Ben Wolf

Mr. Money Mustache can tend to get a little high-level at times, talking about all these feelings and philosophies that underlie the proper path to wealth.

But you can’t just smile your way to the top – there are real numbers at work in the background, whether you understand them or not.  These can gang up and torture you (as in the case of a person with a crushing 60-hour workweek who maintains a paltry 10% savings rate), or they can boost you right out of a mandatory work sentence in unprecedented time.

This is especially relevant in the wake of the annual spending article, which always brings up a lot of questions about how Mustachians accumulate wealth so quickly. So let’s start with the big picture, which is how to become wealthy:

So with this post, let’s explain these three fundamentals of rapid wealth accumulation the MMM way, so the schooling will be there for all future students.

Net Worth

We’ll begin with the end in mind. Net Worth is a bit of a degrading term, as it incorrectly implies a person is only worth the amount of money he or she has accumulated. But you can use this for motivation, since as a Mustachian your figure will tend to be unusually high.

The overall formula is easy:

The Value of everything you own (-subtract-) The total of all your loans

The details are equally easy, although sometimes debated. So I’ll tell you the way I happen to think about it:

• You do include the value of any properties you own, including your primary house
• All 401(k)s, IRAs, savings plans, and other hidden assets are included
• All mortgages, loans, credit card balances and other nonsense get subtracted
• Don’t bother with depreciating consumer stuff like your cars,  furniture, or Apple products, unless you are willing to sell them right now.

Let’s start with a deliberately twisted example:

Joe Consumer (age 33) is a Washington DC Lawyer pulling down $250,000 per year.

He has a condo he paid $517,000 for with a current market value of $580,000 and a mortgage of $460,000. He also has a BMW 535i sedan that cost him $61,300 including tax a few years ago, payment is $539 per month and remaining balance is $43,000.

401(k) balance is $50,000, IRA is $27,300 and he has $90,000 left on his Harvard student loans, which he plans to get serious about soon and pay off over the next 10 years. Credit card balance is just a bit high at $8,000 right now, what with the holiday season hangover. What is his net worth?

Whoo! Look at that collection of financial spaghetti.  Oddly enough, when people write to me with financial problems this is usually how they are described: a big list of confusing and unsorted details. They just heap them on a plate and hope it will straighten itself out some day. When you’re confused about your own money, it is likely that you are wasting a lot of it.

If you ask the average Josephine, Joe is a successful rich guy, doing very well for a 33-year-old. Expensive house, flashy car, massive income and even some money in the bank. If he just keeps on the current path and saves a bit more during those “peak earning years” in a couple decades once he makes partner, he’ll have a nice fat retirement fund by age 65.

My diagnosis would be quite different: “Holy Shit, Joe! What the hell have you been blowing all your money on?! You should have had a higher net worth than that many years ago, given your career!!”

Very Rough Guideline: Take the total money you’ve earned after taxes in your lifetime (suppose that for Joe it happens to be $1,243,100). If you don’t have at least 40% of it still around to show for it today, you are spending way too much.

Bonus: Suppose his nearly-new BMW can still be sold on Craigslist for $33,000. Although he has already lost $28,300 in depreciation on this horrible money pit, he could end the bleeding immediately by selling the car and taking the $33k plus $10k of his own money to pay off the $43,000 note. This would increase his net worth by $33k and set him on a much more prosperous path for the future.

Spending

This was Joe’s problem above. The key is to understand where your money is going, and for most of us that means tracking your spending. I calculate it like this:

Everything that flows out of your wallet, bank account, credit cards,  or automatic payroll deductions for things like insurance.

Finer Points:
I include property taxes and sales tax, but do not count income tax or other payroll taxes.
I include all loan interest and fees, but do not count the principal portion of loan payments.

Why? Because I’m very interested in financial independence: that point when your passive non-work income is enough to pay for a hypothetical retired life of your choosing. Right now, Joe might be earning $250k and paying over $60,000 in income taxes. In retirement, he will probably be in a lower tax bracket. Plus income might come from dividends, long-term capital gains, or rent checks from investment properties he owns. He might even live in an area with a different tax rate.

You need to deeply understanding your spending needs and wants in order to know if you can afford to retire. Instead of taking random guesses at the factors above, I prefer to think of everything in terms of after-tax dollars. Take-home income instead of gross income.

So if we sort out what is surely a twisted ball of credit card,  EFT and ATM transactions, Joe’s monthly spending might look something like this:

So how can a busy person track all of these transactions and categorize them well? You have two choices:

• Manually save all receipts and enter them into a spreadsheet or piece of budgeting software every night, or
• Do all your spending on a credit card and let some financial software like Mint, YNAB, or Personal Capital grab all your transactions and sort them out (this is what I prefer).

In either case, you’ll probably spend at least some cash which you pull out of ATMs. You will see this in your automated spending report as well – I suggest assigning your cash spending to a category called “the decadent throwing around of unnecessary $20 bills.”

Take-home pay

This boils down to the amount of your paycheck that you eventually get to spend yourself. So let’s look over Joe’s shoulder as he opens a biweekly paycheck:

Gross Pay: $8620

401(k) plan deduction: $692
Employer 401(k) Match: $300
Automatic deduction he has set up to pay towards student loans: $1000
Professional Fees/Insurance: $200
Federal Tax: $1724
State Tax: $689

Net pay to his bank account: (8620-692-1000-200-1724-689) = $4315
Since there are 2.16 pay periods in the average month (52 / 24) you would scale this up to see that he gets an average of $9349 per month showing up in the bank.

But this is where many people get confused, because this paycheck he takes home is not really his take-home pay. You need to add back in the money that he is actually using – including to pay off loans –  or will get to use – including all retirement and savings account deposits.

If this sounds like a shitload of money, that’s because it is. Anyone making $250k gross pay should be rolling in it and saving the vast majority, therefore able to retire within just a few years. If you get your savings rate right.

 Savings Rate

Now that we’ve done all the hard work, we get to hit the gas pedal and show off a little, since we can make some bold forecasts.

Hey, Joe is still saving a third of his income, even with the most outrageous spending list that I could invent for a single guy. It’s not completely suicidal, but he is still squandering an opportunity that only a tiny percentage of humans have ever been offered: the opportunity to become financially free while he’s still young.

To steal a few data points from the most popular article in this blog’s history: The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement:  Joe’s 35% savings rate means he is on track to retire in about 25 years. He is already 33, so this means he is sentencing himself to be locked into that office until age 58.

This may seem “early” by current American standards, but if the reports I get about high-octane Washington DC law careers are accurate, that shit can get old in a hurry. It is far wiser to earn your freedom while you are still fired up about working.

