Dumbest Post

DD: Instagram As a Tool for the Media

Video Debate: Are Gadgets Driving Us Away From Real Conversation?

The Daily Download team discusses Sherry Turkle’s New York Times article, “The Flight From Conversation.”

Ethical Shopping and the Guilt Trip: A Love Story

Fashioning Change is already beta-testing a great site called Wear This, Not That, which invades any big-brand shopping sites you may be browsing and offers ethical alternatives to clothing items you may be interested in. You can also use it from the Fashioning Change site, where you can select a number of fashion retail brands and search for better alternatives.

The tool will also tell you what good you’ll be doing by buying from Fashioning Change instead of the mainstream option. For example, if I buy a United By Blue messenger bag, instead of one from J Crew, I not only save $19, but I also give my money to a company that “removes 1 pound of trash from oceans for each product sold” and get a product that is 100 percent organic cotton. On the other hand, the site tells me, J Crew has a lack of transparency in its supply chain and no commitment to eco-friendly manufacturing.

Kurtz and The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman on Excessive Media Mogul Pay

Compensation for media executives is skyrocketing – and occasionally bears no relationship to the success of the company. Our Howard Kurtz discusses with The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman.

Video: Grover Norquist Juggles the Issues

Grover Norquist is a serious guy.  A really serious guy.  He’s never held elective office, and most people don’t know his name.  Yet more than any other human being on the planet, Norquist drives the bus when it comes to pressuring Congress into keeping taxes low.

Turns out, he has a silly side.

Howard Kurtz and I sat down with the billionaires’ best friend and founder of Americans for Tax Reform in his downtown Washington office to get his reaction on a piece novelist Stephen King wrote for The Daily Beast titled “Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!”

The serious stuff is here:

And then, well, there’s this video I took with my iPad as we were packing up to leave.

Twitter’s International Intrigue

Sometimes Twitter seems unstoppable.

No matter what the news event, tweeting now plays a key role. Once dismissed as a pedestrian toy for the bored to record what they had for lunch, the social network is now part of the media and political bloodstream.

On Sunday, Twitter users managed to circumvent a French embargo on election results to tell the world that Nicolas Sarkozy had been booted from the presidency. The tweeters used code names to avoid running afoul of the law. Sarkozy was either Rolex (his opulent lifestyle with Carla Bruni) or the wine Hungarian Tokaji (his pere is Hungarian). Francois Hollande, France’s incoming president, was called Gouda cheese, among other things. The hashtag: #radiolondres, for a BBC World War II service.

The reason for the subterfuge: France imposes fines up to $99,000 for releasing election results before 8 p.m.

Days earlier, Twitter users also outsmarted the Chinese regime as the case of dissident Chen Guangcheng played out during Hillary Clinton’s visit to Beijing.

Brokaw on the Media’s Disconnect

Tom Brokaw knows how to spin a good yarn.

We were chatting at Washington’s Newseum, where he was helping celebrate the centennial of my alma mater, the Columbia School of Journalism, when the longtime NBC anchor described how he and Walter Cronkite once escaped the craziness of Louisville on Kentucky Derby weekend by hitching a ride on a hot-air balloon.

Brokaw seems at ease after so many years in the Nightly News trenches, traveling around the country for occasional specials and promoting his latest book. And he delivered some biting observations about the news business in a video interview with my colleague Howard Kurtz for The Daily Beast.

Most Americans are not as ideologically divided as the pugilistic pundits they watch on television, Brokaw says. They feel disconnected from the “closed game” of politics, which has “its own language” and “its own culture.”

The Constanza Proposal: What Yahoo’s Chief Should Do

For our younger readers, there’s an episode of Seinfeld where the hapless George Costanza decides his life is going so horribly that he should start doing the opposite of every instinct.

His first act, if I remember correctly, is ordering the opposite of what he usually gets at the coffee shop, which leads to meeting a gorgeous girl who made the exact same order. Going against his instincts, he goes up to talk to her and tells her he doesn’t have a job and lives with his parents. In a reaction that could only be scripted by Larry David, she’s intrigued. No matter how crazy it seems, he continues in this fashion, eventually getting a job with the Yankees. It’s at this point he says something like, “This is no longer an experiment, Jerry. This is my religion.”

I don’t usually suggest that CEOs model their jobs after implausible sitcom plots, but I think it’s about time Yahoo’s Scott Thompson adopt “The Costanza Doctrine.”

Tempted to lie on your resume? Do the opposite.

Ready to scrap a complex three-way Asian asset deal that’s taken years to negotiate? Do the opposite.

Fast Chat: Santorum’s anemic email endorsement; Maurice Sendak on politics

Lauren Ashburn and Howard Kurtz sit down to discuss the death of children’s author Maurice Sendak and the strong feelings he had about certain politicians.

What It’s Like To Join A Covert Presidential Trip

A photographer from Reuters offers a peek inside an unusual situation: what’s it’s like to be tapped to join the President on a trip that isn’t public.

Where Daughters Will Live Shorter Lives Than Their Mothers

The life expectancy of American women is increasing significantly more slowly than that of men – and in hundreds of counties across the country, girls born today will have shorter life spans than their mothers.

A Tool To Combat Terror: The Xbox

The new popularity of game consoles in Mogadishu, Somalia, has had at least one positive impact: a reduction in the number of young men who sign up to become militants.

Dumbest Post – How Posts About Dumb Things Help Them Spread

In a smart post about dumb behavior, The Atlantic’s Nadja Popovich describes how social media has shifted the patterns by which stupid trends among youth spread.