if these delights thy mind may move

Jon Stewart Slams Apple Over Its Handling of Gizmodo Case

Tonight on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart gave his take regarding Gizmodo's iPhone exclusive and the subsequent police raid on Jason Chen's home. Speaking directly to Apple and Steve Jobs, Stewart didn't hold back his criticism of them. Video inside.

Stewart first talked about how "excited" he was to see Gizmodo's report, before mocking the circumstances that led to its acquisition of the device.

Then, Stewart questioned whether it was necessary for Chen's home to be raided, stating, "the Gizmodo reviewer gets the meth lab in the basement treatment after he'd already given the phone back," before talking about how "creepy" Apple—or the "Appholes," as the screen called the company—was for its handling of the case.

Finally, Stewart delivered a direct address to Apple and Jobs in which he criticized the company for its increasing paranoia and obsessive control over the information related to its products, and also took some hilarious shots at AT&T.

Update: Via InOtherNews, here's a partial transcript of Stewart's statement to Apple/Jobs:

"Apple - you guys were the rebels, man, the underdogs. People believed in you. But now, are you becoming the man? Remember back in 1984, you had those awesome ads about overthrowing Big Brother? Look in the mirror, man! …It wasn't supposed to be this way - Microsoft was supposed to be the evil one! But you guys are busting down doors in Palo Alto while Commandant Gates is ridding the world of mosquitoes! What the fuck is going on?!

…I know that it is slightly agitating that a blog dedicated to technology published all that stuff about your new phone. And you didn't order the police to bust down the doors, right? I'd be pissed too, but you didn't have to go all Minority Report on his ass! I mean, if you wanna break down someone's door, why don't you start with AT&T, for God sakes? They make your amazing phone unusable as a phone! I mean, seriously! How do you drop four calls in a one-mile stretch of the West Side Highway! There're no buildings around! What, does the open space confuse AT&T's signal?!

…Come on, Steve. Chill out with the paranoid corporate genius stuff. Don't go all Howard Hughes on us."

[The Daily Show with Jon Stewart]

Send an email to Matt Cherette, the author of this post, at matt@gawker.tv.

Ban Portable Electronics Before Bed for More Restful Sleep

Taking your laptop, cellphone, or iPad to bed might seem to be an obvious candidate for keeping you up—you're playing with the device after all—but the real culprit is the glow of the screen.

Photo by sidewalk flying.

Three years ago we shared some research with you indicating that people who used electronic devices before bed reported feeling less rested the next morning.

The subjects in the study weren't just imagining that working late on their laptop in bed or spending time text messaging was make them more tired—they slept the same number of hours as the non-electronics users—they were actually experiencing the effects of exposure to bright and intense light late in the evening. The Los Angeles Times reports on the science behind it:

But staring at the screen before bed could leave you lying awake. That's because direct exposure to such abnormal light sources inhibits the body's secretion of melatonin, say several sleep experts. [...]

Light-emitting devices, including cellphones and yep, the iPad, tell the brain to stay alert. Because users hold those devices so close to their face, staring directly into the light, the effect is amplified compared with, say, a TV across the room or a bedside lamp, said Frisca Yan-Go, director of the UCLA Sleep Disorders Center in Santa Monica.

What can you do? Switch to night-time activities that don't involve blasting your face with light right before you turn in. Reading a traditional paper book or an electronic book on non-light emitting electronic device like the Kindle is a much better alternative than reading a book on an iPad or laptop. Even better would be to institute a no-electronics policy surrounding the hours leading up to bed time to let your body move naturally and gradually towards sleep.

You can read more about the effect of electronics on sleep quality at the link below. While you're reading up on better sleep habits, make sure to check out our Top 10 Ways to Sleep Smarter and Better. Have a favorite sleep-related tip or trick to share? Let's hear about it in the comments.

Reading on iPad before Bed Can Affect Sleep Habits [Los Angeles Times]

Send an email to Jason Fitzpatrick, the author of this post, at jason@lifehacker.com.

 

 

Sonoma County CA separates elderly gay couple and sells all of their worldly possessions

Filed by: Kate Kendell

April 17, 2010 4:00 PM

Print

Clay and his partner of 20 years, Harold, lived in California. Clay and Harold made diligent efforts to protect their legal rights, and had their legal paperwork in place--wills, powers of attorney, and medical directives, all naming each other. Harold was 88 years old and in frail medical condition, but still living at home with Clay, 77, who was in good health.

