Don’t let the pigeon read this blog post!

If you are a parent of kids between the ages of 1-12 and you don’t know who Mo Willems is, where have you been?  You know what, even if you are not a parent at all, Mo Willems is awesome.  And, if you are already a fan of Pigeon, Piggie, etc., you’ll love this recent NPR interview him him (definitely worth a listen, despite the full transcript).   It was especially fun to hear about Willems’ inspiration for the pigeon.

Courtesy of Hyperion Books

And if you are a parent of younger children (all the kids in our family from 1-12 love them) and are not familiar with Willems’ books?  Get to it!

Facebook is not making me lonely

Really interesting article about Facebook in the latest Atlantic.   All sorts of fascinating nuggets, but I found the following most compelling:

Moira Burke, until recently a graduate student at the Human-Computer Institute at Carnegie Mellon, used to run a longitudinal study of 1,200 Facebook users. That study, which is ongoing, is one of the first to step outside the realm of self-selected college students and examine the effects of Facebook on a broader population, over time. She concludes that the effect of Facebook depends on what you bring to it. Just as your mother said: you get out only what you put in. If you use Facebook to communicate directly with other individuals—by using the “like” button, commenting on friends’ posts, and so on—it can increase your social capital. Personalized messages, or what Burke calls “composed communication,” are more satisfying than “one-click communication”—the lazy click of a like. “People who received composed communication became less lonely, while people who received one-click communication experienced no change in loneliness,” Burke tells me. So, you should inform your friend in writing how charming her son looks with Harry Potter cake smeared all over his face, and how interesting her sepia-toned photograph of that tree-framed bit of skyline is, and how cool it is that she’s at whatever concert she happens to be at. That’s what we all want to hear. Even better than sending a private Facebook message is the semi-public conversation, the kind of back-and-forth in which you half ignore the other people who may be listening in. “People whose friends write to them semi-publicly on Facebook experience decreases in loneliness,” Burke says.

On the other hand, non-personalized use of Facebook—scanning your friends’ status updates and updating the world on your own activities via your wall, or what Burke calls “passive consumption” and “broadcasting”—correlates to feelings of disconnectedness. It’s a lonely business, wandering the labyrinths of our friends’ and pseudo-friends’ projected identities, trying to figure out what part of ourselves we ought to project, who will listen, and what they will hear. According to Burke, passive consumption of Facebook also correlates to a marginal increase in depression.

Not surprisingly, I am a very active user and feel that FB has significantly enhanced my life and feelings of social connectedness.  I have a number of real-world relationships that I know are better than they otherwise would be because they are enhanced and cultivated via FB.  I also know a lot of people who are just lurking as passive users.  Clear message: get active or just get off FB.

I’m sure somebody’s looked at it, but I also wonder about the relationship with extroversion/introversion.  I’m an extrovert who loves FB and my wife is an introvert who loves FB.  I suspect extroverts use FB more (definitely fits the bill for the most active friends in my feed), but that it is not quite the clear relationship many would think.  Anyway, the whole article is definitely worthy your time.

Photo of the day

Well, meant to do this Sunday for the the 100th anniversary of the Titanic’s sinking, but here it is a couple days late.  Nice set of Titanic photos at the big picture.

In this April 10, 1912 photo the Titanic leaves Southampton, England. The tragic sinking of the Titanic nearly a century ago can be blamed, some believe, on low grade rivets that the ship’s builders used on some parts of the ill-fated liner. (Associated Press)

Not long after the movie came out and piqued my interest I did read a terrific book on the matter.   First published in 1955, Walter Lord’s  A Night to Remember remains a classic account of the sinking.  It’s a gripping, chilling, and highly informative read.  If the 100th anniversary has piqued your interest, give this book a try.

Photo of the day

Wow, great set of “a collection of kisses” via Alan Taylor.  Really hard to choose just one.  Ahhh, I’ll just go political:

Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta (left), assigned to the amphibious dock landing ship USS Oak Hill, kisses her partner Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlalic Snell, following the ship’s return to homeport after a three-month deployment in the Caribbean, in Virginia Beach, Virginia, on December 21, 2011. History was made on a Virginia Beach pier on Wednesday when the two women sailors, one just home from 80 days at sea, became what was believed to be the first same-sex couple to share the Navy’s traditional first kiss.(Reuters/U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Joshua Mann)

And heck, I’m feeling very Mad Men this week, and the season 5 premiere was entitled, “A Little Kiss” so here’s an added bonus:

 

Photo of the day

Mad Men comes back tonight!

