It’s in the little things. His essay on Chick-fil-A, for instance, is like a highlight reel of writing, but tucked away in it is a throwaway line on “light grandparenting” that just kills.

Santino makes a very persuasive case that Adam Smith, the very mean person who made a spectacle of himself by telling off a Chick-fil-A worker at the drive-through and then posting the exchange on YouTube, shouldn’t have been fired from his job as CFO of a medical device manufacturer.

I disagree. Sort of.

First off, it’s always lousy when anyone loses their job. Even jerks. It’s just no fun, no matter who you are.

Second, if Smith was a low-level employee at his company the case for him keeping his job would be much stronger. But the fact that he’s so high up the corporate structure–CFO is a big deal–carries with it a couple of problems. (1) Corporate officers have a different level of responsibility to the company than do front-office grunts. Part of that is to not publicly embarrass the company. It’s a burden, obviously. But these guys get compensated for it. (2) As a high-level officer making such a public stink, his company could easily be worried that he’s costing them business with clients who find his manner and/or views unpleasant. Not an unreasonable concern. (3) His company could also be worried about future HR litigation: If a lower-level worker filed a hostile workplace complaint against them, citing Smith and claiming that the workplace was intolerant of something or other, that video would be a real problem. And the company’s prior knowledge of the video would be, I suspect, highly problematic.

In any case, I hope he lands on his feet.

Galley Friend Gabriel Rossman’s long-awaited (for me) book on how FM radio still drives chart success in the recording industry is finally out. It’s called Climbing the Charts.

If you’ve followed Rossman’s stuff elsewhere you know how good he is at taking complicated pointy-headed models and making them accessible to normal readers. He’s one of those rare academics–like Paul Cantor–whose base sensibility is firmly popular. He just happens to have the formal scholarly structure built on top of it.

Go pick up a copy. You’ll thank yourself.

As a supplement to this first-blush reaction to The Dark Knight Rises I’m now ready with some spoiler-filled observations. Proceed at your own risk. The rest below the fold. (more…)

Subject header: “50 Shades Outsells Harry Potter!”

That’s from the literary PR agency (Smith Publicity) pimping publisher The Writer’s Coffee Shop Publishing House. The flack begins her email by noting, “Earlier this morning, the news broke that the Fifty Shades trilogy has now officially outsold Harry Potter.”

Here’s the fine print:

Incredible as it may sound, J.K. Rowling’s compendium of seven Harry Potter books is no longer the best-selling book series on Amazon UK — that crown has now been passed toE. L. James’ monumentally popular Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. James’ books have sold over four million copies in print and on Kindle since going on sale in March 2012, making her the most successful author of all time on Amazon’s British portal.

In terms of individual books, the first novel in the series, carrying the titular name of Fifty Shades of Grey, has been outselling Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by a factor of two to one in recent weeks, which has resulted in it becoming the all-time bestselling book on Amazon UK. Amazon also tells us that Fifty Shades is comfortably topping the bestseller chart in both print and Kindle editions in the US, but it doesn’t seem to have yet managed to break any records the way it has in the UK.

It’s hard to unpack all of this, but we’ll give it a try. The only hard number we’re given is that 50 Shades of Grey has sold 4M+ books (on the Amazon UK portal) since March. So what Harry Potter book is that supposedly better than? Unclear. The story says it’s been outselling Deathly Hallows by 2-1. Which is great, except that Deathly Hallows came out five years ago. On the first day of release, Deathly Hallows moved 2.65M copies just in the UK. I haven’t been able to find final numbers for the book in Britain. Is it possible that in the ensuing five years Deathly Hallows failed to sell another 1.4M copies in the UK? I guess. But that seems implausible.

Then there’s this story from 2008 claiming that the Harry Potter series has sold 400M copies, worldwide.

Again, that’s not dispositive. But I can’t really imagine how a series selling only 4M+ copies could outrank any of the HP books–unless they mean that it’s outselling them right at this minute.

I emailed the the reporter from the Verge. We’ll see what he says.

This blog began in 2004 basically because of Russian gymnast Svetlana Khorkina. Here’s the first post about her:

 Obsessing over Svetlana Khorkina tonight, I caught NBC’s Very Special Package on the Russian gymnast. “I know that people look at me,” she says to the camera. “They watch me.”

“I have been great for a long time,” she says.

Speaking of these Olympics, she tells the NBC crew: “I want to win as badly as I want to mother my own child. . . . I will go there and get what belongs to me.”