One evening, Harold fell down the front steps of their home and was taken to the hospital. Based on their medical directives alone, Clay should have been consulted in Harold's care from the first moment. Tragically, county and health care workers instead refused to allow Clay to see

Harold in the hospital. The county then ultimately went one step further by isolating the couple from each other, placing the men in separate nursing homes.

Ignoring Clay's significant role in Harold's life, the county continued to treat Harold like he had no family and went to court seeking the power to make financial decisions on his behalf. Outrageously, the county represented to the judge that Clay was merely Harold's "roommate." The court denied their efforts, but did grant the county limited access to one of Harold's bank accounts to pay for his care.

What happened next is even more chilling.

 

Without authority, without determining the value of Clay and Harold's possessions accumulated over the course of their 20 years together or making any effort to determine which items belonged to whom, the county took everything Harold and Clay owned and auctioned off all of their belongings. Adding further insult to grave injury, the county removed Clay from his home and confined him to a nursing home against his will. The county workers then terminated Clay and Harold's lease and surrendered the home they had shared for many years to the landlord.

Three months after he was hospitalized, Harold died in the nursing home. Because of the county's actions, Clay missed the final months he should have had with his partner of 20 years. Compounding this tragedy, Clay has literally nothing left of the home he had shared with Harold or the life he was living up until the day that Harold fell, because he has been unable to recover any of his property. The only memento Clay has is a photo album that Harold painstakingly put together for Clay during the last three months of his life.

With the help of a dedicated and persistent court-appointed attorney, Anne Dennis of Santa Rosa, Clay was finally released from the nursing home. Ms. Dennis, along with Stephen O'Neill and Margaret Flynn of Tarkington, O'Neill, Barrack & Chong, now represent Clay in a lawsuit against the county, the auction company, and the nursing home, with technical assistance from NCLR. A trial date has been set for July 16, 2010 in the Superior Court for the County of Sonoma.

Read more about NCLR's Elder Law Project.

Are you disturbed by the story of how Clay Greene was treated by the County? Please blog about this, pass it on over Facebook or Twitter, just do whatever you can to help raise the visibility of what happened to Clay. Send a letter to the local paper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat at letters@pressdemocrat.com. Send them this link to NCLR's page.

Want to stay up to date on this case? Follow NCLR and Bilerico Project on Twitter.

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Volcanic Ash Could Last Months, Larger Nearby Volcano Could Soon Erupt Too

It's scaremongering at best, but yesterday's volcanic ash story has turned into a right old mess for the aviation industry, with all planes grounded until at least Sunday in the UK. Even worse, a much larger volcano could erupt.

As I said yesterday, the Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted for the second time on Tuesday, and as it was under a 200m-thick piece of glacier ice, it's resulted in all the rivers flooding—not to mention the volcanic ash which has meant very few planes are able to depart or arrive in the UK, with the rest of western Europe affected as well.

Jalopnik explained what happens when the volcanic ash gets in airplane engines, and flight control systems—and just how dangerous it can be, with 90 commercial airplanes suffering damage from volcanic ash in the past 30 years alone. We may not be able to see it in the air (though apparently a very red sunset was viewed last night by many), but it's harmful enough to cut off Britain from mainland Europe.

Now, experts are saying that the Eyjafjallajokull eruption could likely trigger activity at Mount Katla, a nearby glacier volcano that's even larger and potentially more dangerous. It's not erupted since 1918, but "volcanologists" are saying it's very close to blowing its top. We can already expect the volcanic ash to hang around in the skies for the next couple of weeks, but if Katla goes then it might last for months. Back in 1783 another volcano in Iceland caused thick fog across Europe and even spread as far as the US, for eight whole months.

At least we're getting some amazing photos from the eruption, with several showing the Northern lights appearing next to Eyjafjallajokull volcano. [Metro and The Telegraph]

Image Credit: *ice

Send an email to Kat Hannaford, the author of this post, at khannaford@gizmodo.com.

