In the hands of a lesser creator, the gee-whiz set—not to mention the news itself—could dominate the show. But placing the series in the recent past makes the news a backdrop to the human story Sorkin wants to tell. “I like writing romantically and idealistically but still having one foot in the world we live in,” he said. “So a show that took place in a newsroom felt like all those things could live together. But I want to be very clear—we’re not doing the news, and the show isn’t about the news. It’s about the people who are doing the news.

“I really like workplace shows,” he continued. “I like creating workplace families, and writing about people who are very good at what they do, and less good at everything else.”

That’s what made The West Wing and Sports Night great — they weren’t about politics or sports, they were about people.

Monica Hesse for the Washington Post on the country’s granite countertop obsession:

“It’s very hip. It has green and rust,” Joyce says, which brings out the cherry in the cabinets. It has a name: Crema Bordeaux. Anywhere in the world, granite of this color is called Crema Bordeaux, just like anywhere in the world, an Ikea Poang chair is an Ikea Poang chair. “Just look at it.”

It looks — it looks like granite. It looks like lovely granite, but granite is in the eye of the beholder, and the unique characteristics of one’s own granite are not immediately apparent to a newcomer. One’s own granite sings a special siren song. All around the country, couples leave parties and get in their cars and say to each other, “I’m so glad we went with the Santa Cecilia instead of the Kashmir Gold.”

Joyce pauses. She looks concerned.

“I would be more comfortable,” she says, “if we were talking about something that was important.”

I’ve started watching a lot of House Hunters recently, and the number of couples who dismiss a kitchen without granite countertops outright is sort of astounding. They take one look at the tile, or the laminate, and just look so disappointed.

What really worried me was a more basic question: To truly love music, did you have to discover it as part of the normal and natural rebellion and establishment of your own identity? Did you have to be able to claim it as your own? Are things different now that fathers — particularly the Brooklyn variety — are more likely to stay MP3-playing, blog-browsing guys in hoodies than they are to become remote presences in wing-backed chairs?

via Pop Loser

Next time you want to introduce someone to Star Wars for the first time, watch the films with them in this order: IV, V, II, III, VI

Notice something? Yeah, Episode I is gone.

His case is sound. I haven’t watched Star Wars in years — mostly because the thought of it is just too painful — but this makes me want to give the DVDs another spin.

via Merlin Mann

In America’s rough streets, there are four forms of currency—cash, sex, drugs, and bicycles. Of those, only one is routinely left outside unattended.

Symmes deliberately allowed four of those bikes to be stolen in an attempt to track the thieves using a GPS. He could have just used the Dutch method to avoid having your bike stolen: drive a beater and lock it up with a huge-ass chain.

While in the movie Grandpa mentions that his story is “The Princess Bride, by S. Morgenstern,” Goldman’s book really explores that notion. The full title of the novel is The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure. Goldman, he writes of himself in the book’s lengthy preamble, didn’t write The Princess Bride; S. Morgenstern did. He’s a legendary Florinese author, and his original take on the story was an epic tale, the published, long out-of-print version of which gigantic and extremely long, from which Goldman edited to present his book, or as he calls it “the good parts.” Goldman also details how he hoped the gift of the Morgenstern volume would please his loathsome son.

Of course, none of this is true. Goldman wrote the only Princess Bride there ever was. Morgenstern isn’t real, Florin isn’t real, and Goldman never even had a son.

Billy was connected to neighborhood but he wasn’t really part of it. He lived in a small apartment in the back of the building and spent a lot of time hanging out on the stoop and playing pool in the tavern across the street. He knew everybody. The way Billy saw it, someone breaking into the building was an attack on all of us and it could not go unpunished. Something had to be done. The neighborhood had to understand that the building — his building, where he once told me he had $20,000 cash hidden away somewhere in case he ever needed to leave town for good — was off limits. Billy explained all this to me out in the hallway. He said he had a pretty good idea who robbed us but he had to go talk to some people.

This is why you don’t fuck with Philadelphians. They take it personally.

Watch Arcade Fire on PBS. See more from Austin City Limits.

It’s a great show all around, but the transition from “Month of May” to “Rebellion (Lies)” is awfully good.

Of the 5,000 magazine and newspaper iPad apps we’ve evaluated for McPheters & Co.’s iMonitor service since April 2010, far too many simply do not work well.

In the summer of 2010, about 45% of the apps we evaluated revealed significant malfunctions.

The primary iPad magazine I read is The New Yorker. The app has gotten significantly better over time, but it’s still crashes too often, and still — amazingly — doesn’t allow for downloading issues in the background. This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if Newsstand background downloading always worked. If I could read the entirety of each issue in Instapaper, I would.