Web Monitor
18:29 UK time, Thursday, 23 July 2009
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Web Monitor has been on the back foot the past few days - feeling a little peaky. So sorry if things haven't been quite up to scratch.
Altruism is a concept Web Monitor finds hard to comprehend. WM was reassured, when it seemed Larissa MacFarquhar in the New Yorker was equally baffled. She looked at the . Not just any old organ donors but those who donate to strangers who they meet on the website matchingdonors.com. According to MacFarquar there are more of these donors than you would think and they end up getting far more involved in the lives of the recipients than originally planned. The altruism doesn't extend to the full length of the article however, for that you have to subscribe to the New Yorker.
In Foreign Policy, George Jonas gives a brief history of assassinations. He asks why there are, what he sees as, inconsistencies around views on state-sponsored killings of civilians versus VIPs:
"Governments can bomb faceless troops of enemy conscripts with impunity, but are questioned closely about bombing photographable individuals. Numbers numb; identity humanizes. That's the general rule ... Countries put their weaponry for random killing on ceremonial display, but are evasive about their assets and capabilities for targeted killing. Some reticence makes sense -- stealth is an operational requirement for such missions -- but much of the evasiveness is due to moral reservations."
Regulars of this column will know that rap about surprising subject is a pet subject of Web Monitor (mentioned here and here). We also love a bit of sibling collaboration, that's why we work so well with Paper Monitor, aaah, sweet. So what's this - Sacha Baron Cohen's brother, Erran, is an Hasidic Jewish rapper? Brilliant, let's see his video and his in the Guardian, I hear you scream.
It seems it's not just Web Monitor and Paper Monitor that have a generation gap (Web Monitor rather liked the one reader's description of it as a "teenage upstart"). Slate is having its own war of the generations in , where old and new media are fighting for intellectual high ground over Barack Obama's health care plans. WM is pleased to announce between the web and paper (scissors and stone weren't an option), the web won, based on trust. Web Monitor didn't actually read the article - reading a whole article and carefully considering its merits is like so passé granddad. But judging by the sub-heading "Don't Trust Any News Source Over 35" we jumped to our conclusion and then checked our Facebook status.
Advertising is a perplexing world, so it's always nice to have a bit of de-mystification. Here, the style Bible for the, ahem, , behind Stella Artois' 4% brew created such authentic-looking 60s posters to sell their beer. Actually, there's not an awful lot of mystery here - they simply tapped up retired 60s poster designer Robert McGinnis (and doubtless offered him a handsome wodge to temporarily adjust his Facebook status to "unretired").
Gustavo Sousa, of ad agency Mother, tells it thus:
"Robert McGinnis is undoubtedly the best film poster illustrator of the 60s, and probably one of the best poster designers ever, so it wasn't a hard choice. In fact, we had been referencing his posters when we started looking for illustrators, but we thought he was retired. Eventually we thought 'what if we try it?', and we decided to give him a call. Like we expected, he was retired, but to our surprise he told us he was willing to come out of retirement to do this project."
Lastly, but by no means leastly, Media Guardian has a quiet moment of reflection to - called, incidentally, Overkill. would never have approved.
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