THE GIST:

• Subconsciously, even confident women may be concerned about their weight.
• More women than expected might be on the edge of an eating disorder.
• For women, body image is wrapped up with cultural ideals of beauty.

To be an American woman and feel good about your body requires a powerful inner strength and the will to resist an unrealistically skinny social ideal.

But even women who truly accept themselves as they are have internalized the desire to be thin, suggests a new study that looked deep into women's brains. The study found that the brains of healthy women resemble those of bulimic women when confronted with the idea that they might be overweight.

The findings might eventually help doctors better evaluate and treat body image issues, no matter how subtle.

"This is kind of validating the suspicion that most women are teetering on the edge of an eating disorder," said Mark Allen, a neuroscientist at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. "If the brain response is so strong in these apparently healthy women, maybe most of us could use a little dose of what it is that you go through in an eating disorder therapy."

Related Links:

• Women's Natural Scent More Seductive Than Perfume
• Women's Earning Power Shifts Economics of Marriage
• HowStuffWorks.com: How accurate is our mental image of ourselves?
• Are Men More Evolved Than Women?

Who are you? What makes you unique? What fulfills you? Are you friendly, cheerful, grumpy or important? When people consider questions like these that force them to engage in serious self-reflection, activity picks up in a part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex.

Scientists have suspected that this self-reflective part of the brain could betray subconscious thoughts that people might not even know they have. For example, other studies have shown that, in tasks like word-associations, people who don't think they're racist still show racist tendencies when they don't have time to consciously override what's under the surface.

Allen and colleagues looked into hidden feelings about body image by using fMRI machines to scan the brains of 10 healthy women. The women were thin, but all had passed eating disorder screening tests with flying colors. So, theoretically, they felt just fine with their bodies.

While hooked up to brain scanners, the women looked at images of avatar-like models in skimpy bikinis: some overweight, some skinny. With each image, the women were told to imagine that someone else was saying the model looked like her.

When overweight images popped up, the medial prefrontal cortex lit up in all of the women, the scientists reported in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. Simply imagining that they might be overweight seemed to make the women question their sense of self, even though they claimed afterward that the test was boring or meaningless.

"Women are actually engaging in an evaluation of who they are and whether they are worthwhile as a person," Allen said. "Even though women might claim to be well adjusted and not care about body issues, subconsciously they might care."

Based on the new results, it now appears that there is a finer line between women with and without eating disorders than scientists previously suspected, Allen said. Their brains aren't exactly the same: Bulimic women had stronger reactions in their medial prefrontal cortexes as well as activity in a part of the brain that processes negative emotions.

But most men showed no response at all to pictures of other men in bathing suits, either fat or thin. (Bodybuilders were an exception.)

As brain-scanning technologies become cheaper and more accessible, the results might give doctors new tools for figuring out when women need counseling and how likely their eating disorders are to relapse. At the very least, the new work helps validate what women go through in our society day after day, said Greg Siegle, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

"Something is happening for women with regard to shape and weight, and that's for real," he said. "This study is showing it at a biological level. It's not just a myth."

THE GIST:

• Analysis of bones discovered at the Donner Party campsite found no evidence for cannibalism.
• The members did resort to consuming the family dog, cattle, deer and horses.
• Slate pieces and china shards reveal the members tried to live with dignity.

The Donner Party, a group of 19th century American pioneers who became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada and supposedly resorted to cannibalism, may not have eaten each other after all, suggests a new study on bones found at the Donner's Alder Creek campsite hearth in California.

Detailed analysis of the bones instead found that the 84 Donner Party members consumed a family dog, "Uno," along with cattle, deer and horses. Cattle, likely eaten after the animals themselves died of starvation, appear to have been their mainstay.

The study is the first to show that the Donner members successfully hunted deer, despite the approximately 30 feet of snow on the ground during the winter of 1846-1847. The horses are thought to have come from relief parties that arrived in February and could have left a few of their animals behind.

Related Links:

• Settlement Site Hints at Mass Cannibalism
• Cannibalism May Have Wiped Out Neanderthals
• Bust Myths From History and More
• HowStuffWorks.com: Donner Party
• Planet Green: Quiz: Would You Fall For an Eco Myth?

The paper, which will be published in the July issue of the journal American Antiquity, is also the first to prove the theory that the stranded individuals ate their pet dog.

