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Life's Work: Ricky Gervais

You insist on complete creative control, right?

Yes, I’m a complete fascist—and you should be in art. I don’t think I’m the best producer or director or actor in the world, but I know how I want it done. I don’t try to please anyone except myself. If people like what I do, fantastic. If they don’t, that’s good, too. If you start trying to water it down or second-guess, you end up with something so safe and homogenized that a lot of people will like it, but they won’t love it. I’ve always preferred to do something that really moves a million people rather than something that washes over 10 million. The more successful you get, the more hated you are, but you should relish that, because it means you're making a connection. And that’s the point of art.

via hbr.org

Wieters

Stolen from a tumblr.

via hello.typepad.com

It's almost baseball time.

Buzz. Zeitgeist. Electrifying!

I've received so many odd "Thank You" notes from New Yorker subscribers begging me to hire Malcolm Gladwell as well. I should do it. Malcolm is the one writer in English language who perfectly embodies my theories of multiple points of entry in his prose—you never have to look past the subhead to know what he'll say. Soon I'll have him.

via www.observer.com

The Observer is good again?!

Duke and the Charlie Brown Coefficient

Duke and the Charlie Brown Coefficient:

With Duke Snider's passing this weekend, there's been a lot of discussion of the three great New York centerfielders of the 1950s - the famous 'Willie, Mickey, and the Duke' trio. And with good cause: Snider was a great player who, for better or worse, will always be tied to those two all-time greats. The fact that he wasn't the equal of Mays or Mantle is no blemish on his fine career.

There is at least one other metric that we can use to compare the three centerfielders that I think many have neglected. We'll call it the 'Charlie Brown Coefficient.'

As you recall, the Peanuts comic strip was published daily from October 1950 until February 2000. In that time, nearly 18,000 strips were drawn, with a full 10% featuring baseball in some way. The height of the strip - and of its baseball fandom - came in the 1960s, though the late-1950s and early-1970s saw their fair share of top-notch strips. That also happened to be the era of Willie, Mickey, and the Duke. How often, then, were each of the three centerfielders mentioned by Charlie Brown and friends?"

The answer won't surprise you, as Larry Granillo notes, Charles Schulz lived in Northern California.

On Apps

The main issue is that readers – paying or not – aren’t engaging with overtly magazine-like apps. There’s a simple reason for this: printed magazines work better in every way. They are a simple one-off purchase that can be used (both in a navigating and reading sense) anywhere. They are lightweight, easily shared and disposable. You’ve heard the arguments plenty of times but this first year of apps have done nothing to weaken them. Why would you buy an app when it only repeats the printed magazine?

via magculture.com and spd

Jeremy Leslie's thoughts are generally spot on, he is one of my favorite bloggers, and I am generally as inclined as anyone to embrace the idea of an iPadocopalypse when it comes to the current state of table application design. But I think it's a stretch to say "printed magazines work better in every way." Print doesn't work better for breaking news, interactive visualizations, collaborative real-time problem solving, blogging whimsical ideas that aren't print-worthy (a la The New Yorker), community, e-commerce, location-aware behavior or searching archives.

Right now many iPad apps are designed to replace what the print magazines do well, not augment what they do well with what the iPad (natively) does well. And that is the basic problem with most tablet apps today, especially the Adobe-produced behemoths that seem to be unfortunately gaining traction.

I'm oversimplifying Leslie's argument, he goes on to outline some new apps that he expects to be better, but I think that most people overcomplicate the problems publishers and marketers are facing right now. This is, of course, an opportunity to start over and do everything better.