From this point, it can get far worse or far better. Joe could get married, have multiple children, and expand the level of spending (larger house, more vehicles,  private schools, etc.) to consume even more of his income.

• If he adds just $3000 to this monthly budget, he drops to a tragic 15% savings rate and is set for a 43 year working career
• On the other hand, if he trims down the excess and goes to a still-insane $5000 monthly spending level, he’ll be saving about 65% of his income, which means he will be set for life less than 10 years from now.
• If he can streamline life to just a slightly less ridiculous level than that, let’s say to my own level of spending, he will be retired well before 40.

So there you have it: The easy way to calculate spending and savings rates, and your net worth.

Although I illustrated it here with an outrageous but very common example of high income and high spending, the principles work just as well, and are even more important if you are living on an average income. In the US, it is quite possible to live well on under $7000 per person per year, and even gradually become wealthy on a below-average income.

But the first step is to understand how all these dollars fit together. How are YOU doing?

 

Bonus: For those who love to calculate, my friend and fellow early retiree Darrow Kirkpatrick maintains a really thorough roundup of the best retirement calculators on his blog here: http://www.caniretireyet.com/the-best-retirement-calculators/

"I am not a science computer!" says Tom Brady.

Alastair Humphreys writes about making his living as an adventurer. But really, this advice works for anyone who wants to turn their hobby into a job. For instance, this list of reasons he's an adventurer is pretty much why I did the same thing with kottke.org almost 10 years ago.

- I love almost every aspect of what I do.

- I love being self-employed: the freedom and the responsibility and the pressure.

- I think I'm probably now un-employable.

- I love being creative.

- I appreciate that building a profile helps generate exciting opportunities. (And I have come to accept -- though not enjoy -- the weird world of relentless self-promotion that being a career adventurer requires. I remain uncomfortable with people praising me more than I deserve, and I continue to get very angry and upset with the inevitable haters that your self-promotion will attract.)

Notice I don't mention "going on adventures", because there are loads of ways to do that in life. Don't become a career adventurer solely because you want to go off on fun trips. There's easier ways to do that.

That third point is a real double-edged sword. I can't imagine what other job I would be even remotely qualified for other than this one. Feels like walking a tightrope without a safety net sometimes. (via @polarben)

Tags: Alastair Humphreys   kottke.org   working

Ryan Adams and Jenny Lewis have become inextricably linked in the past year; Adams was heavily involved with Lewis’ great The Voyager, they both have been deriving inspiration from Tom Petty, and lately they’ve been touring together and guesting on each other’s songs. They even played Kimmel together! Now they’re also sharing an episode of Austin City Limits, which airs this weekend on PBS. Below, check out a preview of the episode, Adams performing the awesomely Jackson Browne-esque “Let It Ride” from Cold Roses.

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From a study that “explores whether intimacy between two strangers can be accelerated by having them ask each other a specific series of personal questions”:

1) Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?

4) What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?

5) When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?

7) Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?

19) If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?

26) Complete this sentence: “I wish I had someone with whom I could share … “

33) If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?

Filed under: questions

Before his death in 2000, Roebuck “Pops” Staples gave the world nearly five decades’ worth of gospel and soul, both on his own and as the leader of the Staples Singers, the family singing group he put together with his kids. In 1999, Pops got to work on his final album, but he never had the chance to finish it. But now, Mavis Staples’, Pops’ legendary daughter, has finished that album, now called Don’t Lose This, and she’s called in help. Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy, who produced Mavis’ last two albums, serves as co-producer with Mavis. Tweedy plays bass on the album, and his son Spencer plays drums. Below, listen to the lovely first single “Somebody Was Watching” and check out a short making-of video that includes a few musical heavyweights singing Pops’ praises.

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Mr. Wahlforss, is SoundCloud a profitable business?

That has not been our focus so far, to be a profit-making business. It’s all about timing and when we really decide to focus more in that area. But I think it is more important to be able to prove that a model is working, that you can see revenue, that you created a thing that people find valuable. Especially in the earlier days of the company, you could always sort of point and say, “Hey, we have something that works, that brings money and not only users.” That was our philosophy when we started.

SoundCloud is valued at around 700 million dollars. Don’t you think it is crazy that a company can be worth so much without actually making a profit?

I mean you can say a lot about that… Some companies do it very consciously and understand exactly how to stage it and others really don’t have much of a plan. It’s hard to say it from the outside. There was a climate after the whole Dotcom crash, and there was a second wave with some failures around 2006 and 2007, where we were conscious of that. There was a movement around smaller, more focused companies that were doing one thing. We thought of keeping it very simple and making a subscription based service that if people find value in it, they pay for it. Then a lot of things happened along the way.

Definitely. SoundCloud has become the poster child of the Berlin start-up scene. Before you guys, Berlin really only had the Samwer brothers who are known for copying other people’s concepts for the German market.

When we came here, the Samwer Brothers were the only thing that Berlin had – that sort of culture of copycats. I think there has been less and less of it over time. And it is not like in Silicon Valley that people don’t copy – in fact there are always like five or six copies of every successful thing that comes out there – but we are really happy that we have succeeded in transforming the image of Berlin to something more representative of what it actually is. It is a genuinely innovative place right now. But I’m not being critical of the Samwer Brothers. They play their part, they are very good operationally and they have some very big success stories. But SoundCloud has certainly helped paint a fairer picture of Berlin.

What drew you to Berlin before it had a reputation for internet startups?

I came to Berlin in 2001 to do music and I actually had a record deal. Through some connections in the creative, design scene here I found my way to a company called Gate5. That was really an experience of a startup, of this chaotic entrepreneurial climate. They were trying to create something new, trying to find customers, trying to use technologies in alternate ways and I realized, “Oh actually that’s what I am good at.” I was only there for a year and then I started doing music again, I was in Japan and we played a tour there, but I would say I sort of found my identity, which took a long time.

Why did it take so long?

In Sweden, entrepreneurship it is not at all widely known the way it is in the US. I remember there was a This American Life episode recently where they asked teenagers in different small towns across America, “What are you going to do when you grow up?” and a lot of them were talking about entrepreneurship as if that is a totally natural thing. In Sweden I don’t think you would get the same answer. Maybe these days you might start to get some of these answers, but my parents did not socialize me at all into that area, for example. To raise money was completely new territory; that was nothing that my parents knew about.

Did you end up getting start-up funding?

We were trying to raise money. At the end of 2008, you had this real estate crisis in the US and no one really wanted to invest in us. People even said, “I know that what you are doing could somehow make sense but we don’t want to take on any risks.” So, it was really tough there for a while. We didn’t pay salaries for a long time. Luckily Berlin is so cheap that you can survive on almost nothing.

