Time Inc, Gone

From the New York Times:

“In 1929, the year of Mr. Hadden’s sudden death, Mr. Luce started Fortune. In 1936, he bought a small-circulation humor publication, Life, and transformed it into a wide-ranging, large-format weekly. Later came Sports Illustrated, Money, People and InStyle. By 1989, with more than 100 publications in its fold, as well as significant holdings in television and radio, Time Inc. was rich enough to shell out $14.9 billion for 51 percent of Warner Communications, thus forming Time Warner.

The flush times went on for a while. But then, starting about a decade ago, the company began a slow decline that, in 2018, resulted in the Meredith Corporation, a Des Moines, Iowa, media company heavy on lifestyle monthlies like Better Homes and Gardens, completing its purchase of the once-grand Time Inc. in a deal that valued the company at $2.8 billion. The new owner wasted no time in prying the Time Inc. logo from the facade of its Lower Manhattan offices and announcing that it would seek buyers for Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated and Money. The deadline for first-round bids was May 11.”

Continue reading it to get an idea of the culture of excesses and affairs before it's decline by not adapting to the Internet.

I remember during the start of my debating years, I started off reading Time and/or Newsweek (another much fallen "giant" of the times, subscribed by my father), before you'd get serious and start reading the Economist and researching issues online via Google.

It's clear that the Internet has claimed many traditional media entities as its prey.

(via Daring Fireball)

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How a National Culture of Academic Over-Competition Destroys Their Youth

This is such a sad story:

“When I asked a class if they were happy in this environment, one girl hesitantly raised her hand to tell me that she would only be happy if her mother was gone because all her mother knew was how to nag about her academic performance.

...

Herded to various educational outlets and programs by parents, the average South Korean student works up to 13 hours a day, while the average high school student sleeps only 5.5 hours a night to ensure there is sufficient time for studying.

... 

Many young South Koreans suffer physical symptoms of academic stress, like my brother did. In a typical case, one friend reported losing clumps of hair as she focused on her studies in high school; her hair regrew only when she entered college.

Students are also inclined to see academic performance as their only source of validation and self-worth. Among young South Koreans who confessed to feeling suicidal in 2010, an alarming 53 percent identified inadequate academic performance as the main reason for such thoughts.

...

But above all, the conviction that academic success is paramount in life needs to be set aside completely. South Korea may have become an enviable economic superpower, but it has neglected the happiness of its people.”

That is just child abuse. The American education system may be swung a bit much towards sports/creativity/“emotional development” at the expense of academic development, but swinging to the other side is just as harmful.

But with being rich being a significant factor to achieving any social mobility in the current era of ever increasing economic iequality, the drive to keep pushing to be on top will always be there. But it seems that the Americans are doing better than Asians in coping with the pressures (maybe because there's an impression that the American millennials are completely oblivious to the high stakes nature of the modern workplace while kids are given certificates just for participating in something without proper achievement).

I think that we have a bit of both extremes among our own people, but it’s certainly more in the middle. Hence we produce people who can’t really talk confidently yet can’t memorize word by word their textbook and still suck in sports (except in online keyboard warrior arguments).