New York Magazine: “In January, Time published an exclusive story on the new iPhone, in which writer Lev Grossman tweaked Apple CEO Steve Jobs about his secretive access to the product (‘I don’t call Steve, Steve calls me’) and suggested that Apple had ‘some explaining’ to do about backdated stock options. When the story hit the Web, Jobs called Stengel to complain (as it happens, Apple is a major advertiser in Time, and Jobs is a good friend of Huey’s). Stengel reacted by immediately excising the offending paragraphs from the Web (they have since been restored). Then he had Grossman come into the office to rewrite part of the piece for the print edition. Grossman was infuriated.” (via CJR Daily)
Clumsy Editorial Assistants Now More Dangerous Than eBay Manuscript Poachers
BBC: “n unpublished novel by renowned author Jeanette Winterson has been found at an Underground station in south London….Martha Oster, 27, said she was ‘amazed’ when she found the 134-page manuscript lying on a bench at Balham station on Wednesday night.”
Chancellor Angela Merkel Announces New “License to Kill Leftists” Program
Gang Rape is the New Black
Mike Industries: “The ad shows a man and a woman, presumably about to have sex, with four other men at various levels of undress looking on. There’s no denying that the ad is extremely racy and people are well justified to be offended if strikes them negatively, but from a design perspective, I’m interested in *exactly* what elements of the ad push it over the line.” (via Corey Spring)
Ice Ages Are a Great Sartorial Motivator
New York Times: “If people first became nudists 3.3 million years ago, when did they start to wear clothes? Surprisingly, lice once again furnish the answer. Though humans may long have worn loose garments like animal skin cloaks, the first tailored clothing would have been close-fitting enough to tempt the head louse to expand its territory. It evolved a new variety, the body louse, with claws adapted for clinging to fabric, not hairs. In 2003, Mark Stoneking, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, estimated from DNA differences that the body louse evolved from the head louse about 107,000 years ago. The first sewn clothes were presumably made shortly before this time.”