"They were boiling hides, chewing on leather and trying desperately to survive," project leader Gwen Robbins told Discovery News. "We can see that the bones were processed so heavily -- boiled and crushed down in order to extract any kind of nutrients from them."

Robbins, an assistant professor of biological anthropology at Appalachian State University, and her team produced thin sections from the hearth bones and examined them under high magnification in order to measure each basic structural unit and link the bones to particular animals.

No human bones were identified.

"What we have demonstrated is that there is no evidence for cannibalism," said Robbins. "If the Donner Party did resort to cannibalism, the bones were treated in a different way (such as buried), or they were placed on the hearth last and could have since eroded."

Victorian Era journalists, who embellished the accounts provided by the 47 survivors, largely fueled the legend of the Donner Party cannibalism. The survivors, 11 men and 36 women and children, fiercely denied the allegations. Although one man, Louis Keseberg, filed and won a defamation suit, he was still forever known as Keseberg the Cannibal.

"Racism might have played a part," Robbins said. "Keseberg was an immigrant, and negative sentiment existed toward some recent immigrants then."

The trash and debris left around the Donner Party hearth in the spring of 1847 show that, in spite of their very difficult circumstances, the members tried to maintain a sense of decorum and normalcy.

"Slates suggest they had the children sitting and doing their lessons, while shards of china indicate they were eating off of plates, retaining some dignity and hoping for the future," Robbins explained.

University of Montana anthropologist Kelly Dixon worked on the initial study that first documented the hearth and bones.

"The tale of the Donner Party has focused on the tragedy of survival cannibalism," said Dixon, "yet the archaeological remains inspire us to consider more significant implications, such as what it was like to be human, doing whatever possible to survive in one of the snowbound camps."

Robbins and her colleagues are currently writing a book about the Donner Party for the University of Oklahoma Press. It is scheduled for release next year.

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RIAA/MPAA Want Government-Mandated Spyware That Deletes 'Infringing' Content Automatically

The RIAA and MPAA have submitted a plan to the Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement. It's basically a plan that they want the government to enact, and it's terrifying.

Here are some of the lovely things that they're calling for:

* spyware on your computer that detects and deletes infringing materials;
* mandatory censorware on all Internet connections to interdict transfers of infringing material;
* border searches of personal media players, laptops and thumb-drives;
* international bullying to force other countries to implement the same policies;
* and free copyright enforcement provided by Fed cops and agencies (including the Department of Homeland Security!).

Uh, yeah. So we'd basically give up all of our privacy so the government could play copyright cops for the RIAA and MPAA. This is crazy stuff, and one's got to assume that it's so crazy that the government would never listen to it. But good lord. [EFF via Boing Boing]

Send an email to Adam Frucci, the author of this post, at adam@gizmodo.com.

Ditch Desktop Apps for Webapps, Free Up RAM, and Enjoy the Best of Both Worlds

Desktop applications have their charm, but most of your information already lives on the web. Ditch those clunky desktop apps for webapps without losing their better features—like notifications, shortcuts, offline access, etc.—and free up precious system resources along the way.

Most Lifehacker readers may already be using Gmail as their number one mail client, Google Reader for their RSS feeds, and other webapps to fill various needs, but lots of us are still using native desktop applications to access email, RSS, and other such things. With operating systems like Chrome OS on the horizon, the world looks to be becoming more and more browser-based. You may prefer your desktop client for one reason or another—perhaps you need instant notification of when your mail arrives, or perhaps you like being able to keystroke your way through your RSS feeds. Or perhaps you just need to be able to access what you can offline. Those of us hooked on clients have probably hardly noticed, though, that nowadays almost all these features can be found somewhere in today's most popular webapps.

Note that when I talk about using webapps, I don't mean just throw them all into site-specific browsers (SSBs) with Google Chrome, previously mentioned Fluid for Mac, or Mozilla's Prism. They're certainly an option if you prefer keeping your applications running in separate windows with unique taskbar/dock icons, but these can hog your RAM just as much as desktop apps, and it isn't necessary for most of the webapps we use today. Some webapps you want to keep open all the time, like a web-based IM client (such as previously mentioned Meebo or eBuddy) or a web-based music player (such as previously mentioned Lala or Pandora), and for these an SSB is a great idea. But if you're keeping a bunch of applications open just so you'll receive notifications, there are other, less RAM-heavy ways to pull it off.

