CantBlogTooBusy is a tumblelog.

“Yuppie,” like “hipster,” is a word that is as enraging in its overgenerality as it is guaranteed to be instantly understood by everyone. Both of these maddening words also have value due to the fact that those who best fit the description are those most likely to object to the use of these words.

Hamilton Nolan (via beekeeperssociety)

That’s because we're connoisseurs of both, able to detect gradations in each much the way Eskimos differentiate types of snow.

(via flowisaconstruct)

Before 1969, stories in The Magazine had no bylines. There’s a single authorial voice, the voice of The Magazine, omniscient in its power observation, a fullness of perspective that transcends individual insight to bring the hefty weight on an institution. It works to much effectiveness.

But then 1969 happens. The Magazine catches up to the culture… Voices that are too institutional and too authoritative are suspect. Institutions inherently are co-opted by the immoral status quo, all slightly to massively oppressive, all involved in the insane desire of the Establishment…

The Magazine, to its credit, adopts positions throughout the 60s that start to border on the radical, at least compared with those of its competitor, Brand X. It is, as the editors see it, a time when smart business strategy and positive social policy converge.

In practice, though, it is undermining the labor movement. The Magazine writers don’t have a union. The writers live with the hypocrisy until 1971. The writers go on strike.

It is a brief moment in history: magazine writers will never have the chance to go on strike again.

The writers and reporters win an important concession: the byline.

The institutional voice of the magazine is never the same again.

… and then the writers and reporters go Twitter!

The above is an abbreviated history of Newsweek magazine from Michael Hastings’ forthcoming novel, The Last Magazine. It’s one of my favorite parts.

The progression in these fifty years – from writers absorbed into a brand to writers becoming bigger brands than the outlets they write for – is interesting to me, not least of all because those anonymous Newsweek writers in the early 1960s probably all got pensions.

This is something I tried to explain to Jamie Mottram when his post about Jay Glazer and Twitter got me thinking. But Mike, per usual, brought a lot more historical specificity to bear than I could.

They told us that she rolled her own tobacco — Kite brand, in a green pouch — but that she also sometimes smoked a corncob pipe. She carried a pistol under her apron, a long-barreled “old type” of pistol. Robin stood and up and did an impersonation of her locking up the house at night. Staggering stiffly around in the nightgown, with the long pistol dangling in her hand. She would sing while doing the dishes and cleaning. Her house had no running water. She didn’t trust banks and kept her money in the outhouse, under the planks. She liked to hunt possums and chopped her own wood. She was “almost a man,” they said. Had I heard that she used to jump trains?

John A. Frascotti, the chief marketing officer at Hasbro, pointed out other reasons for these toys’ growing popularity.
“It’s the coming of age of the Title IX mom, who grew up as an athlete in her own right,” he said, referring to the gender equity law. “And men, who have grown up in that environment, who have daughters, want their children, both boys and girls, to have equal opportunity to play.”

I remember the last thing I ever made of Lego, far later into adolescence than I should admit. It was a robot that, thanks to double-jointed hinges, could continually reconfigure itself without being disassembled. And in this sense it was anti-Lego, capable of being remade without being unmade. I knew that it was the most I could ever do in the medium, and the end of an era. It drifted back into that bucket.

A quarter-century later I saw the same bucket opened and overturned by a young nephew. And there, like a time traveler, was this same robot. Mostly just its legs, standing Ozymandias-like in a pile of bricks. I reached for it, but not faster than my nephew, who, recognizing an accretion of especially useful pieces, instantly dissolved it with his hands.