Monday, April 02, 2012

Time Magazine Pieces: Future of Oil / Kony 2012 / Change.org / FanFiction / Draw Something

I've already just linked to a few Time Magazine pieces, but there's been a number of other recent Time stories of interest to note here.

The March 26 issue of Time featured "The Warlord vs. the Hipsters" by Alex Perry on the "KONY 2012" video about African warlord Joseph Kony and US-backed efforts to apprehend him. Additionally of note in the piece is information about the group Invisible Children that produced the video (now viewed 86 million times on YouTube). Perry details how the video creators have received a large amount of criticism for things ranging for being too sensational to them directly calling for military action against Kony. Likely due in part to this, Invisible Children just announced (as is detailed in this piece by The Guardian) a sequel video coming April 3rd.

A second Time feature that stood out recently was its April 9 cover story, "The Future Of Oil" by Bryan Walsh. I've linked to a number of pieces by Walsh and as is usually the case, his story comes across as thorough and well-reported. Upshot of the piece is that oil isn't running out imminently (predicted as recently as a few years ago), but new sources of oil are going to be deeper, more remote and require more invasive drilling methods to reach. Result is that people don't need to worry as much about not having oil, but rather should have great concern over the economic and ecological costs of getting to what there is.

Also from this recent issue of Time was "Change Agent" by Bobby Ghosh and Elizabeth Dias. Profiled is the organization Change.org and its founder Ben Rattray. The site allows anyone to launch a petition on behalf of their particular cause and is detailed in the Time piece as being "a certified B corporation that benefits entrepreneurs who want both to make a profit and seek social change." Ghosh and Dias also write significant content about the Change.org petition asking for prosecution of George Zimmerman for shooting Trayvon Martin... now at 2.2M electronic signatures.

Finally, two additional (and short) Time pieces stood out with an interesting concept from each.

"Drawsome" was about the OMGPop created app Draw Something that was recently purchased for $180M by Zynga. Of note in the piece was description of how the game was built not as a competition, but rather collaborative effort (between either friends or complete strangers) to complete Pictionary-like drawing challenges.

Last piece to mention was about a book I likely won't read, but find interesting how it was written. "Homer-Erotic" details The Song of Achilles from high school teacher Madeline Miller. Concept is a "based in potential fact" fictional retelling of the Trojan War as depicted in The Iliad from Homer. It's a fascinating genre of writing, this idea of spinning off from the truth (or spinning off from characters created by others as FanFiction does).