Posts Tagged ‘John Hughes’
More Friday!
* This teen is suing the state of Alaska because climate change threatens his home.
* For-Profit Fiasco: California Public Colleges Turn to Web Courses.
Replying to the doubters, one Coursera “financier” told the Times that “monetization is not the most important objective for this business at this point.” What is important, he said, is that “Coursera is rapidly accumulating a body of high-quality content that could be very attractive to universities that want to license it for their own use.” Potential investors should therefore “invest with a very long mind-set.”
The MOOCs were invented by man. They evolved. They rebelled. There are many copies. And they have a plan…
* More than 40 of the world’s 100 most reputable universities and colleges are American, according to the Times Higher Education’s 2013 world reputation ranking of colleges and universities. Just because it’s the envy of the world doesn’t mean we shouldn’t melt it down and sell it for scrap.
* What’s happening at UW-Eau Claire?
* The anti-circumvention section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act threatens to make archivists criminals if they try to preserve our society’s artifacts for future generations.
* Maryland to repeal the death penalty.
* Pot-Hating New York Politician Cited for Having Pot.
* What happens when Game of Thrones runs out of books to adapt?
Links for a Thursday without Joy
Links for a Thursday without joy.
* Don’t forget about him: John Hughes has died.
* The Big Picture visits Hiroshima 64 years ago today.
* Long Vanity Fair profile of Mad Men and Matthew Weiner. Best show on TV. Via Kottke.
“Matt wants real,” said Charlie Collier, president of AMC. For Weiner, Collier continued, “it’s not television; it’s a world.” Perhaps the only other producer as committed to the rules of his imagined universe is George Lucas. “Perfectionism” is a word the show’s writers tossed around when I asked a group of them about working with Weiner. “Fetishism” was another. Alan Taylor, who has directed four episodes of Mad Men, labeled Weiner’s attention to detail “maniacal.” Call it what they will, it is a charge that is largely embraced. “We’re all a little bit touched with the O.C.D.,” Robin Veith, one of the writers, told me, describing how she and her colleagues have researched actual street names and businesses in Ossining, the suburb where Don and Betty live; checked old commuter-train schedules, so that they know precisely which train Don would take to the city; pored over vintage maps to learn which highways he would drive on.
* Towards a four-day work week.
* And Sonia Sotomayor has been confirmed, 68-31, making her the first Latina woman racist on the Supreme Court.