“You’ll spot them in status updates, blog posts, even New York Times articles. The Internet is filthy with typos, confusing countless readers each and every day. But instead of just groaning and reading on, a legion of spelling sticklers are using Twitter to try and sweep the web clean. A few of these typo vigilantes talked with us about what drives their copyediting urges.”
Did you hear that Monica Lewinsky is getting an eight-figure book deal for her juicy tell-all? We’d take that with a grain of salt. Reports about huge advances have been wrong many times in the past, and they’re often used as a way to drum up publicity.
With buyers clearly in place, Pure, White, and Deadly is as close to free money as the publishing world can hope to get. And publishers can’t feign ignorance about the book’s newfound popularity—a New York Times Magazine cover story from April, 2011 gushed about Yudkin and video lectures citing him as a prophet went viral years ago. So what’s taking so long for a reprint?
Americans can’t get enough of the bizarre hit “Gangnam Style” by Korean pop star PSY. It has 53 million Youtube hits as of this writing, it’s the first K-pop single to top the iTunes video charts, and every news organization from The Washington Post to Time is gushing over it. But, as they do with most K-pop songs, Western listeners are hilariously mishearing its lyrics.
Anyone who’s seen enough foreign films is bound to have noticed typos, punctuation gaffes and head-scratching translation choices. So why exactly is sub-par subtitling so common? What is it about the process that leads to such clumsy work?
When Egypt shut down the Internet at the outset of the Arab Spring, a group of computer hackers in Washington, D.C. took note. Hoping to create an alternate Internet free from government control, they launched Project Byzantium. But are their goals feasible?
Here’s a concert video I produced. Check out The Black Sparks, an amazing punk band whose members are all 14 or younger, playing on the roof of NPR’s DC headquarters.
Ever since technology has enabled us to do so, we’ve been bringing musicians back from the dead for questionable “collaborations” and digital “duets.”
“I grew up going to ghost towns as a teenager,” says Paiva. “And I immediately connected the night photography with shooting these locations. I’m trying to reanimate these dead places.” Focusing on rusting automobiles, hollowed-out train cars and other Westward Expansion detritus, Paiva’s work documents a crumbling California.
