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In the desert of short news bites and unsatisfying blog posts, the website and weekly email Longreads is a refreshing anomaly. Since 2009, the small Oakland-based company has been linking to stories of over 1,500 words, offering a smorgasbord of great articles from underappreciated websites as well as from more established publications. Its twitter account, @longreads, promises “the best storytelling on the web” and is well-followed in media circles.

Today the site announced it is being acquired by Automattic, the company that operates the common blogging system WordPress. Financial details weren’t disclosed. Matthew Mullenweg, the CEO of Automattic, says he’ll add the Longreads’s staff of four to WordPress’s editorial team, which highlights new material on WordPress.com and the company’s mobile app. “The world cannot live on 140 characters alone,” Mullenweg said. “Longreads embodies a lot of what we really value with Automattic and WordPress.”

File under Things To Ponder Later When Deadlines Aren’t Pressing On My Head.

(From here.)

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Could ‘Star Wars: Episode VII’ Be Too Enamored With the Original Movies?

Could ‘Star Wars: Episode VII’ Be Too Enamored With the Original Movies?

One thing that can’t be said about J.J. Abrams’s Star Wars at this early stage: it’s not reverential enough to the source material. With each new piece of information released about the project, it’s clear that Abrams and his collaborators have the earlier movies – and, most obviously, the original trilogy from the 1970s and ‘80s – in mind as both inspiration and target of aspiration.

In between getting more and more angry with Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD today, I also wrote this for THR about the dangers of nostalgia in making the new Star Wars.

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It’s possible that you might have thought that series like Millionaire Matchmaker and The Real Housewives of [Insert City Here] marked some kind of nadir for shameless reality television, but Bravo—ever the innovator in this area—has proven otherwise with the announcement of its new programming slate. After all, rich trashy women in America is one thing, but when you bring them over to London, that’s a whole other ballgame.

I wrote about Bravo’s new programming slate for Wired. It was therapeutic.
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After Watching The Winter Soldier and Agents of SHIELD…

I keep seeing interviews with the showrunners of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD where they explain that, of course, they knew about what was going to happen in the new Captain America movie and that the entire season was planned around that reveal. It’s not that I don’t believe them – the “Caterpillar” thing alone (a reference to Secret Warriors that I didn’t catch) convinces me of that – but it does make me think: If they knew what was going to happen, and they essentially had a ticking clock on the status quo, then how did they make such a boring show for all this time?

Also, given the overarching theme of The Winter Soldier, if SHIELD knew that was coming, why was the show so amazingly, disturbingly pro-Big Brother in its early episodes (and, for that matter, unthinkingly obedient all the way throughout)?

(While I’m at it, doesn’t last night’s episode of Agents of SHIELD… not exactly fit in with the timeline/events of The Winter Soldier? When, exactly, did Hydra send out a “reveal ourselves” signal? In the movie, Hydra is revealed by Cap, not by choice. Wasn’t Fury “killed” at least three days before the Hydra reveal, which puts it at odds with the Agents of SHIELD timeline?)

Ah, missed opportunities all ‘round…