Not every show can make the ad the story and still be so profoundly meaningful.

Emily Nussbaum is one of the best people writing about television, and in a recent New Yorker piece on the relationship between shows and advertisers, she examines the faustian deal between creators and the brands that want into their shows.

There’s a common notion that there’s good and bad integration. The “bad” stuff is bumptious—unfunny and in your face. “Good” integration is either invisible or ironic, and it’s done by people we trust, like Stephen Colbert or Tina Fey. But it brings out my inner George Trow. To my mind, the cleverer the integration, the more harmful it is. It’s a sedative designed to make viewers feel that there’s nothing to be angry about, to admire the ad inside the story, to train us to shrug off every compromise as necessary and normal.

She acknowledges the need to pay for art somehow (“Perhaps this makes me sound like a drunken twenty-two-year-old waving a battered copy of Naomi Klein’s “No Logo.””), but on a deeper level, asks if we’ve given up too much of the art’s integrity in the process.

Do you perceive product placement as it happens? Does you perceive it as a violation? A distraction? Or an easily ignorable part of watching television?

Understanding that the creation of entertainment, and TV in particular, has to be paid for somehow, is this an acceptable trade-off?

If so, what do you think the effects are on you as a viewer?

If not, what other arrangement would you prefer between you as a viewer and the makers of television (and potentially, willing sponsors) to finance the production of the shows you enjoy?

Early Kindles succeeded at being both revolutionary and revolting at once.

In Aeon magazine, writer Craig Mod reflects on his initial enthusiasm for digital books, and how that enthusiasm has cooled, sending him back to the physical versions for a whole host of reasons.

It was an incredible user experience, full of perceived value, delightful in its absurdity. Most importantly, using the device in these ways felt like an investment in the future of books and reading. Each Kindle book I bought was a vote with the wallet: yes – digital books! Every note I took, every underline I made was contributing to a vast lattice collection of reader knowledge that would someday manifest in ways beautiful or interesting or otherwise yet unknowable. This I believed. And implicit in this belief was a trust – a trust that Amazon would innovate, move the experience forward unpredictably, meaningfully, and delightfully. This belief – that Amazon was going to teach the old guard new tricks – kept me buying and reading and engaging.

…

From 2009 to 2013, every book I read, I read on a screen. And then I stopped. …It was a stark reminder that pliancy of media invites experimentation. When media is too locked down, too rigid, when it’s too much like a room with most of the air sucked out of it, stale and exhausting, the exploration stops. And for the intersection of books and digital there’s still much exploration to be had.

In his case, it’s not the lack of willingness or enthusiasm for the idea that has turned him off. It’s the lack of momentum on exploring even newer possibilities.

What differences have you perceived in your digital reading vs digital reading, in terms of reading experience, or how you engage with the material?

What are the most meaningful strengths of each format? Do any of these make you a die-hard advocate for one or the other?

If in another 20 years they were to stop physical book printing outright, what would you miss most? What would we lose as a culture?

Putting your startup idea in cartoon form is guaranteed to make it seem friendlier.

Fast Company takes a look at why the utopian idea of borrowing things you only use rarely (tools, bikes, etc) through the internet never really took off. Today’s “sharing economy” businesses like Uber or Airbnb are actually more traditional pay-for-service than anything to do with sharing, but somehow the most pure common-good businesses fell by the wayside. This quote is particularly on point:

There was just one problem. As Adam Berk, the founder of Neighborrow, puts it: “Everything made sense except that nobody gives a shit. They go buy [a drill]. Or they just bang a screwdriver through the wall.”

Makes you wonder if it’s not the idea, but the people who are the problem. If we can’t be bothered to sign up or use simple web services like this that theoretically both save us money and helps communities feel more neighborly…

Is the sharing economy built on a flawed premise of cooperation?

Are we too self-involved for this to work at all, or is there hope that going about it slightly differently could make sharing more appealing?

At the root of it all: do you even want to be closer to your neighbors, or feel a stronger sense of community, or is that an old-fashioned ideal?

“I will not waiver in my belief: that my beliefs matter than the beliefs of others.”

The New Yorker puts a cap on the Kim Davis affair with a simple question-slash-concern for what this whole messy business means going forward:

The controversy in Davis’s county may now end without another confrontation (or incarceration). If the marriages are valid with her deputies’ signature, then that will probably defuse the situation. But the principle is still a troubling one—that religious belief carries with it a shopping-cart approach to citizenship. You can choose some obligations but not others, while the legislators and judges figure out which ones are really mandatory. It’s a recipe for further division in an already polarized society—and the prospects, in Kentucky and elsewhere, are for more conflict, not less.

My personal opinion aside (if you must know, I believe the whole thing could have been easily avoided without legal action, but the fuss did bring out an awful lot of idiocy, generally), the bigger issues do provide room for debate.

Whether you agree or not with Kim Davis in this instance, should people have the right to be excused from performing specific job tasks because of personal belief?

Is that answer the same when they are holding elected office?

In the balance between a personal freedom issue and a separation of church and state issue, which takes priority?

An altogether different sort of prisoner’s dilemma.

A bit late to this one, but FiveThirtyEight did a piece on using statistical modeling to aid in prison sentencing that will definitely spark debate.

There are more than 60 risk assessment tools in use across the U.S., and they vary widely. But in their simplest form, they are questionnaires — typically filled out by a jail staff member, probation officer or psychologist — that assign points to offenders based on anything from demographic factors to family background to criminal history. The resulting scores are based on statistical probabilities derived from previous offenders’ behavior. A low score designates an offender as “low risk” and could result in lower bail, less prison time or less restrictive probation or parole terms; a high score can lead to tougher sentences or tighter monitoring.

The risk assessment trend is controversial. Critics have raised numerous questions: Is it fair to make decisions in an individual case based on what similar offenders have done in the past? Is it acceptable to use characteristics that might be associated with race or socioeconomic status, such as the criminal record of a person’s parents? And even if states can resolve such philosophical questions, there are also practical ones: What to do about unreliable data? Which of the many available tools — some of them licensed by for-profit companies — should policymakers choose?

It’s almost as if they’re stealing my schtick right there in the article. But there’s an overriding question I think is the most interesting angle.

Is it inherently wrong to sentence people on predicted behavior, even if using this more mathematical model is a net positive for society?

If we get a certain percent of punitive imprisonments “wrong” now under the subjective sentencing of judges, but this system works “better” overall, which is more unfair?