How did you convince people to keep working for you without paying them?

They had to work for free for a couple of months and we had to talk with them and let them know that a salary is going to come, hopefully. I remember I was in debt left and right. I had borrowed small amounts of money from different people. But it was a really fun time. I poured a lot of energy into this startup.

With 16-hour days and all night coding sessions kind of like in The Social Network?

The movie is obviously kind of a polished thing, and maybe there are exaggerations, but that’s exactly how it was. We had a crazy, weird location. It was just this concrete box that this criminal Danish guy painted before we moved in. He literally just threw buckets of color in this incredibly poor paint job. We slept there in some cases, had crazy, weird parties there. It was kind of a crazy time because we had nothing else. We came to Berlin for this purpose. We were on a mission here. We didn’t have any money, so we had to really bootstrap and figure out how to get by.

But within two years you received 3.3 million dollars in funding and within three years you had over one million subscribers. Was there ever a time that you thought things were going too fast?

I’ve had my share of stress related issues and now I try to make it a more balanced, sustainable thing. But to be honest, I think it’s a lot easier for me to feel like things are going too slow. It’s very easy to toss around ideas and easy to come up with some big concept, but to execute it, and to really nail it, takes years in some cases. Of course, it’s really overwhelming sometimes because there are new people coming in all the time, but for me it’s probably the opposite. Also, when you have this many people, as an individual you can’t move the needle that much. You are part of a big group of people and you can only bring a few things to the table.

You have to stop doing everything yourself and start delegating. Looking at your offices here I imagine you now have around 200 employees…

That’s kind of what’s been going on for the last six years. One of the things that I really struggle with is that a lot of the skills that I have are obsolete in some way, like making music – I don’t have a lot of time to make music. Building websites – I don’t code or design anymore. There’s a lot of stuff that I could do or that I used to do, that I can no longer do because it would just no longer work. That’s kind of a nostalgic element for me.

At least there is always the option of selling your stake in the company and pretty much doing whatever you want.

I think I would probably go crazy after three months. I don’t know if I could just check out. I’m able to use a lot of the experience and skills that I’ve acquired in this project, which is really nice. In a sense I found my identity – I really like entrepreneurship, I like starting new things, I like thinking about an idea and then executing on it. Thinking back, at some point when I was a teenager, my father said, “Hey, you have a lot of stuff ongoing that you have not finished. Try to finish something. Try to create something from beginning to end.” And I think that really stuck with me. I feel a strong sense of commitment. I’ve set out to do this now and we need to finish it.

Remember dragging yourself out of bed before dawn to get to your high school classes on time? Remember how much easier it seemed in grade school? Yeah, you weren’t just getting lazy, a new study shows.

The research, out today in the journal PLoS One, is further confirmation for what sleep researchers had been thinking for a while: As they get older, kids’ and teens’ circadian rhythms shift, meaning they really should go to bed later at night and wake up later in the morning. The new study lends support to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recent statement that middle and high schools shouldn’t start earlier than 8:30 a.m.—doing otherwise, the pediatricians’ group argues, could threaten kids’ health and academic performance.

The conflict between school start times and biology could pose health risks as an apparently natural desire to stay in bed gets rudely awakened by the morning bell.

In their study, Stephanie Crowley and researchers from five other institutions followed 38 kids aged nine or 10 initially and 56 teens aged 15 or 16 initially, all from Providence, Rhode Island, for about two and a half years. About every six months, those 94 participants underwent a week-long sleep assessment, during which they kept daily sleep diaries and wore activity monitors on their wrists. The resulting data gave the research team an idea of their subjects’ sleep patterns, but to investigate what sleep their bodies actually wanted, as opposed to what they got, the team had each participant come into the lab to measure something called dim light melatonin onset. Basically, that’s the time when the body starts producing more melatonin in preparation for sleep.

As both the younger and older cohorts aged, the team found, they went to bed later and later, and on weekends they woke up at correspondingly later times, typically around 8 or 8:30 a.m.. On weekdays, kids under 18 all got up before 7 a.m.—suggesting schools set the de facto wake up time for most adolescents—while those 18 or older woke up closer to 8 a.m., in line with their weekend habits. Regardless of when they got up, the study participants’ melatonin rhythms shifted back by one or two hours as they aged. That suggests that regardless of school policy, adolescents really ought to go to bed later.

“The consistent early weekday sleep offset [waking] times across 9 to 17 years … indicates that the school schedule may suppress a biologically-driven behavior to sleep later,” a result bolstered by the facts that weekend waking times grew later over time and that the difference between weekday and weekend waking times declined only after age 17, near or after the end of high school, the authors write. The conflict between school start times and biology could pose health risks as an apparently natural desire to stay in bed gets rudely awakened by the morning bell.

Rolling Stone lists the 40 most groundbreaking music albums in history. Kanye West makes the list with 808s and Heartbreaks, Dr. Dre with The Chronic, Nirvana with Nevermind, and the Beatles with Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper's. About The Chronic:

The album sold a world to white America that it had never really seen before, and packaged it with a soundtrack so funky there was no avoiding it. It was both raw, uncut underground and carefully composed pop. If Public Enemy confronted white America, The Chronic seduced it. For the first time ever, hip-hop's mainstream and America's were one.

I counted only four women artists though: Mary J. Blige, Loretta Lynn, Nico, and Carole King.

Tags: best of   lists   music

In this week’s issue of The New Yorker, John Seabrook writes about how the streaming service Spotify is changing the landscape of the music industry. On Out Loud, Seabrook joins Kelefa Sanneh, who also writes frequently about music for the magazine, and Nicholas Thompson, the editor of newyorker.com, to discuss how artists, record companies, and their own listening habits are adapting to the economics of streaming. They discuss how Spotify became the dominant streaming company, why Taylor Swift recently pulled her entire catalogue from the service, and how the industry is likely to evolve as the tech industry and the music business continue to converge. Seabrook says, “The tips of the two continents are just touching. And that is going to be a fascinating, enormous cultural change, conflict, and hopefully synthesis to watch.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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On Immigration, Obama Isn’t the Radical One
Is Dishonesty Endemic to Banking and Finance?

How to support an artist you love by Austin Kleon

Charlie Day, from 'Horrible Bosses 2,' has been charming the world for years as grubby wildcard Charlie Kelly on TV's 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.' In honor of the actor's return to the big screen, here are his funniest moments.

A quick lesson on branding—via @gewqk.

As I sat down to write this feature, Bob Dylan looked up at me from the cover of the most recent issue of Rolling Stone that sat on my coffee table. He clearly approved of what Father John Misty was belting through my laptop’s speakers. I think I may have even seen him nod when I found a quote from Father John himself about the creation of his first album, Fear Fun, that read: “I got into my van with enough mushrooms to choke a horse and started driving down the coast with nowhere to go.”

