WP: The Lasting Consequences of Character Attacks

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

“Because he is losing right now, McCain is on a more urgent mission to turn around his campaign. Because he is under attack, Obama feels the need to show he won’t let his rival push him around. The effect is the same, which is to degrade the political dialogue at a moment when the nation faces some of the most difficult challenges in a generation or more.” This qualifies as a ‘must read.’

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Wanted: Trashy Design Magazines

The mailman delivered the latest copy of Eye Magazine to my door last week. As design periodicals go, it’s hard to beat Eye for being both historically illuminating and contemporarily challenging; few continually published design magazines are as well-written issue after issue as is this one. It’s edited and printed in the United Kingdom, which probably goes a long way towards explaining why it’s so uniformly gorgeous, too — the British take their design press a bit more seriously than we do. That also partly explains why subscription issues arrive neatly packed in a protective cardboard sleeve. These magazines are so exquisitely printed (and priced) that readers tend to cherish each issue.

None of which is to belittle American publications. Among others, I also subscribe to the domestically edited and produced Print Magazine, which despite its name, had something of a renaissance under the remarkable, decade-long stewardship of Joyce Rutter Kaye that concluded only a few months ago. Print, which has always set a high standard for design journalism, had for decades opted for sobriety in its presentation. To be fair, the magazine was always beautifully designed. But in recent years especially it has approached its page layouts with a palpable freshness and vigor, and now regularly looks spectacular. When my copy arrives in the mail, I tend to leaf through it eagerly but gingerly.

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First Look at RIM’s App Store for BlackBerry Devices

Ratings

1 of 5 stars
What’s this?

“Aimed to launch on the the BlackBerry Storm’s version 4.7 operating system, the BlackBerry Application Center will allow the user to find, browse and install/upgrade third-party BlackBerry apps hosted by carriers.” Setting aside the fact that it’s aesthetically and typographically anemic compared to Apple’s, I wonder why RIM waited so long to do something like this. Can it really be that the idea didn’t occur to them until after the App Store launched? That they are really only executing in reaction to Apple’s moves instead of trying to get out ahead of the game? If so, a change in approach would seem to be warranted.

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Paid Content: Tina Brown Launches The Daily Beast

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

“Brown’s high-profile move to the Web from glossy print… [is] meant as a smart one-stop news shop, an effort to break new ground in news aggregation by mixing lots of outbound links with heavy doses of curation and original content.”Iit’s probably too early to tell whether it makes for a compelling user experience, but I’m not bowled over aesthetically, at least.

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