1. “AT&T Takes the Blame, Even for the iPhone’s Faults”
“When I set about looking for independent data, however, to confirm the superior performance of Verizon’s network, I was astonished to discover that I had managed to get things exactly wrong. Despite the well-publicized problems in New York and San Francisco, AT&T seems to have the superior network nationwide.”
2. “Legal Battles Over E-Book Rights to Older Books”
“Backlist titles, which continue to be reprinted long after their initial release, are crucial to publishing houses because of their promise of lucrative revenue year after year. But authors and agents are particularly concerned that traditional publishers are not offering sufficient royalties on e-book editions, which they point out are cheaper for publishers to produce. Some are considering taking their digital rights elsewhere, which could deal a financial blow to the hobbled publishing industry.”
3. “Serious Music? He Loves It. No, Seriously.”
“Orchestras, opera houses and other musical institutions engage in a sometimes desperate-seeming search for relevance in a society that has increasingly marginalized serious music. For the Philharmonic the involvement of a major figure from popular culture is like gold.”
4. “Women in the Seats but Not Behind the Camera”
“I’m not talking about those buff babes who pop up in adolescent fantasies, licking their lips as they lock and load; I’m talking about movies made for and with women. I’m also talking about movies directed by women.”
5. “Alternate World, Alternate Technology”
“Maybe we won’t have 14-year-old girls going back to see it four times, but it’s definitely a movie for women.”
6. “Tiger Woods and the Perils of Modern Celebrity”
“‘The very agency which first makes the celebrity in the long run inevitably destroys him,’ Mr. Boorstin wrote in 1961. ‘He will be destroyed, as he was made, by publicity. The newspapers make him, and they unmake him.’”
7. “Be Careful What You Fish For”
“So an urgent search is underway in Chicago for sightings of the silvery-gray fish with low-set eyes, the sort that even a scientist here described, somewhat unscientifically, as ‘an exceedingly ugly fish.’”
“The government is increasingly monitoring Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites for tax delinquents, copyright infringers and political protesters.”
“What is it that makes people think that a same-sex couple living next door would defile or taint their own marriage when they don’t think that, let’s say, some flaky heterosexual living next door would taint their marriage? At some level, disgust is still operating.”
10. “The 9th Annual Year in Ideas”
“Once again, The Times Magazine looks back on the past year from our favored perch: ideas. Like a magpie building its nest, we have hunted eclectically, though not without discrimination, for noteworthy notions of 2009 — the twigs and sticks and shiny paper scraps of human ingenuity, which, when collected and woven together, form a sort of cognitive shelter, in which the curious mind can incubate, hatch and feather. Unlike birds, we can also alphabetize. And so we hereby present, from A to Z, the most clever, important, silly and just plain weird innovations we carried back from all corners of the thinking world.”
