, a recent study found. “If you hit the on/off button it only dims the clock, it doesn’t significantly reduce power use,” said Noah Horowitz, senior scientist at the natural resources council.

More like this, please:

With his position still undeclared, Senator Mark J. Grisanti, a Republican from Buffalo who had sought office promising to oppose same-sex marriage, told his colleagues he had agonized for months before concluding he had been wrong. “I apologize for those who feel offended,” Mr. Grisanti said, adding, “I cannot deny a person, a human being, a taxpayer, a worker, the people of my district and across this state, the State of New York, and those people who make this the great state that it is the same rights that I have with my wife.”

The Joke:

“I got a parrot, and the parrot talked, but it did not say ‘I’m hungry,’ so it died.” —Mitch Hedberg, 1968-2005

Hedberg’s on-stage delivery was a curious mixture of charisma and terror, along with a certain level of intoxication. He made it feel as if his jokes were coming to him unbidden at the end of a long party. In certain performances of this particular joke, he adds a few little tics beforehand, as if he’s just remembered this great story you have to hear. He lulls us into believing it’s no big deal, then startles us 18 words later. It’s a trick few comedians can pull off.

An amplified voice from backstage utters those awful words: “For this performance, the part of … will be played by …” Before the sentence ends, a groan goes up from the entire audience. The moment is bad for them, but infinitely worse for one person standing backstage who hears it clearly. The one who, somewhere earlier in the day, has been told, “You’re going on tonight.” The one who has not yet made an entrance but has already, in effect, been booed. Hearing the dismal reaction at the mention of his name is enough to shrivel the soul. […] Sorrow and self-pity were short-lived. Another splendid actor, Jared Gertner, entered for Gad and instantly won the hearts of the disappointed. And held those hearts right through to the big, rewarding moment at the end — the one that surely makes up for standing backstage and hearing the announcement of your name trigger a groan — the curtain call. There’s a big surge in the cheering as you take your solo bow and your onstage fellow players salute you for having not just somehow having gotten through it, but gotten through it with distinction. He looks delightfully funny. Bulky of upper body (padded, possibly) and with legs appearing barely adequate to support their load, topped by oddly orange hair that fits the head like an ample, folded-under hat of some sort. Gertner exudes comic presence.

Bizarre:

Ads will appear on the device’s screen saver and show up as a banner on the homepage, but will not appear inside books.

It’s only a $25 savings from the normally-$139 Kindle 3. I’m sure they can find buyers for it, but at what cost to Amazon’s (and the Kindle’s) image?

“We’re gonna be talking about love, there are gonna be some songs about sex and there’s gonna be songs about food,” Black told Spinner. He warned not to look for the set until later on this year, but at least they’ve spent some time thoughtfully gestating. “We’re in the middle of recording it. We’re about halfway through the writing process. We need another few months,” he said. “[The new album] is strictly a musical endeavor, but I would not rule out another film. Although it would probably be on the lower-budge.”

If you haven’t seen last night’s HIMYM, move along. If you have click through for some commentary from co-creator Carter Bays, as well as a brief look ahead at how the show moves on from here.

Says [PSM Randall] White: “There are certain things where absolutely you have to stop no matter what. There are other things you work around. They’re called B-plans, and it takes about six months, but you learn all the B-plan options.” A crucial part of the stage managers’ job is safety […]

