The Offline Report

Things You Can't Google (TYCG): Convenience from digital advancements has atrophied our search muscles. In 2007, perhaps 2006 or 2008, Matt Taibbi wrote about newsracks. Yes he's a hard-hitting journalist covering the great vampire squids of global predatory finance but first and foremost he's a newsman. The Offline Report (TOR) wants the city to bring back the lively colorful metal newsracks. The ones replaced by the grayscale "clean" Clear Channel newsracks in 2007. Tristan Harris, the digital addiction apostate formerly employed by Google and Facebook, advises three actions to people trying to cut the frequency with which they check their smartphone. Action one is to grayscale your phone. "Warm colors attract your attention," says the narration of Vox's interview with Harris . This is why print media needs those warm colors from the pre-Clear Channel metal newsracks. Next Harris advises people disable push notifications on their phones t...

Lewis Lapham publishes a quarterly that perfectly overlaps "Things You Can't Google" (TYCG.) A set of Lapham's Quarterlys is a good replacement for the now-defunct bookshelf encyclopedia in any family home. A contemporary family home, because the wonderfully snobby Lapham has done something akin to, more elevated than, *compromising* for the web. Most of the entries in each issue would fit into a blog post. And the entries span blogs from last year back to well before Gutenberg . His editor's letter from the "Means of Communication" issue is too long for the web (which would likely frustrate and please him, it's the point he's exploring in this essay,) but here's an excerpt from his piece titled  Word Order : ...Carr presumably knows whereof he speaks, and I’m content to regard the Internet as the best and brightest machine ever made by man, but nonetheless a machine with a tin ear and a wooden tongue. It is one thing to browse the I...