The iPad and the Publishing Industry: A Match Made in Heaven?

Stephen Fry has posted a lovely reminiscence on the TIME website, which looks back on his early days playing with a Mac computer back in 1984. Fry and author Douglas Adams were the first two people to own Macintosh computers in England, and they would regularly meet up to exchange floppy discs and rearrange their desktop icons. The article discusses how those early dalliances with the Mac brand were the first time that computing had been a fun experience for both Fry and Adams—-something Steve Jobs and his team would ultimately build on as they produced the iPod and the iPhone. But expectations for the iPad, released this past weekend, inhabit some strange middle ground in the suite of Mac products, with a certain industry banking on it to blow some much needed air into the lungs of its failing business model.

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Military Madness: How the Army Courted the Music World

Anyone browsing the U.K. arm of MTV’s website may find themselves raising an eyebrow when they see this page. Yes, MTV is using its considerable weight to bolster Army recruitment figures, presumably realizing the age range that the network attracts makes for ideal cannon fodder. Naturally, the advertising campaign features very little about the prominent hazards of the job-—U.K. troops are still being deployed to Afghanistan, but it would be unthinkable to mention something related to that on the MTV page-—instead choosing to focus on other aspects of military life. Predominant among these are ways in which the Army can indefinitely enhance civilian life.

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The Selling of a 21st Century Pop Star

Hundreds of used copies of Lady Gaga’s The Fame are freely available at knockdown prices on Amazon and EBay. It’s not surprising; journalists were flooded with copies of the CD prior to its release in August 2008. Sometimes, multiple copies of the disc would even arrive in the same week. Her name wasn’t as recognizable back then, her ubiquity still agonizingly out of reach. Fast forward a year and it’s difficult to imagine Gaga having many aspirations left, although her bolshy, Madonna-esque outlook on life would never allow her to admit to that. For Lady Gaga, this is just the beginning.

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