Broadway stage managers often work without a view of the stage, instead watching the action on video monitors from somewhere below or in the wings. With performers flying out over the audience, though, White says he felt it was essential that he and Purvis have a direct view of the entire house. So a total of six seats were killed in the lower balcony to build booths for their vantage points. Purvis calls lighting and LED-panel cues from house left. White handles flying and scene-change cues from house right. {Co-PSM Kathleen] Purvis’ booth has as the normal gear of a Broadway “caller,” including communications and monitors showing the stage. White’s booth, though, more resembles a space shuttle cockpit, with an array of video and computer monitors, comm controls and computerized cue lights. In front of him sits a row of lighted buttons controlling 23 cue lights for prompting scenery moves: light on for warning, light off for “go.” During tech rehearsals, Spidey’s debut scene was broken up into sections. When they tried to run it straight through, he had to stop. “There were 27 cue lights in three minutes, plus all the flights. I could not get my hands in the right places on the lights and watch the flyers the whole time,” White says. “I remember going over to Julie, and she asked, ‘Can we run it?’ And I said, ‘I cannot run this. I cannot connect all of this. I have to get an automated cue light system in here.’?” That took two weeks, and added yet more to the technical budget. But now those scenery cues are run through CueVision software, which White operates through a simple two-button controller at his left hand — though he still has manual overrides for every cue light, in case he needs to improvise if something goes wrong.

Under the plan, one offstage crew member will attach the harness and related cables, wires or tethers to the actors, and a second stagehand will verify that the attachments are made. That second stagehand will then verbally notify a stage manager that they are safely connected. The actor will also verify that the attachment is made. Previously, there was no second stagehand to verify or communicate with the stage manager, and the actor was not required to check his harness.

They’re spending nights in their car, on the run from the same shadowy cabal—“the Hollywood Star Whackers”—who may have killed Heath Ledger, possibly sabotaged Jeremy Piven, and could now be targeting Lindsay Lohan. No, this is not the plot of Oscar nominee and Golden Globe winner Randy Quaid’s latest movie. It is what he and his wife, Evi, swear is really happening to them. With the Quaids in Canada, the author probes their nightmare reality, which has alienated friends and family, and turned the couple into outlaws.

Creative disagreements on Lone Star Love degenerated into “screaming matches,” said Herrick. Evi was constantly filming rehearsals with her video camera in violation of union rules (“I was not a union member,” Evi said) and writing “threatening e-mails about contractual obligations.” (“Yes, to the producer Bob Boyett,” she responded.) […] [T]he last straw for the producers and the 25 cast members who signed on to the Actors’ Equity action against Quaid were preview performances where he slapped an actor in the head four times in the process of knocking his hat off and ad-libbed lines about the “gynecological instruments” of an actress. […] At his Actors’ Equity hearing in Los Angeles in January of 2008, Evi became irate when she was told she couldn’t film the proceedings, calling it a “Nazi plot” and kicking a 76-year-old secretary in the shins. Randy was fined $81,572 for the two lost weeks of work on the show (which he has not paid). “It was an extortionist nightmare from Bob Boyett,” Evi said. “I have no idea what they are referring to,” said Boyett. “It would be like herding cats to get a producer [of a Broadway show] to be part of a conspiracy,” Herrick said.

A Super Sized version of what happened to Gawker.

Besides producing popular Christmas standards, Connick is known for his acting in movies (Hope Floats,Independence Day), on Television (Will & Grace), and on stage (The Pajama Game). But his real jam is music. Connick attended the Manhattan School of Music after which he provided the soundtrack for When Harry Met Sally. Since then, he has received three Grammy’s and produced almost 30 albums. His invented apparatus? ”System and method for coordinating music display among players in an orchestra”

For technical advice, he turned to his neighbor David Pogue, who is a former Broadway conductor and a computer guru to the stars, whose clients have included Stephen Sondheim and Mia Farrow. (Mr. Pogue, who also writes the State of the Art column for the weekly Circuits section of this newspaper, has no commercial ties to Mr. Connick’s invention.) ”A lot of the guys I knew from my pit work on Broadway said that it would never work,” Mr. Pogue recalled. ”They said the computer would crash or the screen wouldn’t refresh itself in time for a professional situation.”