Use a System Tray or Menu Bar Apps to Receive Notifications

Instead of keeping a client or SSB open waiting for notifications to come, you're better off opening up things like Gmail or Google Calendar only when you need them. To receive notifications, install a small notifier app such as Google Notifier, which will give you notifications of incoming mail or upcoming calendar events (either through the app's native notifications or through Growl on the Mac with the addition of Gmail+Growl).

This way, you can keep your email lightweight and out of the way unless you need it, and if you ever click a mailto link, the notifier will automatically open up Gmail for you (or you can compose a message or create a calendar event by clicking on the app's icon). If you use multiple Gmail accounts (which this app doesn't yet support), there are other notifiers available for Windows, and you can use this workaround from Mac OS X Hints to get notifications for two accounts on a Mac.

Similar lightweight notifiers are available for Google Reader notifications—though you may prefer to use an extension for Firefox or Chrome extension with an unread badge (instead of badgering you with popup notifications all the time).

Learn Your Webapps' Keyboard Shortcuts

We here at Lifehacker are keyboard shortcut junkies, so when webapps like Gmail, Google Reader, Google Calendar, Remember the Milk, and a whole host of others started adding keyboard shortcuts, we were in heaven. In Google's webapps, turning these on is easy—just go to Settings and click on the General Tab, and look for the "Enable Keyboard Shortcuts" option, which also provides a link to the shortcuts for that particular application. Other apps, like Remember the Milk, already have shortcuts enabled, you just have to use them.

Access Your Webapps Offline When You're Not Connected

It's been a gradual process, but lots of Google's apps have built up their offline access with Google Gears, allowing you to view your email inbox, calendar, RSS feeds, and even edit documents when you're not connected. This feature is likely to change soon, what with the depreciation of Gears and the transition to HTML5 (sadly, if you're on a Mac, you've already been left high and dry since Gears is no longer available in most browsers), but for now all you need to do is click the Offline button in supported Google webapps (or, in the case of Gmail, turn the feature on by going to Settings > Offline) and you can access your most important tools without needing to set them up in a client. This feature is even available in some non-Google webapps, like Remember the Milk, so you can keep your to-do list around no matter how flaky the internet decides to be.

Use Multiple Accounts in Gmail and Google Calendar

A feature of clients a bit more specific to mail clients (and, to a certain extent, calendars) is the ability to access all your accounts at once, but this feature is available in Gmail as well. You can easily set up forwarding in most email accounts, Gmail or non-Gmail, to the Gmail account from which you want to manage all your addresses—but what's even better is that you can send mail as different accounts from Gmail as well. To do this, just go to the Accounts tab in Gmail's settings and under "Send mail as" you can add your other accounts, Gmail or not—though if you're replying to a message, Gmail will automatically reply from the address the original message was sent to.

In Google Calendar, this is a bit simpler—if you have, say, a separate Gmail account with a calendar tied to that instead (say, a work calendar), you can easily consolidate that with your main Gmail account by going to Settings > Calendars and clicking "Share this calendar" for the ones you want to view on your main account.

Tweak Your Webapp for Everything It's Worth

There are a few other things that webapps just don't always give you, but they usually try and stay on top of things. In your Google webapps, be sure to check the Labs section for features that haven't made their way to the full version, like drag-and-drop, custom shortcuts, and lots of other preference-tweaking awesomeness.

 

Beyond features that are pseudo-built in to webapps through Labs, you can tweak some settings in your browser to give you the experience you desire. For example, if you prefer (or find yourself in a specific situation where you need) that comfortable 3-pane view in your email client, you might try pulling up the iPad version of Gmail on your computer. Similarly, you can squeeze lots of extra options out of webapps with extensions like our own Gina Trapani's Better Gmail (for Firefox or this unofficial version for Chrome), Better GReader (for Firefox), and other such userscripts (Userscripts.org is a great place to look for these). The possibilities are pretty much endless.