Father John Misty is a force to be reckoned with on “Bored in the USA,” a single off his upcoming album, I Love You, Honeybear, due February 10 on Sub Pop. He’s perfected a mournful warble and a gorgeous falsetto that give life to lyrics portraying his frustration with modern day America, cuttingly ironic and bursting at the seams with social commentary. From the first moments of dissonant piano music, you can tell that this song is somehow both a familiar and incredibly unique entry into the American folk music cannon. So really, can you blame Mr. Dylan for his admiration?

The post Father John Misty
“Bored in the USA” appeared first on Jonk Music.

Last week, Emily Dreyfuss wrote a piece at about Why I'm Giving Wikipedia 6 Bucks a Month.

"Give me money, Emily," Wales begged, "then go back to researching Beyonce lyrics."

"Excuse me, Jimmy," I wanted to say, "I don't appreciate being watched as I read about how her song "Baby Boy" includes a lyrical interpolation of "No Fear" by O.G.C."

Later, Wikipedia replaced Wales with other employees of the Wikimedia Foundation, which maintains Wikipedia with grants and donations. They moved me about as much as Wales did, which is to say not at all.

Today, while scanning my third Wikipedia article in as many hours, I saw the beggi.... er, note was back. It's at the bottom now, without the pleading visage of a Wikipedian, and now includes an option to pay monthly.

I was annoyed, again. That's the first instinct of anyone who spends time on the Internet and is constantly bombarded by pleas for money. But then I realized something: My annoyance was a symptom of my dependence on Wikipedia. I rely on it utterly. I take it completely for granted.

I found her argument persuasive, so much so that I just signed up to give Wikipedia a monthly amount as well. I consider it a subscription fee to an indispensable and irreplaceable resource I use dozens of times weekly while producing kottke.org. It's a business expense, just like paying for server hosting, internet access, etc. -- the decision to pay became a no-brainer for me when I thought of it that way.

Do other media companies subscribe to Wikipedia in the same fashion? How about it Gawker, NY Times, Vox, Wired, ESPN, WSJ, New York Magazine, Vice, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post? Even $500/month is a drop in the bucket compared to your monthly animated GIF hosting bill and I know your writers use Wikipedia as much as I do. Come on, grab that company credit card and subscribe.

Tags: business   Emily Dreyfuss   journalism   Wikipedia

kochalka:

“James Kochalka on Being Creative”

“The main inhibitor for creativity is just being scared… if you’re worried that what you’re gonna do is not good enough, then you just don’t do it. That’s what “writer’s block” really is: people say, “Oh, I don’t have any ideas.” It’s not that you don’t have ideas, you’ve got tons of ideas, you’re afraid they’re not good enough.”

James has long been one of my favorite cartoonists. Two of his pieces of writing had a big impact on me early on: “Craft is the enemy” and “The Horrible Truth About Comics,” both of which are in his great book, The Cute Manifesto. (Fun fact: the original dummy book for Steal Like An Artist was just a copy of The Cute Manifesto with a dust jacket.)

If you haven’t read American Elf, it’s one of my favorite comics, ever. Start with volume one.

Filed under: james kochalka

1. An embankment made to prevent flooding. 2. An embankment around a field that is to be irrigated. 3. A landing place; a quay.

Mr. Cage, why did you change your name?

I had to reinvent myself. I am still legally Nicolas Coppola, but I am Nicolas Cage. I love my family and all of their accomplishments, but as a young actor going into casting offices I couldn’t get that off of me. I had to focus on the character and the audition and there was pressure because of my name. As soon as I went into the casting office under a new name and they didn’t know that there was a connection and I got the part, I was like, “I can really do this.” I felt liberated. It gave me the freedom to become what I wanted to be in my dreams.

It’s funny that you talk about liberation when the name you chose is Cage.

It is ironic, I hadn’t thought of it that way. I was looking for a name that was unique but simple. I wanted people to remember an exotic name that was short and sweet and Cage to me seemed right. Tom Cruise changed his name, we came up together, and I also liked the avant-garde composer John Cage. I thought it was interesting you had both sides, you know, you have the popcorn side and the more thoughtful side.

That’s been true of your career, actually. You’ve received acclaim for your acting, even winning an Academy Award for Best Actor, but you do a lot of “popcorn” films too. Is that by design?

Yes, it was by design. I wanted to break the mold a little bit. I was reading books by Stanislavsky, you know An Actor Prepares, and I was interested in the idea of opening doors for performance in film so you don’t have to get stuck in one style: naturalism, photorealism. I like to mix it up a little bit in terms of my presentation. I can be quiet and cinéma vérité and get more into the minutia of a performance, but I can also do an operatic, larger than life, jazz-acting sort of thing.

Roger Ebert once called you a fearless actor who doesn’t care if the audience thinks you are going over the top. Is that true?

You can design a performance in terms of the size of it, go outside the box, be operatic, but if there is emotional content in it – if you still have the feeling – you can commit to whatever you want. I’m not the first one to do it. In the ’30s it happened quite a bit. Look at Cagney, was he real? No. Was he truthful? Yes.

How do you get to that place when you are on set?

In a movie I was on recently I had a four-page scene where they wanted a copperhead snake to be in the grass. They had a snake that had no poison and I said, “You know what, I think we really need to take a chance here and use a real snake and pick it up and use it in the scene.” And they were like, “Why?” I said, “It’s a big scene and I think it will relax me.”

Relax you? Really?

I’m one of those people that when I do stunts or drink a lot of coffee it calms me down. And I like what it can offer in terms of creativity – you could feel the focus on set. You don’t have to act. If you can avoid acting and get to the truth of it and be in the moment, something magical will happen.

What do you say to the people who criticize your style and call it overacting?

It hasn’t always been met with appreciation, but that is the beauty of the challenge: you have to stick to your beliefs. I think that if someone does something really unique and original, chances are that it’s going to get criticized. A lot of my heroes in the past were heavily criticized for being different, like Edvard Munch and Stravinsky. These are people that broke the mold.

But what if the critics are right?

Sometimes you may be doing something that isn’t there – there is no honest feeling and it’s not relevant and it doesn’t work – but sometimes if you are getting criticized you may be doing something right simply by virtue of the fact that you are getting someone to think. It’s not always best to be loved. Sometimes it’s good to be hated because you have done something that got under their skin.

Has that stance been difficult for you to maintain over the years?

