The Extra Hot Great Podcast Is Extra Hot and Great

When I first heard of the concept of the TV episode recap years ago, back during the internet’s earlier days, I was pretty baffled. “How could a summary of an episode possibly be anywhere near as enjoyable as the episode itself?” I thought. But browsing through televisionwithoutpity — a pioneer of the form — I got my answer. The summaries were full of wit, insight, and trenchant commentary. Occasionally the humor reminded me of the format of the sitcom itself, an endless series of setups and satisfying payoffs. 
There’s a certain art form to summarizing TV, film, or any other cultural element, and former TWoP staff members like Tara Ariano, Joe Reid, and David T. Cole have totally mastered it. But is it possible to transfer this hybrid of humor and pop culture appreciation into an audio format? After listening to their podcast, Extra Hot Great, my answer is a resounding “Yes!”
I’d listened to these guys’ previous podcast experiments before, and while the content was good, I found the audio quality sorely lacking. Thus, when I heard they’d be starting up a new project, I was fairly intrigued. After listening to a few episodes this past week, not only did the Extra Hot Great podcast blow away my expectations, but it has become my new podcast love. I am tearing through older episodes in a way I haven’t for any podcast I’ve ever listened to, and I’m deeply sad that I will soon run out. (Note: While the sound quality isn’t perfect, it’s vastly improved from their earlier efforts and definitely listen-able).
So what makes this show compulsive listening? To start with, each of the guests is insanely knowledgeable about pop culture, to an extent that deeply intimidates me. And while I often find myself violently disagreeing with them (especially Tara), they’re able to communicate their love for TV and film in a way that I find insightful, and that sometimes makes me think, “Hm, I never thought about that episode/moment/series that way before…but that’s definitely the way I’m going to think about it from now on!” We should long for these “Aha!” moments in general, but to get them from a podcast is a special sort of gift.
In addition to discussing recent TV shows and films, there are also some great segments such as “The Canon” where one of the hosts tries to present the case to “canonize” a specific episode of a beloved show, as well as “Game Time,” an ultra-nerdy game show segment that will make any TV junkie feel right at home. A plethora of (what I assume are) painstakingly collected sound clips from all the TV shows discussed are interspersed throughout each episode to spice up the proceedings. At its best, the Extra Hot Great podcast is a celebration of the love of pop culture. It’s a wonderful reminder that these TV shows we spend hours watching each week can illustrate truths about ourselves and, hopefully, bring us together in some small way. 
If you have any appreciation of pop culture, I’d urge you to give it a listen. I can’t wait to hear more!
[P.S. Tara, if you end up reading this, I’d love to get you on my own podcast at some point. Let me know if you’re interested.]

Their Eyes Were Watching You

According to the NYTimes, you may be under surveillance RIGHT NOW:

[W]e are already continually being tracked whether we volunteer to be or not. Cellphone companies do not typically divulge how much information they collect, so Mr. Spitz went to court to find out exactly what his cellphone company, Deutsche Telekom, knew about his whereabouts.

The results were astounding. In a six-month period — from Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28, 2010, Deutsche Telekom had recorded and saved his longitude and latitude coordinates more than 35,000 times. It traced him from a train on the way to Erlangen at the start through to that last night, when he was home in Berlin.

Behind Google’s Failed Book Deal

Google’s recent settlement with book publishers to digitize millions of books was rejected by a federal today. Paidcontent takes a look at what that means:

Ultimately, the settlement failed because it was too ambitious. Yes, Judge Denny Chin didn’t like a variety of things about the way Google executed the project, but in the end that was secondary. This was just too big for a class-action settlement. The settlement created a books registry and arranged specific revenue splits; it created methods for dealing with “orphan works,” a longstanding copyright problem that, as Chin noted, should be dealt with by Congress. All those things go far beyond simply ending a dispute. The proposed settlement was without precedent in its scope. The settlement had the potential to change the way we all interact with books—to actually change human culture. A class-action settlement just wasn’t the right tool for that serious work. Even for strong supporters of the Google Books project, it’s hard to argue with that logic.

“Basically he’s saying, this is a big deal for copyright law, and a big deal for the U.S. internationally,” said James Grimmelmann, a professor at New York Law School who has studied the settlement extensively. “In light of those things, it’s better for Congress to set this policy, than for me, a judge hearing a case between private parties.”

Women Are Less Likely To Date Outside Their Own Race

Via the NYTimes (via Kimberly) comes an interesting report about racial preferences in the dating realm:

Consider “Racial Preferences in Dating,” a study of more than 400 graduate and professional students who participated in speed dating sessions at Columbia University organized by Raymond Fisman, Sheena S. Iyengar, Emir Kamenica and Itamar Simonson. The researchers conclude: “Even in a population of relatively progressive individuals who have self-selected into participation in a multi-cultural Speed Dating event, we observe strong racial preferences.”