When you break it down, the benefits of dedicated desktop clients are slowly going away. With things like Gears, HTML5, and AJAX powering up modern browsers, all the features we expect from native clients can be found on the web—so if you're still tied to your 10 clients all running at once, close them up for a while and give the web a shot. You might find that your bias against webapps isn't necessary anymore.

Got any other tips for getting the most out of your webapps—or any other gripes about client-side features that webapps don't have? Let us know in the comments!

Send an email to Whitson Gordon, the author of this post, at whitson@lifehacker.com.

 

How Twitter Is Ruining Celebrities

Okay, Jim Carrey was never my favorite, and I'd wager he wasn't yours either. But his Elin-blaming antics on Twitter this weekend confirmed a longtime suspicion I've had: when it comes to the Internet, some people should consider shutting up.

No, I'm not silencing anyone who wants to jump into in this unfettered form of communication, particularly a famous person who wants to connect directly with The People. Nor do I think, as some commentators do, that Twitter is all about indulging in the banal, the narcissistic, and the unearned. (Sorry, Jon Stewart, you lost me on this.) When it comes to embracing the future (or rather, the present), I am generally as pro-Twitter as it gets.

I'm just suggesting that certain people reconsider how goddamn annoying they can be. Because it turns out that plenty of high-profile people are not that smart, at least not all the time. Or at least not without the intervention of lots of people whose job it is to make them look good. And sometimes I would just rather not know how far short they fall.

If you've ever met a public figure you previously admired, you know it can seriously undermine whatever drew you to them in the first place. When I was pounding the pavement as a media reporter, there were plenty of writers and editors I met who more than lived up to fangirl expectations with their sparkling in-person insights. Then there were the ones that sloppily regurgitated conventional wisdom, or were giant social climbers or total leches. Still sorta ruins it every time I encounter their byline!

Twitter is like that, all the time.

It's hard for me, given what I do all day, to admit how many of these are high-profile women in media whose work I generally cheer. But the Internet is supposed to be all about honesty — Twitter-enabled niceness aside — so let's have it out.

New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean, your unselfaware, coquettish oversharing about yourself and your chickens is not cute, and I can never read your longform work in the same way again. (Some 40,000 people clearly disagree, though several Jezebel staffers back me up on this.) Former Gourmet editor and bestselling memoirist Ruth Reichl may have a sense of humor about her rhapsodic, haiku-like tweets, but they persist in their overwrought glory. Nation editor in chief Katrina van den Heuvel, I can't figure out what you're trying to do with the slashes. This is not poetry. Sadie is fed up with Margaret Atwood's Twitter verbosity — I can't bring myself to follow her. (There's also MSNBC's David Shuster getting himself in trouble on Twitter and elsewhere, but I guess I never expected much from him. And, come to think of it, Touré has had some, um, issues too. But by then I'd already unfollowed him.)

Plenty of these people are old media types who are gamely crossing over, but who are used to a filter, or maybe an invisible army of editors, factcheckers, and research assistants massaging their raw material. Now we know what they're like without the entourage, and what happens when you give them a Blackberry and a delayed flight. They often do the things that make you unfollow your real-life friends.

Actual celebrities, even ones you might not have had a high opinion of — or previously had no opinion of whatsoever — do even worse in this regard, alternating the mundane with idiocy and, occasionally, casual racism. Things we now know that we may not have known through the old celebrity publicity apparatus: that Jim Carrey is kind of a misogynistic dick, that Scott Baio thinks it's okay to trash Michelle Obama because his wife's best friend is black, that Kirstie Alley thinks that black people are more "free and fun," that Jessica Stam is tone deaf when it comes to the spouses of housekeeping staff, that Amanda Bynes likes her men "chocolate," that both Lindsay Lohan and Michael Lohan need no tabloid editor's help in their public pursuit of being the biggest train wreck on earth. And John Mayer... well, he can hang himself on all platforms, apparently.

All of them may or may not have had something they were good at — being a late-80s heartthrob, or looking pretty on the runway, or crooning, or... I can't remember. But they are not good at this.

Social media engagement can be a beautiful, even essential thing, and there are some people I like better for getting to know them this way. (Roger Ebert is the epitome of this phenomenon, and Tracie vouches for Josh Groban and Rob Thomas as entirely pleasant surprises). But all this makes Orlean's fellow New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell's relative new-media prissiness seem refreshing. He said recently,

I don't feel I lack for platforms for expressing myself. I have books, I write for the New Yorker. If I gave people any more, they'd get sick of me.

