Links, October 2010

Constructive

An instant xkcd classic.

Oct. 26, 2010 humor

All Programs Considered

Bill McKibben:

About one in ten Americans tune in to public radio each week; if you landed in a spaceship someplace in America searching for thoughtful and nonpartisan culture, your first stop would be the public radio stations that usually show up below 92 on the FM dial. […]

And yet very little gets written about public radio.

(via @walter_biggins)

Oct. 22, 2010 radio

How to Have an Idea

A semi-sort of comic by Frank Chimero.

Oct. 18, 2010 creativity ideas

Kindle Singles

Today, Amazon is announcing that it will launch “Kindle Singles”—Kindle books that are twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book.

Love it. Great opportunities here, especially for long-form journalism. With digital text, there’s no need to shoehorn stories into legacy categories. That’s no excuse to eschew editing—a tighter story is always a better one, in ink or pixels—but it does allow for richer pieces: what would have been a stretched-thin book condenses into a powerful long read; a magazine narrative, begging for twice the words, develops fully.

I haven’t read The Accidental Billionaires, but Orson Scott Card did:

Mezrich faced a nearly insurmountable difficulty in writing the story of the founding of Facebook. After all his research, he had about fifty pages worth of story, and that’s not long enough for a book.

But it is long enough for a Single.

Oct. 12, 2010 ebooks kindle publishing

Chokeville

Sundry tales of awesome adventure by Joshua Allen.

Oct. 11, 2010 storytelling

Hunter S. Thompson’s Vancouver Sun Application

From 1958:

And don’t think that my arrogance is unintentional: it’s just that I’d rather offend you now than after I started working for you.

One of my favorite writers.

Oct. 2, 2010 huntersthompson journalism writing