Oh yeah. I remember when I was doing Moonstruck and I wanted to talk like Jean Marais in Beauty and the Beast – (in a deep, gravelly voice) he had that accent and his voice was very gravelly – and I thought of my character in Moonstruck like a wolf who spoke with a growl. And so I was talking like that in the movie and I got a call from the director Norman Jewison and he said, “Nicolas, the dailies aren’t working.” And then I started hearing names of other actors and I thought I was going to get fired. I had to quickly drop the Jean Marais.

What was the last performance you saw that got under your skin?

Joaquin Phoenix in The Master. I loved him in that. I just thought it was the most original, relentless, honest, and tragic performance that I’ve seen in modern times. There is nobody else like him. I also think Aaron Johnson is excellent. I’ve been lucky to work with all these guys. They are marching to the beat of their own drummer.

You also been lucky to work with many brilliant directors: the Coen Brothers, David Lynch, Werner Herzog. Was that also by design?

I’ve been lucky to work with some of the most creative people and it’s true that I enjoy filmmaking and I’m an enthusiast. I’d seen Blood Simple and I really wanted to work with the Coen Brothers and I must have auditioned for Raising Arizona 10 times. Werner was a blessing because we were getting together at the time where there might have been some confusion about the roles I was choosing and he gave me a chance to get back to my roots and do independent filmmaking in a way that seemed a bit more original.

Confusion about the roles you were choosing? So you are concerned with what people think of you?

I just want people to get the story right: it’s by design, it’s a concept, it’s something that I want to do! It’s not because I have no control. It’s because I’m in control by being out of control.

Muhsin Muhammad’s time with the Bears is best remembered for its six-word eulogy. In 2008, Muhammad had just returned to the Panthers after three forgettable seasons in Chicago. In his final year, he’d caught just 40 passes for one of the league’s worst offenses. When Sports Illustrated’s Peter King asked him about those dark days in Chicago, Muhammad didn’t hold back. “That’s right,” he said. “It’s where receivers go to die.” It would seem cruel if it weren’t so true.

I grew up about 45 miles from Soldier Field and spent plenty of Sundays there. Muhammad’s stay in Chicago was an extension of the franchise’s identity for the past half-century. From Doug Atkins and Bill George to Dick Butkus and Mike Singletary, from Dan Hampton and Richard Dent all the way to Brian Urlacher, the Bears have long been defined by defense. Even the way Walter Payton played felt like a safety who just happened to run the ball.

To be a Bears fan was to give up on offense, and nowhere was that sacrifice bleaker than at receiver. The Bears’ all-time leader in receiving yards is Johnny Morris, a flanker type who played from 1958 to 1967. In 10 seasons, he totaled 5,059 yards and 356 catches, another Bears receiver record. On average, it comes out to a little less than 42 yards a game. He had one season with more than 1,000 yards. No Bear has ever had more than two.

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Founded in 1920 as the Decatur Staleys, the Bears are one of the league’s original franchises. Even with 94 years’ worth of players, only the Buccaneers have a career receiving leader — Mark Carrier — with fewer yards than Morris, and Carrier did it in 33 fewer games. For nearly a century, Chicago has been, in almost every way, the most receiver-starved team in league history.

Chicago’s playmaking past is so barren that the team’s trade for Brandon Marshall two years ago made him the best receiver in team history before he even caught a pass. By the standards he set in Denver, the seasons Marshall spent in Miami were pedestrian. They also would have been the best two-year stretch the Bears have ever had. Even Marshall’s enormous talent wasn’t enough to calm the fears that he would end up another victim of the receiver-eating sarlacc pit that is Soldier Field.

What actually happened was beyond anything Bears fans could have hoped. Instead of slipping, Marshall was better than he’d ever been. In two years, he has compiled 2,803 yards ­— more than halfway to Morris — and owns two of the best receiving seasons in team history. The production was undeniable, but to watch Marshall was to watch a player unlike any the Bears had ever had. He bullied cornerbacks, tossed them aside in the open field, and overpowered them in the end zone. He looked how a star receiver should look.

The Bears rewarded him like one in March with a three-year extension worth up to $30 million, news he announced live on The View. He was on the show to promote mental-health awareness, which he does often these days. In 2011, Marshall was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, a disease that can lead to emotional outbursts like the ones that marred Marshall’s early years in the league.

At the press conference announcing his extension, he fought back tears. “He was desperate,” said Jay Cutler during his press conference after the team’s OTAs. Cutler has known Marshall since they were rookies in Denver. “He was searching for something. He found it here.” After signing the deal, Marshall called coming to Chicago “lifesaving and career-saving.”

That’s what has happened in the time since Muhammad buried the Bears. In just two years, Chicago has transformed from one of the league’s most putrid offenses into one of its best. For the first time since the 1940s, the Bears look like a team defined by offense. Chicago is no longer a franchise where receivers go to die. It’s where they’re reborn.

Phil Emery swears that Cutler had no hand in the trade for Marshall. Soon after Emery was hired as the Bears’ general manager, in early 2012, he sat down for a meeting with his quarterback. Emery told him what he would tell a lot of people in those early days. “When I came in, I said the one thing we had to do was increase the playmakers on our team,” he says. But Emery claims Cutler didn’t even bring up Marshall’s name.

Jeff Ireland, then the Dolphins’ GM, is the one who did that. Ireland was looking to shop Marshall.³⁷ “Obviously,” Emery says, “he thought we would be an interested party.” During the negotiations, Emery learned that Marshall had been implicated in an incident at a New York nightclub, but after looking into the incident he felt confident that Marshall hadn’t been involved. Emery agreed to send two third-round picks to Miami in exchange for the Dolphins receiver.

Bringing in Marshall was a start, but it still left the Bears only one-third of the way to a quality receiving corps. The trade became official on the opening day of the league year, about a month and a half before Emery’s first draft as GM. “The draft for me, at the end, always gets down to repetitively watching players that you like with the head coach,”³⁸ Emery says. “And we just kept coming back to Alshon.”

Alshon Jeffery had an uneven final season at South Carolina. The Gamecocks’ starting quarterback, Stephen Garcia, had been booted from the team. Jeffery’s weight had ballooned. His receiving totals were cut nearly in half. But it was the previous season that Emery was drawn to, the year when Jeffery had 1,517 yards, tops in the SEC, and looked like one of the most physically dominant players in the country.

The combine was a chance for Emery to prod Jeffery about his lagging finish in college. “We tried to shake his tree a little bit,” he says. The conversation started light. They talked about basketball, the first sport in which Jeffery starred in high school. Jeffery talked up his hardwood game, but Emery wanted to know if he thought he could really play receiver. That’s when the tone changed. “He got taller in his chair,” Emery says. “There was no doubt, in terms of how he spoke, that the guy knows he can play. It’s in his fiber.”

