All Thoughts Being Equal

So the lots of people (especially on the Internet) got mad at a video advertisement recently. Fair enough; I watched the ad in question and it's cringe-inducing, clearly the product of too many marketing meetings and too many focus groups from not the right demographics. But almost immediately after seeing the first think-piece headlines, a more troubling question came to my mind. See, the narrative was overwhelmingly "the company really dropped the ball with this ad," "the company totally misunderstood the current political climate with this ad"... generally this ad was disappointing . But unspoken seemed to be an  agreement that there is a hypothetical "good advertisement." The question, then, that came to mind: Do people actually see advertising as a worthwhile element of their lives? Apparently, yes; they jump at the chance to extol the virtues of "radvertising" but are just as quick to shame "badvertising." From the Gawke...

Amazon just built its own physical bookstore in the University Distric of Seattle. What a twist! So why do I think it's pointless for Amazon, and indeed any "corporate" bookseller, to operate a physical storefront? And why do I think that the only worthwhile brick-and-mortar bookstores are the "anything and everything" used bookstores? Simply put: serendipity versus suggestion. You may think that my ideas about the philosophy of bookstores are unorthodox, but if you agree, you might also like... Recently New York Times Magazine ran a story about the fascinating gutter-market for ultra-cheap used books sold on Amazon.com. You know, all those books that are priced at $0.01 (+$3.99 shipping)? Turns out they're often rescued from the landfill—sometimes literally. Sort of like donations to a food bank, libraries and thrift stores often get far more donations than they can properly deal with: [Thriftbooks] , along with several other enormous used-book-sellin...

I.   My friend Jon Bash is a very talented musician/composer , so it's safe to assume that he thinks very seriously about music in general. Recently he posted this article ( "How Popular Music's Lyrics Perpetuate American Idiocy" ) from a site called The Anti-Media, about a study examining the "reading level" of Billboard Top 40 songs. Stories about the study were passed around other places too, including The Guardian ( "Hip hop ain't top: new study reveals reading levels behind music lyrics" ) and The Onion 's A.V. Club ( "Popular songs are dumb and only getting dumber, says dumb study" ), with varying levels of skepticism and/or snark. Before getting in to any substantive discussion, however, I will first make fun of The Anti-Media for writing a really dumb article. Claire Bernish (Twitter handle: @ subversive_pen — Twitter bio: a Julian Assange quote) opens her turd-de-force with the following incredible paragraph-and...

I went to my first Drunken Philosophy meetup at the behest of friend and fellow blogger Kayla (one half of Crows Against Murder dot Tumblr dot com ), and it was really great. One of the more interesting questions, not coincidentally posed by her, involved the nature of art. This is a topic over-ripe with potential, but we eventually digressed from Kayla's initial question ("When an artist makes better art over time, what exactly is the thing that's getting better?") to the nuanced categorization question of What is Art? Specifically, we were interested in figuring out what distinguishes Art from Propaganda and Craft. And for that we asked whether beer brewing is an Art. We agreed that it is not, at least not what most people think of as beer brewing. When a brewer makes a beer, they are aiming for a specific taste-sensation (hereafter "taste")—this is a mental experience that is obviously tied to an external physical stimulus. That is, if a brewer want...