Over The Edge – Dan Rosenbaum's random musings

GOP is Rushing toward disaster

Excellent analysis — by the NYTimes Timothy Egan– of the damage Rush Limbaugh is doing to the Republican Party. (Kudos, too, to the home page editors at the Times for putting a link to it at the top of the page for so long today.) Polling has found Limbaugh, a self-described prescription-drug addict who sees […]

Filed Under: Politics

Why musicians do what we do

I’d never heard of the guy, but Karl Paulnack is apparently director of the music division at the Boston Conservatory. This talk is his welcome address to parents of new students. Bulls-eye. Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a […]

Is the flexible touch screen here?

The folks at E-Ink — who make the clear high-contrast screen for the Amazon Kindle — appear to be prototyping the first flexible computer touch-screen. You know: the digital paper that’s been hyped since forever. This article from Technology Review gives a neat overview of portable flat-screen technology, and why it’s so hard to combine […]

Wanna buy a car? Please?

Here’s a compilation of aerial pictures of unsold cars piling up around the world. I’d imagine that a lot of similar pics could be made to illustrate robust commerce. But the telling ones for me are the cars parked around test tracks — because that means development work has stopped, too. The sudden pileup of […]

Computer Shopper Goes Online-Only

You could have seen this one coming a mile away. Computer Shopper, once the biggest and one of the most profitable magazines in the United States, announced today that it’s going online-only. The days of 1000-page tabloid-sized issues are long past; Shopper went to a slick paper and normal trim years ago. Back in The […]

RIP, Rocky Mountain News

It’s not news anymore when a newspaper closes. But it’s especially sad that Scripps has killed the Rocky Mountain News. Today was its last edition. (I’m not going to link to the RMN, because God only knows how long the links would be live.) For many years, it was the strongest newspaper between the Mississippi […]

Newspapers are fine. Their owners, however…

Fascinating piece in AdAge this week. It turns out that newspapers, as a business, are doing quite well — kicking out 10 to 20 percent returns, which ain’t chopped liver. On the other hand, the companies that own newspapers are debt-laden swine. They took on too much debt in fat times, as national chains swept […]

MPA cans annual magazine conference

One of the more glittery events in the consumer magazine business has its plug pulled for this year. The Magazine Publishers Association has canceled its annual American Magazine Conference. Given that Hachette, AMI and New York all pulled out of the MPA recently, and given that tens of thousands of people got axed in the […]

Public propriety

This may be one for the etiquette mavens among us. Or maybe it’s just a matter of common courtesy. Or cluefulness. The other day, I was flying with my family — myself, my wife, and two 7-year-old boys — from JFK to SFO. I was sitting with one kid, my wife a few rows back […]