Well, this doesn’t happen every day. In a recent post, I talked about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s walk across the lunar surface back in 1969 and wondered, how come they walked such a modest distance? Less than a hundred yards from their lander? And Neil Armstrong wrote in to say, here are the reasons: It was really, really hot on the moon, 200 degrees Fahrenheit. We needed protection. We were wearing new-fangled, water-cooled uniforms and didn’t know how long the coolant would last. We didn’t know how far we could go in our space suits. NASA wanted us to conduct our experiments in front of a fixed camera. We [meaning Neil] cheated just a little, and very briefly bounded off to take pictures of some interesting bedrock. But basically, he says, we were part of a team and we were team players on a perilous, one-of-a-kind journey. Improvisation was not really an option. But, reading between the lines, I kinda think he wanted to do more, go further. Anyway, read for it for yourself.

So what kind of instructions have you been given about your character? “You hate all of them, and you hate children.” We even did a scene, as an exercise, where I tear all the music off the piano and storm off. But I have had occasions when some directors — we have such great guest directors — have said to me, “You can soften up here.” And in that sense I feel like I have a character arc. How often are you on set, and what’s your role [there]? I’m there two or three days a week. Basically, I am Plan B. If a producer decides we aren’t going to use a full version of a song, they look over at me and say, “Can you come up with something?” And I do. I’m old-school Broadway like that.

Time, on how the iTunes Music Store succeeded in the face of file sharing:

It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.

Picasso’s electrician just tore the art world a new one. Pierre Le Guennec used to install burglar alarms for Pablo Picasso. Last September, he approached the Picasso estate with an astonishing revelation: for the past several decades, he’d had been keeping 271 previously unreleased Picasso originals in a trunk in his house. He wanted Picasso’s relatives to authenticate the work; instead, the filed suit against him for illegal possession. Le Guennec claims they were a gift from the late artist; Picasso’s family thinks he stole them. No matter who prevails in court, art lovers are the real winners here. This is a huge find.

This was my first full year at the helm of Give Me Something To Read, and to mark it, I’ve compiled this list of the best articles and essays I posted through 2010 (limited to those that were actually published in 2010). Best, obviously, is subjective, and what this list comprises is a selection of my favourites and reader favourites (as judged by the number of notes they got on Tumblr). Enjoy!

Software engineer John Tyner’s account of refusing an X-Ray scan at the San Diego airport on Saturday. He recorded much of the incident on his cell phone. At the 8:30 mark of the first video, a TSA agent tells him: “Upon buying your ticket, you gave up a lot of your rights.” After being escorted — by TSA — out of the airport for refusing to allow his genitals to be groped, he was then threatened by a TSA supervisor with a lawsuit and $10,000 fine for having left the screening area.

Terry Kniess, a former weatherman with a knack for numbers and seeing patterns, went on The Price is Right and won more than $50,000 in prizes because of an exact bid on his Showcase. His secret? He watched hundreds of hours of the show and discovered its secrets and weaknesses.

Before they stepped foot in the Bob Barker Studio, they were going to be prepared; “Good TV is rehearsed TV,” Terry likes to say. For four months during the summer of 2008, they recorded The Price Is Right every morning and watched it together in bed every night, Terry hunting for patterns and Linda doing the math. It didn’t take long for them to find their edge. In The Price Is Right’s greatest strength, he and Linda also found its greatest weakness: It had survived all those years because it seemed never to change. Even when Drew Carey replaced Bob Barker — the show’s own version of Vatican II — he rocked a similar skinny microphone. Behind all the screaming and seeming chaos, there was a precise and nostalgic order. Terry says he first sat upright in bed when a distinctive grill called the Big Green Egg came up for bid again and again. It was always $1,175.

(via @longreads)

Go get it.