This is Emery’s second stint in Chicago. The first started in 1998, as a regional scout. For three of his first seven seasons with the Bears, one of Emery’s pre-draft roles was as the wide receiver cross-checker. Along with scouting his territory, he was tasked with evaluating every receiver the Bears considered draft eligible — typically about 65 players. The theory, he says, is that you develop an expertise. He left the Bears in 2004 to become the Falcons’ director of scouting. The next offseason, Atlanta took Roddy White with its first-round pick. Emery likes to think he knows what he’s looking for in wide receivers, and in Jeffery, he saw the best hands in the draft. On the Bears’ final draft board, Jeffery was among the top three receivers.

When the 2012 draft actually came, six receivers were gone by the 44th pick.³⁹ None of them was Jeffery. The Bears were picking 50th, and calls came in and went out as Emery schemed to trade up. Finally, the voice on the other end of the phone was Les Snead, the Rams’ general manager and a former colleague of Emery’s in Atlanta. He wanted a fifth-round pick to move down from 45. It was a small price for Emery to make good on his mandate for playmakers. “I wanted to be living what we spoke,” he says.

The returns came slowly. Jeffery limped through his rookie season, in every sense. Injuries limited him to just 10 games, and when he did play, he seemed to collect more pass interference calls than catches. That seems like a long time ago now. 

Jeffery wasn’t a star from the Bears’ first snap last season. It might feel that way now, but through the first three games, he was relatively quiet. Week 4, in Chicago’s ill-fated comeback attempt in Detroit, is when it really started. He had two spectacular catches — one on each sideline — that were worthless to the outcome, but revealing both for fans and for him. “As soon as he began to step up and make the plays, he became more confident, [showing] that, ‘Hey, I do belong here,’” says Mike Groh, the Bears’ receivers coach. “Then, he really started making big jumps.” The next week, Jeffery finished with 10 catches for 218 yards against the Saints, the highest total in franchise history. It was also a record he’d break eight weeks later.

Groh admits that, like most young receivers, Jeffery still has work to do as a route runner, but “his hands are always going to separate him.” Trestman’s offense allowed Jeffery to flourish because it made those hands his primary tool. Only six receivers were targeted at least 20 yards downfield more often, and only A.J. Green had more yards on those throws. Getting away from cornerbacks matters less for players who can just jump over them.

Marshall had already set a new standard, but Jeffery was something different. Marshall was established when he arrived in Chicago. Jeffery was one of our own. Matt Forte, whom the Bears took in the second round in 2008, has long been one of the most reliable and underappreciated offensive players around. But in Jeffery, Chicago had a handpicked 23-year-old who went beyond reliable. His raw totals were impressive (89 catches for 1,421 yards), but the best part of watching Jeffery every week was seeing what he might do next. He wasn’t just a receiver. He was a fireworks show.

Phil Emery press conferences should come with intermissions. Emery went for 54 minutes the day he announced Lovie Smith’s firing. The choice did warrant some explanation. Chicago won 10 games that fall, the fifth winning season in Smith’s nine-year tenure. Smith had once again put together the NFL’s best defense, but the Bears’ offense continued to toil near the bottom of the league. When Chicago failed to make the playoffs for the fifth time in six seasons, that was the end.

In its search for a new head coach, the front office found that most successful head coaches have one of two backgrounds — former quarterback coaches or defensive back coaches who’ve become coordinators. “Because they see things from a big-picture perspective,” Emery says. “They see the game from the lens of having to know it all.” With the hope being that the Bears could retain its defensive form by keeping coordinator Rod Marinelli, Emery shifted his focus to former offensive coordinators. The list was eventually narrowed down to three: Colts offensive coordinator Bruce Arians, Seahawks offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell, and CFL coach Marc Trestman.

Most important for Emery was finding a coach who could unearth everything Cutler had to offer. Ultimately, that’s what cost Smith his job. Three offensive coordinators failed to turn Cutler into the quarterback Chicago thought it had traded for in 2009. “I wanted a coach that would have a natural connection or experience in connecting with a quarterback,” Emery says. “Marc was that person for us.”

In his initial interview, Trestman presented his plans for Cutler. “We weren’t going to get caught up in Jay’s skill set, because that was very observable,” Trestman says. “The no. 1 thing was being able to develop a relationship with him of secure trust.” The first time the two met, it was over a pair of boxed lunches at a room in Halas Hall, the Bears facility in nearby Lake Forest.

“We just started talking about, I don’t remember what — football, not football — and it was easy,” Trestman says. “I never tried to get him to like me.” Ninety minutes later, neither had touched his food.

The legendary George Halas wore glasses. Hardly what fans think of when they hear “Bears head coach.” In 1993, the Bears went from Mike Ditka, with his full mustache and sandy brown hair, to Dave Wannstedt ­— with his full mustache and sandy brown hair.

When Bears coaches haven’t looked alike, they’ve at least thought alike. The tough-minded Ditka was an offensive-minded coach only by default. Three former defensive coordinators not terribly concerned with offensive innovation followed Ditka. Trestman was the first offensive-leaning head coach hired by the organization in 30 years. Not only does he think like Halas, but with the floppy cap and thick frames, he looks like him too.

With five years leading the Montreal Alouettes on his résumé, Trestman was initially pegged as an offbeat hire. But really, Chip Kelly was the new NFL head coach with the nontraditional background. Trestman’s past is that of a coach educated in the West Coast offense. It included coordinator jobs in Cleveland, San Francisco, Arizona, and Oakland, where he worked under noted West Coast disciple Jon Gruden. Trestman was a Raiders offensive assistant until 2002, when he was promoted to offensive coordinator after Gruden left for Tampa Bay. It was also the year Rich Gannon threw for nearly 4,700 yards and was named the league’s MVP.

“Quarterback whisperer” is the title that gets thrown around, and it’s one Trestman started earning long before he made it to the league. In 1982, Trestman, a former backup quarterback at Minnesota, was a volunteer assistant at the University of Miami. He and freshman quarterback Bernie Kosar took to watching film together late into the night, going over the finer points of quarterbacking. A year later, Trestman was promoted from volunteer to quarterbacks coach and Kosar was winning Miami its first national championship.

Trestman came to Miami for law school, where he passed the bar the same year the Hurricanes won the national championship. And there’s still some lawyer in him. He jumps on questions with gaps in their logic, parses out semantics as far as they’ll go. When I ask him about the differences between Year 1 and 2 as a head coach, he stops me.

“I don’t look at this as being Year 2,” he says. “It’s just another Year 1. It all starts over. Yes, the players have a better understanding of the offense and the communication, but moving forward, that’s really where it ends.”

