The Entroporium

As an old print hand, the collapse of the magazine business model has been a sad thing to observe and play a small part in.  The typical big US title – think something you’d pick up at the airport or (tellingly) from a waiting area –has staked its business for decades on printing & distributing [...]

With all the fuss over the empty luxury seats at the new Yankee Stadium, I was mildly surprised to find something similar happening in my own backyard.  At Sunday’s A’s-Rays game at the Oakland Coliseum, all the ingredients for a great day at the ballyard were in place: sunny April weather, last year’s AL champions [...]

Quaker Oats, one of America’s great venerable supermarket products, staged a complete relaunch of its brand over the last two months.  The campaign has won kudos both for its general positivity in these otherwise dark times – sick of bailout-themed ads yet? – but also for the way that it reframes oats as a “power [...]

Wired gave it a 9/10 review, but I absolutely hated Dan Kennedy’s Rock On.  Based on Wired’s write-up, I was excited to find an unread review copy sitting in our New York office.  Perfect travel book, right?  Took it on the plane and hated every minute of it, except possibly for the explication of Jewel’s [...]

Here is another lost piece of post-war Americana – the wacky inventor entrepreneur. Richard Knerr was one of the founders of Wham-O, which introduced the Hula Hoop, the SuperBall and the Frisbee, among other things. The only place you’ll see this kind of guy today is on late night infomercials – or getting ready to [...]

Back in June, the Supreme Court issued its decision invoking Brown v Board Of Education to end racial quota systems in Louisville and Seattle public schools. Regardless of where you stand on this issue, legal support of diversity is a an assumptive underpinning of our lives that anyone born from 1965 forward has had to [...]

MP3 – John Adams: On The Transmigration Of Souls (34.4 MB) http://entroporium.com/mp3/01%20On%20the%20Transmigration%20of%20souls.mp3 From Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul: Ours is a time of connection. All must be touched. All touch corrupts. All must be corrupted. Foreign Policy: The Day Nothing Much Changed [I]f you look closely at the trend lines since 9/11, what is remarkable is how [...]

Ars Technica posted an interesting article on US soldiers’ use of personal technology in Iraq. It brings to mind a number of questions about not just how Americans look to the less-developed world, but also about the ability to keep troop discipline and our operations under wraps. And that’s just the start. In a world where copyright violation is considered a serious problem and child labor is often used to make “Frauda” knock-off bags, is it really appropriate for our military to be shopping for bootleg DVDs in the local markets, encouraging that kind of commerce?

“During a visit to Graceland, the Memphis home of Elvis Presley, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi sang a few famous lines of his musical hero’s songs.”