The original entries are short updates about his life and health and a few of his heart’s wishes. Postcards and pebbles. They’re followed by a smattering of Welcomes to Cyberspace. But slowly the journal picks up steam, as Ebert’s strength and confidence and audience grow. You are the readers I have dreamed of, he writes. He is emboldened. He begins to write about more than movies; in fact, it sometimes seems as though he’d rather write about anything other than movies. The existence of an afterlife, the beauty of a full bookshelf, his liberalism and atheism and alcoholism, the health-care debate, Darwin, memories of departed friends and fights won and lost — more than five hundred thousand words of inner monologue have poured out of him, five hundred thousand words that probably wouldn’t exist had he kept his other voice. Now some of his entries have thousands of comments, each of which he vets personally and to which he will often respond. It has become his life’s work, building and maintaining this massive monument to written debate — argument is encouraged, so long as it’s civil — and he spends several hours each night reclined in his chair, tending to his online oasis by lamplight. Out there, his voice is still his voice — not a reasonable facsimile of it, but his.

Ebert keeps scrolling down. Below his journal he had embedded video of his first show alone, the balcony seat empty across the aisle. It was a tribute, in three parts. He wants to watch them now, because he wants to remember, but at the bottom of the page there are only three big black squares. In the middle of the squares, white type reads: “Content deleted. This video is no longer available because it has been deleted.” Ebert leans into the screen, trying to figure out what’s happened. He looks across at Chaz. The top half of his face turns red, and his eyes well up again, but this time, it’s not sadness surfacing. He’s shaking. It’s anger. Chaz looks over his shoulder at the screen. “Those fu — ” she says, catching herself. They think it’s Disney again — that they’ve taken down the videos. Terms-of-use violation. This time, the anger lasts long enough for Ebert to write it down. He opens a new page in his text-to-speech program, a blank white sheet. He types in capital letters, stabbing at the keys with his delicate, trembling hands: MY TRIBUTE, appears behind the cursor in the top left corner. ON THE FIRST SHOW AFTER HIS DEATH. But Ebert doesn’t press the button that fires up the speakers. He presses a different button, a button that makes the words bigger. He presses the button again and again and again, the words growing bigger and bigger and bigger until they become too big to fit the screen, now they’re just letters, but he keeps hitting the button, bigger and bigger still, now just shapes and angles, just geometry filling the white screen with black like the three squares. Roger Ebert is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and he’s still hitting the button, bang, bang, bang, and he’s shouting now. He’s standing outside on the street corner and he’s arching his back and he’s shouting at the top of his lungs.

Concerned about your privacy while using Google? The internet giant says it understands. Google is now offering users a chance to opt out, and live in privacy in a remote mountain village.

When jazz pianists are improvising riffs, their brains act much more like the dreaming brain, with inhibition turned down and creativity cranked way up, a new study finds.

CUPERTINO, CA—Claiming that he completely forgot about the much-hyped electronic device until the last minute, a frantic Steve Jobs reportedly stayed up all night Tuesday in a desperate effort to design Apple’s new tablet computer. “Come on, Steve, just think—think, dammit—you’re running out of time,” the exhausted CEO said as he glued nine separate iPhones to the back of a plastic cafeteria tray. “Okay, yeah, this will work. This will definitely work. Just need to write ‘tablet’ on this little strip of masking tape here and I’m golden. Oh, come on, you piece of shit! Just stick already!” Middle-of-the-night sources reported that Jobs then began work on double-spacing his Keynote presentation and increasing the font size to make it appear longer.

back when i was the music guy at the chapelle show, outkast’s publisher might tell us they want $150,000 for “the way you move” in that puffy/real world/fonzworth bentley/cambodian breast milk sketch….BUT if you just ring up Big Boi and explain to him the nature of the sketch and how we just want 6 secs of it next thing you know Big Boi says “ill tell my lawyers to request the standard basic rate….if yall write me into a sketch” deal done. we get our outkast song for 10 secs, dave and neal write big boi in that “nick cannon is hiwwalrious” sketch and the rest is comedy history. —ive had to make ALOT of phone calls of that nature (hey ahmir do you know blah blah? can you do me a favor and make a call?) for projects im not even involved in. but of course the “see what happens when lawyers run the industry?” blog is a WHOLE nother lesson. (just found out bruuuuuuce cut max a break on conan by charging basic rates instead of his normal $tandard.

