➻ If you haven’t read Texts Without Contexts, Michiko Kakutani’s piece from last Sunday’s New York Times yet, I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s almost counter to the point of the story to quote an excerpt, but I am going to anyway:

Now, with the ubiquity of instant messaging and e-mail, the growing popularity of Twitter and YouTube, and even newer services like Google Wave, velocity and efficiency have become even more important. Although new media can help build big TV audiences for events like the Super Bowl, it also tends to make people treat those events as fodder for digital chatter. More people are impatient to cut to the chase, and they’re increasingly willing to take the imperfect but immediately available product over a more thoughtfully analyzed, carefully created one. Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite—never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.

Now go read the entire article.

➻ Michael Mace wrote a very lengthy, veritable dissertation on the subject of The future of publishing: Why ebooks failed in 2000, and what that means for 2010. It’s certainly the most in depth analysis of the situation that I’ve read. But, being a lover of short stories, there’s one possibility he raises that really struck me:

Short fiction is a great fit for e-readers because it can be consumed in small bites, and if authors could sell directly to their readers, the revenue could eventually be good enough that people would go back to writing short fiction. Plus it would give e-reader devices a real benefit — content that you can’t get anywhere else.

What’s missing is the marketplace to make that happen. We need the equivalent of an iTunes store for short stories, tied to a mass market tablet device.

➻ strategy + business has a new article up from Edward Tse, adapted from his new book, The China Strategy: Harnessing the Power of the World’s Fastest-Growing Economy.

➻ In a case of one author of one of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time talking to another, The New Yorker has video of James Surowiecki (The Wisdom of Crowds) speaking with Michael Mauboussin (More Than You Know) about “common investment mistakes, how to improve decision-making, and what investors can learn from the recent stock-market woes.”

➻ AN INTERESTING LETTER FROM DAVID MAMET TO THE WRITERS OF THE UNIT ON WHAT MAKES FOR GOOD DRAMATIC WRITING HAS BEEN MAKING ITS WAY AROUND THE INTERNET THIS WEEK.

➻ It quite old now, but I love Nicholas Carr’s Tweet fantasy:

How cool would it have been if Twitter had been invented a couple hundred years ago so our forebears could have used it?

transcendo: RT @emerson new idea: “the making a fact the subject of thought raises it” http://bit.ly/cAhzDL (expand)<----interesting!

His book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, coming out in June, might be my favorite of the year so far.

➻ I was hoping we could end this week talking a little bit about health care reform. (Also, if you could hit me with a hammer, that would be great.) Eschewing the hyperbole and vitriol coming over our public airwaves lately, The Christian Science Monitor‘s Marjorie Kehe put together a fine list of books that could provide ground for a more civil debate, writing “For those hoping to gain a wider grasp of the American healthcare reform debate, here’s a (beginning) reading list. The authors below do not offer common prescriptions, but they do share some lucid analyses of the problem:”

• Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis–And the People Who Pay the Price by Jonathan Cohn, HarperPerennial
• Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer by Shannon Brownlee, Bloomsbury Publishing
• Boomerang: Health Care Reform and the Turn Against Government by Theda Skocpol
• The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care by David Gratzer, Encounter Books
• The Health Care Mess: How We Got Into It and What It Will Take to Get Out by Julius B Richmond & Rashi Fein, Harvard University Press

➻ The GalleyCat reports that LeVar Burton may have Reading Rainbow 2.0 in the works, which I mention only in an cruel attempt to get the original theme song stuck in your head for the next week.

➻ The New York Times‘ Jeffrey Scales put together a very cool audio slide show about W. Eugene Smith and The Jazz Loft Project.

➻ One of the very best 8cr excursions in company history was in NYC two years ago (we were there for our first awards event), when three separate groups of us all converged on the very hard-to-find, practically unmarked Issue Project Room in Brooklyn to see Jonathan Kane.