Recent blog posts

How much would you pay for KFC?

Now how about if you were living in Gaza?

Fares Akram's piece in the NY Times breaks down one trafficker's modus operandi in obtaining one of America's iconic fast foods:

The French fries arrive soggy, the chicken having long since lost its crunch. A 12-piece bucket goes for about $27 here — more than twice the $11.50 it costs just across the border in Egypt.

And for fast-food delivery, it is anything but fast: it took more than four hours for the KFC meals to arrive here on a recent afternoon from the franchise where they were cooked in El Arish, Egypt, a journey that involved two taxis, an international border, a smuggling tunnel and a young entrepreneur coordinating it all from a small shop here called Yamama — Arabic for pigeon.

I guess no matter what corner of the globe, Colonel Sanders' recipe remains "finger-lickin good." 

(via NY Times)

We expect paintings to be static. Perhaps a card player is sitting in a chair, frozen. Or layered drips of paint that have become dry puddles. We know that the painter’s hand moved when these were made (how fast, we don’t know, but it’s easy to point at Jackson Pollock as a vigorous counterpoint to Paul Cézanne), but the artists knew that the result would be still.

Jazz music, especially if it's from the early 1900s, has this endless aura of romanticism that I can't seem to shake when I hear it. 

In pop culture, the grandeurs of that era are now mainstream gold for producers and storytellers alike, as the pageantry of pre-recession lifestyles have turned into the backbone of television dramas like "Boardwalk Empire" and films like the recently released Gatsby adaptation.  

Free n Losh's "Where Do They Go" is a derivative of that vein, combining the charms of this period with the modern flair of "trap music." (In case you need a primer on trap music, Urban Dictionary usually does a good job of filling the gaps.)

In summation, it's highly effective "get stuff done" tuneage; the type of track that's bumpable in any office setting because it doesn't hold any obscenities that might make your co-workers nervous, and it carries enough "cool" that your square comrades might even take you for having a "hip" bone. 

Enjoy. 

Follow Anthony on Twitter: @antbrent

THE GOLDEN YEARS, Al Gore, the almost president, has become the ultimate Davos Man, a moral entrepreneur and richer than Mitt Romney. [NY MAG]

PIGSKIN AND PINYIN? Can the NFL plant its flag in China? [Grantland]

STARTED FROM THE BOTTOM  It was a tiny town of farmers, a village where everyone knew everyone and nearly all struggled to make ends meet. But then, a few days before Christmas, they won the largest lottery in the history of Spain. [GQ]

INVENTING BOWIE David Bowie’s art is about style, high and low, and style is a serious business for a museum of art and design. [NY Books]

I DROP MEGATON BOMBS Thirteen years later, Liquid Swords continues to age well and is a stellar case of quality ’90s hip-hop. GZA talks to Wax Poetics about the making of a heralded classic.

Follow Anthony on Twitter: @antbrent

Words from Penelope Trunk's piece in Quartz "If You Want to Succeed, Start a Company Instead of Writing a Resume." 

"I could write a post ten thousand paragraphs long of all the new things people with nonlinear work histories are doing to get jobs.

People use Twitter as a resume, according to the Wall Street Journal, which requires only that you publish ideas, not any sort of academic experience.

Young people are selling stock in themselves—paying out dividends for decades at a time.

Agents represent workers who pick and choose projects that match them rather than signing on for indefinite amounts of time. The Harvard Business Review calls this supertemping. Businessweek calls it going Hollywood.

But here’s the big takeaway. A fundamental shift is taking place, where the path to getting a job is massively circumventing college credentials. And, at the same time, the American public is fed up with the insane debt that college are expecting new grads to take on in order to graduate. (Good essay: How College Ruined My Life.)

If you are not going to school in order to “fit” into the adult world, then why are you going to school? The love of learning, presumably. But school reform pundits are 100% sure that kids will choose to learn if you put no constraints on them. They will just learn what they want. Best example: The MIT program that gave iPads to illiterate kids in Ethiopia, and they taught themselves to use it, program it, and read it in English. No teacher. No curriculum.

The biggest barrier to accepting the radical new nature of the job hunt is the reverberations throughout the rest of life. If you don’t need school for work, and you don’t need school for learning, then all you need school for is so parents can go to work and not worry about taking care of their kids.

It takes bravery to go against the grain. It’s difficult to say that the great learning and the great jobs come from leaning out, doing things in a nonlinear, non standard way, and playing only by the rules that fit your own style for personal learning and growth."

Follow Anthony on Twitter: @antbrent

Saturday, May 04, 2013, 7:00pm
The Public Theater 425 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10003

Americans are way too flippant with their use of the word "hero." Professional sports players, first responders, soldiers, presidents, CEOs, and everyday folks (often doing everyday things) have all been called heroes. The accolade has been watered down so much it has lost all significance. Hero, then, is not a term I use loosely.

History is the object of a construction whose place is formed not in homogenous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by the here-and-now. –Walter Benjamin

Friday, May 03, 2013, 8:30pm
The New School: Tishman Auditorium 66 West 12th St., New York, NY 10011

Caustically witty and sharp-tongued as ever, Fran Lebowitz and A.M. Homes lit up the stage at The New School's Tishman auditorium last night with a candid conversation that ranged in disparate topics from bravery in writing to changes in New York City and in particular, the West Village, to revenge, playing a judge on TV, to teaching, politics and Hurricane Sandy.