This might be the saddest part of the whole ordeal Say goodbye to The Masturbating Bear Pimpbot 5000 Conando In the Year 3000 Desk Driving Wussy Wagon Status of Triumph:

It’s unclear who controls Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, the crass canine puppet that is perhaps O’Brien’s most popular recurring bit. Triumph was originated by writer and longtime O’Brien pal Robert Smigel, whose reps declined to comment on whether Smigel or NBC owned rights to the character.

The lack of delay for new releases is one of the main reasons I still use Netflix rather than relying on iTunes. Sad to see them cave. Update: A slew of reader feedback arguing that this is a good deal on Netflix’s part, especially for access to more streaming content. And John August says it’s not a bad thing. Could well be that I’m just biased because I disagree with the trade-off.

Hard to believe it’s come to this.

Oh, man. (via tanya77) We’ve been remiss in not pointing this out sooner (thanks, J), but this is one of Lyons’ best.

Lickable StampCollectors still demand lickables; everyone else sends self-adhesives.

#9 ‘How I Met Your Mother’

Come for the punch lines, stay for the clues. That’s the draw of How I Met Your Mother, the most untraditional traditional sitcom there is. In a decade full of ambitious television, HIMYM ranks among the most inventive comedies, a Wiki-friendly puzzle show dressed up as a surprisingly competent Friends knockoff. As a group of friends hijink their way through their wild ‘n’ crazy NYC 20s, the viewer gets to piece together the identity of Ted’s (Josh Radnor) future wife. It’s both a whodunit and an efficient catchphrase generator. And in a decade that saw the rise of single-camera comedy, it’s also the last of the great multicamera sitcoms (your move, Chuck Lorre loyalists).

#4 ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ #3 ‘The Office’

I think Steve Carell’s Michael Scott is superior to Ricky Gervais’s David Brent. Where David was just a moronic jerk, Michael is a virtuosic boob who also manages, at times, to be improbably competent. Those fleeting and few flirtations with managerial brilliance are thrilling and well-earned, as are so many moments for The Office U.S. characters, most notably the sweet and bumpy romance between Jim (John Krasinski) and Pam (Jenna Fischer).

#2 ‘Arrested Development’

Arrested Development, by contrast, feels like every episode was written by one person, one person who’s obsessed with reminding you that he knows everything about the dysfunctional (if not downright freakish) Bluth family and never forgets anything. That’s why AD fans are so passionate, the show constantly rewards loyal viewing with micro-jokes that only the initiated will understand.

#1 ‘30 Rock’

When all four burners are hot, nothing on the air is funnier or more rewarding. And at the core of all the wackiness is television’s sweetest platonic relationship, that of Liz (Fey) and Jack (Alec Baldwin), whose relationship fluidly shifts from boss-employee to mentor-mentee to brother-sister to therapist-patient, often in the span of a scene.

(via soupsoup)

The scenario is fairly typical: a company offers an opportunity to ‘break into the business’ in exchange for the intern working for free. You see many examples of this in the entertainment industry. […] In order to qualify as an unpaid internship, the requirement is simple: no work can be performed that is of any benefit at all to the company. That is, you can not deliver mail, sort files, file papers, organize a person’s calendar, conduct market research, write reports, watch television shows and report on them, read scripts, schedule interviews, or any other job that assists the employer in any way in running their business.

New York’s entertainment industry runs on unpaid (or severely underpaid) interns. It’s embarrassing, and it disgusts me — it effectively limits jobs in the business to people who already have enough money (or, more commonly, whose parents do) to afford to live in New York at a loss for a long time. And once you get past the internship stage, it doesn’t get much better. I’ve never seen the disconnect between starting salaries and cost of living be as grossly and unnecessarily out of proportion as the entry-level jobs in the New York entertainment industry.