Is it wrong for me to admit I have a crush on Don Draper?

Boombox Nation

Fasted adopted gadget of the last 50 years?  Color TV?  Cell phone?  CD player?  Nope.  It’s the boombox.  Via Alexis Madrigal in the Atlantic:

It’s worth noting that all five of the fastest-adopted technologies were for the consumption of entertainment not communication or production of media.

Ah, the good old days.  I thought my dual cassette (!) boombox was so cool.   And, of course, without the boombox, we could’ve never had this:

The Wire Bracket

Big Steve has kept pushing me to address this Bracket for Wire characters put together by the folks at Grantland.  It’s pretty cool, but given the depth of Big Steve’s analysis, he’s clearly got more free time than me these days.  Steve breaks down the whole bracket.

In my case, I’ll simply select the characters I found to be most compelling from each.  My final four is: Prop Joe, Stringer Bell, Chris Partlow, and my #6 seed darkhorse, Cedric Daniels.  My next four would be Bubbles, D’Angelo, Carcetti, and Boadie.

Photo of the day

Friend just posted this on FB.  Love it.

Han Solo, Darth Vader, Chewbacca, Leia, Luke and R2D2

The Best album you never heard

Sorry, for posting to be a little slower.  You can blame my attendance last night at a Jeff Mangum show in Chapel Hill.  You’ve probably never heard of Mangum, or his former band, Neutral Milk Hotel, but he/they are responsible for one of my all-time favorite albums that chances are you’ve never heard of.   Here’s my favorite track from In the Aeroplane over the Sea, “Holland, 1945″

As Neutral Milk Hotel was having it’s greatest success over a decade ago, Mangum “snapped” as he put it last night, and completely left the music scene.  Thus, the fact that he is back touring after all these years led to some pretty excited fans and is an NPR-worthy story.  Anyway, last night he performed a mostly solo set that was a simply amazing performance.  I feel quite lucky that I was able to see him.

The Call

I haven’t recommended a work of fiction in a while (and I’ve been frustrated on several acclaimed works of recent fiction in a row), so I wanted to put in a plug for The Call by Yannick Murphy.  It’s told from the first-person journal of a Vermont country vet who records each call he goes out on (hence the title), but uses these veterinary entries to also reflect on his life, especially his search for the person who nearly killed his son in a hunting accident.  It was just super engaging and very readable and a very nice change of pace from your standard narrative.  Definitely think about giving it a try.

Photo of the day

Okay, these are just awesome.  A series of movie posters that take fairly recent vintage movies and reimagine the posters from a different period in time.  If you are a movie fan, definitely check them all out.  My favorite is the Avatar poster (because I cannot resist William Shatner):

Movie prices

Interesting post by Derek Thompson discussing the fact that all movies are priced the same.  Doesn’t really make a lot of economic sense when you think about it:

Like tens of millions of Americans, I have paid money to see Mission: Impossible, which made $130 million in the last two weeks, and I have not paid any money to see Young Adult, which has made less than $10 million over the same span. Nobody is surprised or impressed by the discrepancy. The real question is: If demand is supposed to move prices, why isn’t seeing Young Adult much cheaper than seeing Mission: Impossible?

There’s a lot of interesting discussion of dynamic pricing in a movie theater context and 5 suggestions on why we nonetheless have uniform pricing.  I found these two most interesting:

3) Price can repel as easily as it attracts, because it’s a signal of quality. If you’re a theater showing one movie for $6, one movie for $10, and another for $12, perhaps fewer people will see the $6 movie because they assume it’s garbage.

4) Cheaper tickets lead to higher policing costs. I’m a cheapskate, so I might buy a ticket to see cheap, cheap Iron Lady and sneak into Sherlock Holmes. This would create a fascinating incentive for art-house studios to release smaller, cheaper films the same weekend as blockbusters, knowing that thousands of canny consumers might buy fake tickets to their show to sneak into the more expensive blockbuster.

Would be interesting to see highly-monitored movie theaters.  Though, shouldn’t cost that much to simply station an usher at each auditorium.  Though not particularly related to this main discussion, I was quite intrigued by this chart of average weekly attendance through the year.  Not coincidentally, I talked to a bunch of people this week who had seen more than their fair share of movies recently.

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