The new site, designed to be cleaner, with new typefaces, will be based on the WordPress publishing system. It is expected to be easier to navigate for mobile users — among the fastest-growing segments of the readership.
The New Yorker is one of my top 3 favorite publications in the world, and I’m very excited they’ll be using WP for their next chapter.
One of the most surprising performances I saw at the North Sea Jazz festival was a French-Lebanese trumpet player named Ibrahim Maalouf. He plays a trumpet with a special additional fourth valve — three is standard — that allows him to more easily play Arabic maqams or scales with quarter tone and three quarter tone intervals along with equal temperament western ones, like Don Ellis. He also has a way of playing that sounds most like singing in his inflections and vibrato.
This is the best video I could find of one song he did called “Beirut,” and I’m amazed it only has 475 views. It’s worth 12 minutes out of your day, especially when it amps up at the end.
The audience on Saturday went totally bonkers, and the band did some even wilder songs to close including with jazz bagpipe (gaita?), which reminded me of Cristina Pato. Here’s a video of a similar end, but it’s a much more subdued crowd:
Amazing music, and also a good reminder of the power of a live performance, where a great artist can feed off the audience and vice versa. I wouldn’t mind going to a few more jazz shows where people are unafraid to hoot and holler and move a bit.
If you ever have a chance to see Ibrahim Maalouf live, I recommend it. It looks like he uses WordPress for his site, too, which makes him doubly cool.
Nick Hanauer advocates for $15 minimum wage in The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats. He was the first non-family investor in Amazon.com, and as he puts it, a “zillionaire.”
The factory model of work is dead, but its vestiges still haunt modern-day information workers from the giant companies all the way down to startups and bosses who blindly follow models of how things have been done before rather than reimagining how we work.
It should not matter what hours you work or where you’re [working] from. What matters is how you communicate and what you get done. It’s a waste of the natural resources of time and energy to commute; when we break the shackles of what looks like work versus what actually drives value, 90% of the cost and space of an office and management will disappear. We will manage by trust and measuring output, rather than the easier task of tallying input.