There’s also a clear gender divide, as the researchers note: “Women of all races exhibit strong same race preferences, while men of no race exhibit a statistically significant same race preference.” You might think the gender gap is the result of different dating goals: perhaps the men are more interested in short-term flings, whereas the women are looking for a lasting relationship and are concerned about potential complications from cultural differences. But the researchers conclude otherwise after looking at the data: “Since older subjects (who are more likely to attend the Speed Dating sessions in hope of starting a serious relationship) have a weaker same race preference, this gender difference is unlikely to result from differential dating goals between men and women.”

The Death of Lendle

Farhad Manjoo has written an analysis of the death of Lendle that reads as a lament for the loss of physical media. I think his heart is in the right place:

Of course, the ways in which our rights get chipped away as we move away from analog content is a constant worry in the digital age. I’m not the first pundit to note how terrible it is that we can no longer share, resell, or modify the books, movies, and video games that we get over the Internet. But the sharing restrictions that publishers have placed on e-books strike me as particularly stringent, a rule that underlines how we’ll mourn physical media when it goes away. Under Amazon’s and Barnes & Noble’s sharing model, you’re allowed to loan out a book just once, for two weeks, and while it’s loaned out, you don’t have access to it. The fact that publishers can’t stomach even this milquetoast model should have us scared for a future in which physical media loses its primacy.

Update: And apparently, Lendle is back online!

Mortified

The other day, Wired ran a photo of Limor “Ladyada” Fried, the first female engineer to ever to make it to the magazine’s front cover. You’d think this would be cause for celebration, a sign that a publication as influential Wired was finally getting with the program and reversing its painful trend of only featuring woman primarily known as sex objects. But the internet still knows how to FUBAR this thing like nobody’s business.

I’m usually a huge fan of the writings of Cord Jefferson, but this piece he wrote for Good magazine really got my blood boiling:

Wired didn’t put Limor Fried on their new cover. What Fried actually looks like is below—she’s a normal young woman with a lip ring and an abnormally strong brain, and that’s worked wonders for her her entire life. What Wired put on its cover is an almost cartoonish Photoshop that caused one friend to look at these photos next to each other and ask, “That’s the same woman?”

Here, Jefferson is basically the online equivalent of Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura, but instead he’s screaming “THAT’S NOT WHAT SHE LOOKS LIKE! SHE’S REALLY HOMELY AND BLEMISHED.” Sheesh.

Remarkably, Fried herself was incredibly gracious. Here’s the comment she left in response to Jefferson’s piece:

You found a 3+ year old photo of me in Japan, after a 20 hour flight and short hair.
The cover is stylized but that is really what I looked like. I was not ‘plasticized’ or ‘heavily photoshopped’. if I take off my glasses, have my hair done, and wear make-up its what I look like. Jill uses lighting and makeup to create a glossy look, we saw the shots right off the camera and the only things that changed are the background color and the tool. Its her style and it looks cool! Its a bit different than my every day look, especially when shot with a proper camera and lighting, but it -is- me. I do get dressed up from time to time, being a magazine cover is one of those times! 🙂

My lip ring wasn’t in for most of this year so far, WIRED didn’t remove it or airbrush it. I wasn’t wearing it, just like I wasn’t wearing my glasses. If I’m happy with this and I say it’s looks like me isn’t that GOOD 🙂

A lot of things anger me about this situation. First of all, Jefferson is really complaining about a practice (airbrushing/photoshopping) that’s endemic to magazine covers as a whole. So why bitch about it in this particular case? According to Jefferson, “it makes at least a little bit of sense when the women being Photoshopped are musicians and actresses, professions that, like it or not, often require their members to possess otherworldly features. Where Photoshopping makes no sense at all, not even a little, is in the world of science.” I don’t buy that at all. Regardless of who it is, magazines will still be following the same scripts regarding how their cover models should look. That may be troubling, but it’s no more troubling because it’s Wired’s first cover for a female engineer.

More importantly, here’s a woman who’s put herself (and her face) out there in front of a national audience. Who among us has the courage to face the slings and arrows of a critical public, especially on a cover as attention-getting as this one? And you, Cord Jefferson, are going to try and “unmask” her in such a ridiculous fashion? Get a sense of decency, man.

Matt Buchanan over at Gizmodo made a great point about this too:

[M]ore interesting is what [this situation] says about the ways ultra-smart woman are perceived. What’s implicit in Good’s outrage is the assumption that Fried, badass engineer and genius, couldn’t have possibly been as attractive as she appears on Wired’s cover. The underlying message is that there has to be a distance between brains and beauty. Consider any article that marvels over the fact that Natalie Portman isn’t just an attractive celebrity, she’s like, smart. The general cultural narrative for attractive women who are recognizably intelligent is almost always one of surprise, one way or another—it’s shocking that an attractive woman is intelligent, or that an intelligent woman is attractive…

I’m not really offering a solution (unhelpful, I know!) beyond that we need more nerdy women and more exposure for them, but in a way that’s not misogynist or generally shitty. Oh, except to buy this month’s issue, so hopefully Chris Anderson won’t have that excuse for very much longer.

Right on.