I mention this only as an excuse to re-re-link to the greatest Cintra Wilson column of all time about Khorkina: The Movie. Totally, completely epic:

Later that night in the competition, Sveta advances to the parallel bars — her strongest event — but, after several mind-boggling swoops through the air, misses the bar and falls miserably onto her knees. She stands on the mat, humiliated, her sequined leotard torn at one shoulder, rivulets of body glitter streaking down her cheeks along with her tears.

“As Jesus is watch me, I will never, never,” she growls, clenching her fists, “never let one of those little bitch win me at the event again, as long as I am alive. I will eat her face.”

Thunderous music. The crowd applauds for Sveta despite her terrible failure. Sveta beats her breast and bites her cheek hard enough to enable her to spit blood at the audience, cursing them all in Russian: “May you have four generations of harelipped children!”

One of Sveta’s young protigis wins a separate event, against her. Crying with joy, the younger girl runs to Sveta for approval. Sveta whispers: “Go away from me and die, you tiny whore.” She smiles and hugs the confused girl for the cameras.

What makes it all so perfect is that it’s maybe half a degree off from the real thing. Here, for instance, is the Khorkina discussing her competition at the 2004 Olympics:

“These little girls don’t have my experience, my maturity and my pleasure to the public.”

Svetlana Khorkina–maybe the greatest heel in the history of sports. I miss her.

Courtesy of Galley Friend R.S.–Instapaper’s Marco Arment’s review of John Siracusa’s review of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Sample awesome:

 The 10.8 review maintains Siracusa’s standard at approximately 26,000 words, an impressive feat given that the interval between 10.7 and 10.8 was much shorter than most previous OS X update intervals.

This is not a quick read, so it’s a good opportunity to try a read-later method such as Safari’s Reading List, which Apple invented completely on their own.

I love–love–it when hipsters are so rooted in their own provincialism that they move from ignorance to outrage without even noticing. For case #5,034, let’s look at the incessant carping about NBC’s Olympics coverage.

Guy Adams and the Twitter hordes have been complaining and mocking NBC for failing to present the Olympics precisely as they would like. Which is fine. NBC’s presentation isn’t exactly what I’d prefer either. (More on this in a minute.) But what’s embarrassing is that the #NBCFAIL whining isn’t just a complaint that NBC isn’t doing what they’d like, but rather that NBC is objectively failing.

The nub of the #NBCFAIL complaint is, I think, that NBC/Uni/Comcast isn’t showing enough events live, that the primetime cut-reel shows are hopelessly stale, and that NBC has missed the Information Age revolution where everyone knows everything instantaneously, information wants to be free, and blah-blah-blah.

A few thoughts:

* Does the NBC primetime presentation stink? Probably. It’s not my cuppa and there are aspects of it–such as when they run a 3 minute package hyping the medal chances of the men’s gymnastics team even though we already know that the squad got hosed–which seem positively ludicrous. And for people who are interested in sports and not melodrama, the network’s insistence on “storytelling” remains pretty irritating.

* Even if you take this tape-delay / storytelling model as given, NBC doesn’t look (at least to my eyes) as nimble as they should be. They ought to be able to package finished events in ways which feed the story as it actually happened, rather than according to the pre-determined narrative going into the events. For instance, last night they could have run a package for the men’s gymnastics team hinting at danger and tragedy, rather than underdog triumph.

* All of that said, what would you have NBC do? They paid $1.2 billion for this two-week window of programming. They’re a publicly-held concern and their duty is not to maximize the enjoyment of a handful of leading-edge audience members on Twitter. Their job is to recoup as much of their money as they can. (And use the window to launch their Fall slate of shows.)

* That’s why they do “storytelling.” It bugs me, but you know who loves it? The female viewers who make performance/sports like figure skating and gymnastics such ratings monsters.

* And that’s why they tape-delay all of the good stuff for primetime. Because while there are thousands (and thousands!) of Twitter users who want to spend their work day watching the live events in a Starbucks on their iPads, 10.5 million households tuned in to the Monday night broadcast.

* The same people who insist that everyone has cut the cord on cable and the everyone uses Netflix Instant and that everyone gets stuff from the torrents fail to understand that they are highly atypical consumers. They’re like the Mondale supporters aghast because no one they know voted for Reagan.

* But even if NBC was to court this niche audience, it’s not clear to me that there’s all that much money in it. And probably not enough to justify risking the rest of the revenue platform for the Games.

* Finally, people have been complaining about the lousiness of tape-delay Olympics coverage since the 1988 Seoul Games. But instead of understanding that this is just the nature of the beast, today’s Twitter generation thinks that This Time It Should Be Different.

Because . . . Internet!

* In parting, I’d note that this is the same thinking which led people to believe that the Iranian regime would fall a couple years ago and that the Egyptian revolution would be a great step toward liberalism in the Middle East.