From Kate Arthur’s Roundup of Sitcoms:
GHOST WHISPERER Jennifer Love Hewitt sees dead people. Or at least her character, a newlywed, does: she helps ghosts resolve problems that have prevented them from moving to the great beyond. This series takes over the time slot of the canceled “Joan of Arcadia,” as part of CBS’s quest for younger viewers, and while speaking to reporters last spring, Leslie Moonves, the network’s chairman, predicted that “ghosts skew younger than God.” We will see. CBS, Fridays at 8 p.m. (Sept. 23)
Great interview with Chris Whittle on Charlie Rose last night. Chris Whittle is the educator and advocate of private solutions to schools. He has a new book, “Crash Course — Imagining a Better Future for Public Education. Here’s a profile by Jay Mathews about him:
He notes that Edison gives bonuses of $25,000 to $35,000 to principals who show an annual gain in student achievement of more than 10 percent and meet their budget targets. Before this incentive program began, the average Edison school gained about 4 percent a year in student achievement, he says. Since the bonuses program took shape, that gain has nearly doubled to 8 percent.
Creative Commons has a mailing list to ask all the copyright and CC questions that have been pestering you. Also they have a publicly accessible archive.
Alex Ross on how technology has changed recording.
Recording has the unsettling power to transform any kind of music, no matter how unruly or how sublime, into a collectible object, which becomes décor for the lonely modern soul. It thrives on the buzz of the new, but it also breeds nostalgia, a state of melancholy remembrance and, with that, indifference to the present; you can start to feel nostalgic for the opening riff of a new favorite song even before you reach the end. Thomas Mann described the phonograph’s ambiguous enchantments in the “Fullness of Harmony” chapter of “The Magic Mountain,” published in 1924. When a deluxe gramophone arrives at the Berghof sanitarium, it sends mixed messages to the young man who operates it. At times it sings “a new word of love” (shades of Robert Johnson’s “Phonograph Blues”), at times it exudes “sympathy for death.” At the end of the novel, the hero goes marching toward an inferno of trench warfare, obliviously chanting the Schubert tune that the gramophone taught him. These days, he’d be rapping.