NYT article on AOL-Time Warner Merger

It's no secret that I think about 80% of the New York Times is crap, but they do some really fantastic pieces sometimes.  I'm not the biggest business journalism afficionado, but even I found How the AOL-Time Warner Merger Went So Wrong fascinating.

As long as I'm doing a shout out to the Times, here's another one: Who Knew I Was Not the Father?

Yikes.

According to an article in The Business Insider...

it costs the [New York] Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead.

Here's how we did the math:

According to the Times's Q308 10-Q, the company spends $63 million per quarter on raw materials and $148 million on wages and benefits. We've heard the wages and benefits for just the newsroom are about $200 million per year.

After multiplying the quarterly costs by four and subtracting that $200 million out, a rough estimate for the Times's delivery costs would be $644 million per year.

The Kindle retails for $359.  In a recent open letter, Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis wrote: "We have 830,000 loyal readers who have subscribed to The New York Times for more than two years."  Multiply those numbers together and you get $297 million -- a little less than half as much as $644 million.

And here's the thing: a source with knowledge of the real numbers tells us we're so low in our estimate of the Times's printing costrs that we're not even in the ballpark.

Read the full article here. Although, as I'm looking at it...the Kindle retails for $259 not $359. I know because I just bought a new one. I wonder if any of the other figures are off. Hmmmmm.

Anyhow, a quick note about the slew of book reviews that I posted a week or so ago. I've been taking notes about books I read for a really long time, more systematically as time goes by, but these proto-reviews are scattered all over the place.

A lot of them are really old, and some are probably incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't just finished reading the book in question. Not really written for an audience, which means, ultimately, that they're less useful to me - the person they were written for - years down the road. Live and learn I guess.

Anyhow, my memories of these books aren't fresh so I'm not mucking up the old reviews, just copying them out.

There are so many more to hunt down...but I think a catalogue will be kind of interesting. I'm surprised, for example, that the first reviews I wrote of Sebald's books weren't glowing - he's become one of my favorite authors. In general, the proportion of negative reviews is surprising to me.

ah-hem

Culture11 just published my article on the South Seas Bubble. The subject, one of the world's first stock market crashes in 1720 England, is hopefully fascinating enough to compensate for my rookie writing.

Many thanks go to Conor for the opportunity, and for help with editing. I'm pretty excited about writing more, and better.

Oh, and anyone with any great ideas for articles...I'm listening...

more politics, apparently

When I read this article, "Revealed: Secret plan to keep Iraq under US control," about the US trying to cinch a deal to set up 50 permanent bases in Iraq and ensure that American troops would remain immune from Iraqi law, I wasn't surprised. Same 'ol, same 'ol.

Then I read this article, "US issues threat to Iraq's $50 billion foreign reserves in military deal" and I have to say...I was surprised. Not just that we're using incredibly unfair ultimatums to force Iraq to accept the agreement described in the first article; that's pretty low. I almost thought it was worse that the US Treasury vetoed an Iraqi attempt to switch their assets from dollars to euros, "because it would show lack of confidence in the dollar." Proper stewards don't squander the resources they have commited to protect, and certainly not from such pure self-interest.

The Independent is my new favorite paper.

If you're interested...

Broadsheet at Salon.com has been one of my favorite daily reads for a while - short, bloggy articles about women's issues in the news, whatever they may be.  One of those articles pointed me today to Letters from Johns, and its companion site Letters from Working Girls.

I've been reading some of the letters from Johns, and they are pretty fascinating.  

Oh, so this is what we're fighting for

Hey everyone.

Check out this article from Men's News Daily, "Saving Our Young Men." If you do, make sure to read the comments.

The article is a tirade about how (white) men get the shaft, while women have it too easy. The most interesting thing about it is that the author appears to be completely unaware of the irony: he is championing the cause of men using the traditionally feminine tactics of whining and childish petulance.

Women know - or should know - that they traditionally only had access to these tactics because they are, how you say?, ineffective.

The article itself is...sad, pathetic, easy to dismiss. But the comments. The comments are incredible. Aside from the fact that they are also whiny and complainy and not very manly, every last paragraph is drenched in an intense hatred of women.

Fundamentally, the problem that these men seem to have is that they want all the perks of masculine power and dominance without having to develop the qualities that guaranteed it.

Consider this paragraph, written by the distinguished "metalman":

"Women love to complain about equality, and once they get it, they shout their grrrlll power and independence to the hills. The minute they start earning their big paychecks, they never let you forget it. But time and again, when the bills come, these same women suddenly become mute and helpless. Whenever an unexpected big expense arises, it's the man who picks up the slack. When money gets tight, it's the man who's expected to put in the extra hours. When it's raining heavily, it's the man who's expected to park the car five blocks from the restaurant so that his woman can sit all safe and dry inside the restaurant sipping her cosmopolitan while schmucko walks in a downpour."

You know what he's describing there? He's describing a situation in which the man has all the power. Why does he have all the power? Because he has all the responsibility - he takes the tough jobs and he watches the bottom line. The woman is enjoying an imagined independence - she's got a safety net in case her man leaves, that's all. The truth is, being in charge and having power really sucks, if you're doing a half-decent job at it. Independence is hardship. Freedom is hardship. That's why so many enlightened women are running headlong into the golden cages of stay-at-home mom-dom. Not to speak of Americans who are willing to trade civil liberties for security on a grand scale.

I don't know whether "metalman" wants to be a tyrant (which would make his life easier), or if he just doesn't want the responsibility of being in charge - of taking the traditionally masculine role. What I do know is that he's complaining about doing the right thing.

There really is a crisis of masculinity, but this spineless, sniveling attitude is an example of it - not the solution.

Internet slang.

I was reading Le Monde online today, and I noticed in a sidebar for comments that a reader had been writing, "blah blah blah 2 blah blah blah 2" - and at first, I kept reading this '2' as I would an English '2,' i.e. as 'to'...but this was obviously wrong, so I stopped, sounded out "deux" in my head, and realized: 2 = de.

I know it's not rocket science but I felt a little proud of myself.

Circumcision is anti-sex.

This article in The New York Times led me to this study, Fine touch pressure thresholds in the adult penis.

The relevant conclusions?

The glans of the circumcised penis is less sensitive to fine touch than the glans of the uncircumcised penis. The transitional region from the external to the internal prepuce is the most sensitive region of the uncircumcised penis and more sensitive than the most sensitive region of the circumcised penis. Circumcision ablates the most sensitive parts of the penis.

Oh yeah, and this:

Whether the penis is circumcised or not might also affect coitus. For women, having a male partner with a foreskin increased the duration and comfort of coitus and increased the likelihood of achieving single and multiple orgasms