Each offseason, Emery has mounted an all-out assault on the weakest area of his roster. Addressing needs isn’t innovative, but for most general managers, change means tinkering, a small alteration here or there. Emery has rebuilt his roster with dynamite. In his first year, it was two new starting receivers. This year, it was the defensive line, where the Bears handed out three considerable contracts and used two picks in the first three rounds. In 2013, it was the offensive line.

The Bears ranked 24th in adjusted sack rate in 2012, which actually wasn’t terrible considering the past few years. In the two seasons prior, Chicago had never finished higher than 31st. “It was kind of a hit parade back there,” Cutler says.

Emery’s solution was to turn the line almost completely over. Left tackle Jermon Bushrod, who was always buoyed by playing with Drew Brees but looked like a revelation compared to his predecessors, was signed before the first day of free agency ended. The Bears brought in tattooed, steamrolling former Jets guard Matt Slauson to play left guard, and Emery took Oregon lineman — and future first-year Pro Bowler — Kyle Long with the 20th pick. “I’ve never been a part of something like that, where there was so much transition in the room,” says Roberto Garza, the center and lone holdover.

Garza has seen three iterations of the offensive line in his 10 seasons with Chicago. When he arrived in 2005, the line was the highlight of the Bears’ offense, led by fixtures like Olin Kreutz, John Tait, and Ruben Brown. Then came the steady stream of failed picks and misguided signings: Chris Williams, Gabe Carimi, Frank Omiyale.

This new group wasn’t complete until training camp. Former left tackle J’Marcus Webb had the first crack at starting opposite Bushrod on the right side, but early in training camp, Emery and offensive coordinator Aaron Kromer started to notice something. “We both said … in different ways that the best right tackle on the team was probably Jordan Mills,” Emery says. Mills was a fifth-round pick from Louisiana Tech, not a player anyone expected to start from the beginning. “You could see when they put Kyle [Long] and Jordan Mills there, something happened,” Garza says. “The line started to come together.”

In one year, the Bears’ sack rate went from 24th to fifth.

Fresh talent helps, but Trestman’s real achievement last year was turning the old parts of the Bears offense into something new. At his postseason press conference after the 2012 season, Emery talked about the need to better use the middle of the field in their passing game. In Smith’s final season, the offense ranked 28th in yards per play between the numbers. Trestman’s Bears finished eighth.

Bringing in tight end Martellus Bennett helped that cause, but so did deploying Forte the way he should have been used all along. After catching just 44 passes in 2012, Forte caught 74 last year — a career high. The shifty and versatile Forte is the type of receiver who should succeed in Trestman’s quick-passing game, and his efforts to attack the softest part of a defense even unearthed some unpredictable wrinkles in the offense. During his first season in Chicago, Brandon Marshall ran just 130 routes from the slot. Last year, it was more than twice that. Only nine players in the league were targeted out of the slot more than Marshall.

With the 6-foot-4 Marshall and Jeffery and no. 3 receiver Marquess Wilson⁴⁰ standing 6-foot-3, no one on the Bears offense looks like a traditional slot receiver. But that isn’t a problem. Principles, not positions, are what rule Trestman’s offense.

Trestman says that when he first presents his offense, players “perceive it as throwing a bunch of plays against the wall and seeing what sticks. But there’s a plan in mind, and that’s to get them to see the bigger picture first.” Next, it’s about filling in the details, fine-tuning what the concepts look like when the camera zooms in. “Pretty soon,” Trestman says, “it becomes a lifestyle of how we do things.”

That immersion into the system — and proof of Trestman’s power over quarterbacks — was most obvious when the Bears lost Cutler early in their Week 7 loss to Washington. Over the next seven weeks, Josh McCown, at age 34 and three years removed from being out of the league, was one of the best quarterbacks in football. He led the league in QBR, was third in passer rating and fourth in DVOA, and parlayed his season into a two-year deal and a starting job with the Buccaneers. When it was time for Cutler to return, in Week 15 against the Browns, there was a contingent that believed McCown should be the one starting.

Jay Cutler fidgets. On the field, it’s a quick roll of the head, almost as if he’s trying to crack his neck. It happens a lot.

While Cutler sat on the podium for his press conference at the end of Chicago’s OTAs, the movements were subtler, but constant. Rarely did he go for more than a few seconds without adjusting the brim of his hat or moving a hand to rest on his face.

With his cheek resting on the knuckles of his left hand, black wedding ring in sight, Cutler was asked what’s changed since he came to Chicago, where he’s now spent the majority of his NFL life. He was 25 when he arrived. The roster has almost completely turned over. Forte, Garza, kicker Robbie Gould, safety Craig Steltz, cornerback Charles Tillman, and linebacker Lance Briggs are the only ones left. He’s married now, has two kids. He’s grown up. “If you don’t want to grow up, you’re probably not going to last,” Cutler says. “They’ll find something else.”

At the end of last season, the Bears had to decide whether to extend Cutler’s contract. What Cutler did in his limited time with Trestman mattered, but it was only part of the process. “That was the end of the evaluation cycle,” Emery says. “That evaluation cycle started the first day I got here, with who Jay is, who the player is, who the person is.”

What Emery saw last season was “a player that could be the key reason that you’re winning.” Emery isn’t insulated. He heard the chorus that didn’t think Cutler should play against the Browns. “He started out rough [in Cleveland], and he came back and showed that he’s the guy that can be a pivotal player in the game.” In March, the Bears gave Cutler what amounts to a three-year deal worth $54 million in guarantees.

Emery says on-field performance will always be paramount, but what he saw everywhere else is what he’d hoped for when hiring Trestman. “I’ve felt comfortable with him from the beginning, and we’ve obviously spent a lot of time together since then,” Trestman says. “I would hope there’s been an evolution.”

After missing five games last year, there’s still no way to know what Cutler can be in Trestman’s offense, but when Marshall was asked to levy a guess, he aimed high: MVP of the league. If that seems like a stretch, that’s because it is.⁴¹ The Bears may not need an MVP, but if they’re going to make their transition into one of the league’s best offenses, they’ll need the best version of Cutler there’s ever been.

Chicago’s offense finished sixth in DVOA last season, the franchise’s best mark in 18 seasons. None of the teams from Smith’s tenure finished in the top 10. It was an entirely new world for the organization, and as this season gets closer, there’s reason to believe it could be even better. Learning an offense is like learning a language. Progress isn’t measured in how many words are learned; it’s about how quickly you can process them. A year in, with almost the entire offense returning, it should all move faster and smoother than it did before.

Cutler, strangely, is one of the only factors who has changed. The Bears spent nearly half the season without him a year ago. Now, the hope is that if the combination of Cutler and McCown could be a top-six offense, a full season of Cutler could lead to even more.

