Events

WTF? The Washington Post Co. has agreed to sell its flagship newspaper to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, ending the Graham family’s stewardship of one of America’s leading news organizations after four generations. Bezos, whose entrepreneurship has made him one of the world’s richest men, will pay $250 million in cash for The Post and affiliated publications to the Washington Post Co., which owns the newspaper and other businesses. Seattle-based Amazon will have no role in the...

About a week ago, Chicago Public Media CEO Torey Malatia got fired. Crain's has more information today: The Chicago Public Media board, led by Baird & Warner Inc. CEO Stephen Baird, last month requested the resignation of CEO Torey Malatia, 61, who gained national prominence with program hits such as “This American Life” and “Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me” early in his 18-year tenure. Lackluster ratings and fundraising at the nonprofit precipitated his downfall. Mr. Malatia declines to comment. Meanwhile...

James Deen tries Google Glass and...well...don't play this at work: That has to be one of the only porn trailers I've ever laughed through.

This past week, my company put me in charge of operations. The job includes responsibility for our tools and technologies: bug tracking, client request tracking, code repositories, internal knowledge sharing, and Agile process management. Right now we use a collection of tools that we've used for three years: Beanstalk, Sifter, Zendesk, Yammer, and a home-grown Agile tool called Storyboard. Well, Storyboard runs on the Azure SDK 1.4, which Microsoft will stop supporting at the end of November....

Parker and I have walked about 90 minutes today, and we'll probably walk some more half an hour from now. It's 23°C and crystal clear, with a forecast for more of the same all weekend. I may not get anything done until Monday. Pity.

Via Sullivan, a look at a 45-story abandoned tower in Caracas that now houses 2,500 people: Welcome to the world’s tallest slum: poverty-ridden Venezuela’s Tower of David. Squatters took over this very unfinished 45-story skyscraper in the early 1990s, and they’ve been there ever since. The tower was originally intended to be a symbol of Caracas’ bright financial future, complete with a rooftop helipad, but construction stopped because of a banking crisis and the sudden death of the tower’s namesake...

Ezra Klein points to this graph and raises the question: The core issue here is that the unemployment rate only counts people actively looking for work. That means there are two ways to leave the ranks of the unemployed. One way — the good way — is to get a job. The other way is to stop looking for work, either because you’ve retired, or become discouraged, or begun working off the books. The yellow line on the left shows the official unemployment rate since 2008. It’s fallen from over 10 percent to...

...because I didn't have time to read them today: Today's Tales from the Interview on TDWTF July's climate writeup from the Illinois State Climatologist Sam Harris on free will and love Scott Hanselman recommends everyone get a "digital will" Azure SDK 2.1 is out today How to make frequent-flyer programs better Andrew Sullivan on the best opening lines in novels Mental Floss lists things we no longer see in airplanes but leaves out the most important one: hijackers I will now go home and read these...

It's good reconnecting with stuff that has been lost for years. Like the Jewish Samurai, for example. And the quiz proving executives do not have much in common with pre-schoolers. And let's not forget the four Jewish sons. Somewhere in the mists of time I have notes about why I released so many jokes in batches. As I move to a new blog/content platform this fall, I'll post what I find.

Earlier I surmised that automating the process of extracting my old jokes from the ancient braverman.org site would take less time than hand-copying them. Well, duh. It only took two hours to write the script, lint the very few entries that needed it, and push the lot up to The Daily Parker. So, for those of you who have missed all the jokes—there are just under 200 of them, all published from May 1998 to November 2004—start here, then skip to here, and then keep clicking the calendar control. I'll call...