Very possible! It turns out not everyone is worth listening to all the time. Of course, it's also possible that the people who have decided to follow me dislike a good portion of what I myself have to say. But I try to exercise a heightened awareness of not wanting to waste the time of the people who have so kindly subscribed to my feed — having watched what I'd consider abuse of the privilege far too many times.

So why don't I just unfollow these people? After all, this is an opt-in system. But being mildly infuriated by all this chatter is glorious torture, the ideal fodder for the last kinds of internet communication that, at least on the face of it, remain relatively private — IMs and emails. Although maybe I should have listened to my own advice and kept it that way. Too late now!

Related: Malcolm Gladwell: The Quiet Canadian [Globe & Mail]
Jon Stewart Still Baffled By Twitter [Zap2It]
The Eight Types Of People To Unfollow On Twitter Or Defriend On Facebook [Gawker]
The New Internet Civility [NYM]
David Shuster's Twitter Silent Since Breitbart-O'Keefe Battle [Mediaite]
Black Like @KirstieAlley [Media Assassin]
Reichl Lampoons Her Tweets On Bourdain's Radio Show [Eater]
The Mysterious Case Of Toure Praising Raped Slaves For Seducing Massa [Gawker]

Earlier: Jim Carrey Continues To Blame Elin Nordegren, Women In General, On Twitter
Scott Baio Slammed On Twitter After Mocking Michelle Obama
Michael & Lindsay Lohan's Dramz On Twitter
John Mayer Is Back Online, Still A Jerk

Send an email to Irin Carmon, the author of this post, at irin@jezebel.com.

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Gina Bernal, romance lover, Carina Press editor, former editor for Rhapsody Book Club, blogged about cliffhanger endings. They are a common literary mechanism dating as far back to the earliest days of printed mass fiction. The serial depended on it. (The first novel to appear in serial form was Tobias Smollett’s fourth novel, The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves published in 1760, free here at Project Gutenberg.

Wikipedia notes that the cliffhanger may have originated with Thomas Hardy in 1873 with the serialization of A Pair of Blue Eyes.

Gina is both for them and against them.  She says that she will read them but in the end, wonders if some of the magic of the stories wear off, not living up to the reader expectation.

While a cliffhanger ending won’t necessarily completely ruin a good book for me, it doesn’t make me particularly happy either. For me, a cliffhanger is not a wholly satisfying conclusion, especially after having spent the previous however-many pages invested in the characters and their journey. Yes, there’s an Incarceron sequel in the works (Sapphique in 2011), but I can’t wait that long. I can’t wait for the same reason I love the immediate downloads of ebooks, why I wait to watch entire seasons of TV shows on DVD and why Nutella never quite makes it onto my piece of toast. I’m an instant gratification kind of person.

Worse, the cliffhanger sets up certain expectations that often go unfulfilled.  The wiki article quotes Trollope as articulating this same criticism:

all serial writers used the cliff-hanger even though Trollope felt that the use of suspense violated “all proper confidence between the author and his reader.” Basically, the reader would expect “delightful horrors” only to feel betrayed with a much less exciting ending.

I think, like Gina, I have a love/hate relationship with cliffhangers. On the one hand, they do keep your interest. On the other, I am not satiated at the end of the story. I feel like I haven’t gotten the payoff that I invested the time and thought I would receive. Further, the build up never seems to pay off and I don’t always feel fully satiated without a conclusion.

Knowing that there is a cliffhanger ending can actually work to tamp down my excitement for a story, or at least I find myself trying to suppress my interest.

So why do some cliffhangers work better than others? I think that it can depend on a few things. First, if you aren’t terribly invested in the characters or you are losing interest in the series, the cliffhanger isn’t as bothersome. Second, if you think that the cliffhangers will be resolved shortly (as I feel is the case in the Hunger Games trilogy) or are fairly confident as to how the cliffhanger will turn out (as in the Gail Carriger series).

So where do you stand? Cliffhanger yes or no? If yes, why? If no, why? When does a cliffhanger ending work and when does it not?