From the beginning, Emery’s decisions have been made with Cutler in mind. His first spring was spent assembling a new group of targets, his second a new offensive line and head coach specifically aimed at building up his quarterback. Now, the refinements can come.

In the same interview in which Muhammad sounded the death knell for Chicago’s receivers, he trotted out the well-worn list of starting quarterbacks to come through Soldier Field. Cutler was brought to Chicago to put fire to that list. Emery has given him the matches. The rest is up to him. 

This article has been updated to correct the list of players left on the Bears roster from Jay Cutler’s first season with Chicago in 2009. 

Illustration by Gluekit.

It seems like every week I read another article about a mobile carrier offering some incredible deal to eat the mobile data costs you rack up using certain apps.

The most recent was the news that Sprint will sell at data plan that “only connects to Facebook and Twitter”.

Many on the Internet are up in arms about “net neutrality” amid concerns that the wireline carriers will discriminate between or block applications on their networks. I’m a supporter of net neutrality regulations, but it’s worth pointing out that wireline carriers haven’t done a lot of discriminating and blocking on their networks over the past 20 years of the commercial internet.

And yet in mobile data, there is discrimination and blocking all over the place. The main kind of discrimination is called “zero rating” in which a mobile carrier makes a deal with certain applications to eat the mobile data charges a user racks up when using certain apps. A good example of that is T-Mobile’s deal with a bunch of music apps announced back in June.

The pernicious thing about zero rating is that it is marketed as a consumer friendly offering by the mobile carrier – “we are not charging you for data when you are on Spotify”.

But what all of this zero rating activity is setting up is a mobile internet that looks a lot more like cable TV than our wide open Internet. Soon a startup will have to negotiate a zero rating plan before launching because mobile app customers will be trained to only use apps that are zero rated on their network.

I strongly encourage policy makers, policy wonks, internet activists, and anyone who cares about protecting an open internet for all to take a hard look at zero rating. Like all the best scourges, it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Yesterday, I was looking for a GIF of two people missing a high-five (as one does) and the top hits I got back were all of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady.

I thought, "the three-time Super Bowl winner and one of his wide receivers trying to high-five and missing each other's hands? That's pretty funny!" Oh no. What is funnier still is Brady trying to high-five one or more of his teammates and the other players totally ignoring him. What's even funnier than that? This has happened over and over again.

Against the Ravens:

Against the Saints:

And against the Steelers. (These are all just from last season, and all Patriots wins, by the way):

Nobody likes a pity five.

NFL Films even made a "Give Brady a high-five" video, which led to this spoof PSA:

If Glenn Burke and the 1977 Dodgers show us the original spirit of the high-five, Tom Brady and the 2013 Patriots show us that the high-five evangelist's work is never done.

(via Boston.com and SB Nation)

Tags: football   high-five   sports

The Avett Brothers surprised Bonnaroo when they showed up unannounced at the Ed Helms-hosted bluegrass superjam. They joined the musician and actor onstage to play “Be Kind To A Man When He’s Down,” a standard from the 1920s.

The Bonnaroo Interview: The Avett Brothers

Watch them rehearse the song backstage:

And check out their performance later that evening:

Bonnaroo In Review: The Avett Brothers

The post Watch The Avett Brothers Jam With Ed Helms Backstage At Bonnaroo appeared first on American Songwriter.

When he was around 32 years old, Leonardo da Vinci applied to the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, for a job. The duke was in need of military expertise and Leonardo's 10-point CV emphasized his military engineering skills:

3. Also, if one cannot, when besieging a terrain, proceed by bombardment either because of the height of the glacis or the strength of its situation and location, I have methods for destroying every fortress or other stranglehold unless it has been founded upon a rock or so forth.

4. I have also types of cannon, most convenient and easily portable, with which to hurl small stones almost like a hail-storm; and the smoke from the cannon will instil a great fear in the enemy on account of the grave damage and confusion.

And I love what is almost an aside at the end of the list:

Also I can execute sculpture in marble, bronze and clay. Likewise in painting, I can do everything possible as well as any other, whosoever he may be.

Oh yeah, P.S., by the way, not that it matters, I am also the greatest living artist in the world, no big deal. Yr pal, Leo. (via farnam street and the letters of note book)

Tags: art   Leonardo da Vinci   Ludovico Sforza   working

This short profile of Beats By Dre contains many nuggets of marketing wisdom.

When developing the first Beats headphones, Iovine would lay out various prototypes in his Interscope offices and then poll everyone who came to see him. "It was this incredible parade of the world's great artists," says Wood. "M.I.A. or Pharrell Williams or Gwen Stefani or Will.i.am would come around, and I'd ask them, 'What do you think of this one? What about this? What about that?' " says Iovine. "It's not a numbers thing. I go to people with great taste." As he and Dre prepared to launch the final version of Beats, Iovine sent a pair to another world-famous guy: LeBron James. Iovine had been hanging out in the editing room with James's friend and business partner Maverick Carter during the development of a documentary on the basketball star. "Mav called me back and says, 'LeBron wants 15.' " Iovine sent them, and they turned up on the ears of every member of the 2008 U.S. Olympic basketball team when they arrived in Shanghai. "Now that's marketing," says Iovine.

It's easy to see why Apple might want to buy them. See also With Beats, Apple buys the unobtainable: street cred, Why Apple Wants Beats, Why Apple's Beats buy is genius, and Apple's Beats Deal Is All About Bringing Music Mogul Jimmy Iovine On Board. Iovine is the new Steve Jobs, basically. *ducks*

Tags: Apple   Beats By Dre   Jimmy Iovine

Today is a big day for the Internet as we know it. The FCC will meet today to consider a proposed notice of rulemaking that could, if adopted, change some fundamental rules about how the last mile of the Internet works.

I’ve written about this issue a lot here at AVC, but if you are new to it, please read this post and this post. That should get you up to speed (no pun intended) on what is going on.

So I am participating in a virtual protest movement called #StopTheSlowLane today.

You probably got an annoying interstitial when you came to AVC this morning that made you wait and wait while AVC loaded.

I’m running the Slow Lane Widget via a WordPress plugin on AVC today and maybe for a few more days. If you would like to put the widget (javascript or WP plugin) on your site, you can get it here.

I’ve seen this widget at a few places around the Internet over the past 24 hours. I am hoping this spreads to other bloggers and ideally mainstream websites. If the mainstream Internet user can see what a slow lane really looks like, I think this issue will be clarified for everyone and the FCC will do the right thing. Which is to reclassify last mile Internet as a telecommunications service that is regulated under Title II. Last mile Internet is like water and electricity and should be regulated as such.