She survived an evil, gruesome attack. Her partner did not. An account of a victim, a widow, telling her story on the witness stand.
Update, 4/16/12: This piece was just awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.
| The Stranger | Jun 2011
“Mr. Ling has also implemented an all-black dress code–dubbed “Bliss Black”–and revamped his showroom to echo the clean, simple look of Apple stores, with wood floors, white walls and oversize graphics.”
– Bio as Bible: Managers Imitate Steve Jobs – WSJ.com (via thisistheverge)
“This asking for attention is completely legitimate, but in practice, there are powerful forces pressuring us to avoid any kind of self-promotion at all, or enjoy our good fortune openly. Given all these complications, it would appear that only one person so far has figured out how to use Twitter entirely blamelessly: the British comic and TV presenter Simon Amstell; he has around 35,000 followers, but hasn’t ever tweeted, not even once.”
– Maria Bustillos on Why Can’t We Brag On Twitter? (via thisistheverge)
“But it gets more complicated when the subjects are more complicated. Hitting the favorite button on the first episode of “Mad Men” is a remarkably different gesture than expressing digital solidarity with kidnapped children in Africa, but it all sort of looks the same at the keyboard.”
– David Carr on Hashtag Activism, and Its Limits – NYTimes.com (via thisistheverge)
“With language out of reach, it’s hard not to feel as if I’m in a dream, or that I’ve crossed over to another world.”
- The Language of Another World: A New Yorker in Munich by Abigail Rasminsky
Your long read of the day: Twitter, the Startup That Wouldn’t Die – Businessweek
Throughout its first five years of existence, Twitter always seemed on the verge of committing some excruciating form of startup seppuku. There were constant service outages (epitomized by the ubiquitous “fail whale” cartoon message), an embarrassing security breach in 2009 that released a torrent of internal documents, and nonstop departures of key employees. The pièce de résistance was the turmoil at the top: Twitter had three chief executive officers in as many years. That drama culminated with the promotion of serial entrepreneur and former Google executive Dick Costolo as CEO in 2010 and the return last year of one of Twitter’s founders, Jack Dorsey, as executive chairman and product chief.
Honey Badger don’t care. But its creator does—and he’s hoping he can build a business around the most fearless mammal on earth.
For a moment, forget the Honey Badger video’s 37 million views on YouTube. Those were just the tip of the weasel’s tail.
The Honey Badger became a broader force in pop culture: Danica Patrick claimed she would be a Honey Badger in NASCAR. Sue from “Glee” weighed in. Teammates nicknamed LSU’s Tyrann Mathieu the “honey badger” and sportscaster Brent Musberger referenced it 14 times in one game (a bravura performance that ranks very high on the unintentional comedy scale.) The Honey Badger also showed up in Madden NFL 12 commercialsand on shows like “Top Gear,” “MythBusters,” and “American Pickers.” Microsoft’s Bing search engine called a new set of webmaster tools the Honey Badger update.
Within a few months a three-minute video with irreverent commentary and catchy phrases attained a level of publicity and mainstream consciousness any business would kill for.
Too bad there wasn’t a business.
The origin of the Honey Badger
“I was born and raised in New York City,” Randall, the narrator of the Honey Badger video says. “My father was a cameraman for Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and my mom was a nighttime janitor. When I was growing up I spent a lot of time alone watching animal videos and pretending to be the narrator. When my dad came home from trips he would set up a projector and encourage me to describe what I saw.”
He says his assistant showed him the original National Geographic footage. “As vivacious and nasty as the animal was,” he says, “the original narration did it no justice at all. So I narrated my own version. My assistant put it on YouTube and it just went crazy.”
Within weeks the video had been featured on blogs like Funny Or Die, BuzzFeed, and the Huffington Post. Howard Stern mentioned it on his Sirius show. YouTube views skyrocketed.
To capitalize on the phenomenon, merchandise began to appear.
Unfortunately very little of that merchandise was Randall’s.
“Oh, they’re so nasty.”
“My assistant’s girlfriend’s mother-in-law owns a t-shirt company and she took a chance on me,” Randall says. “We created a few cool t-shirts but before we knew it other people were selling their own versions.”
Then Olivia Wilde was spotted by TMZ wearing a “Honey Badger Don’t Care” shirt. “After Olivia Wilde, that’s when the knockoffs really started to appear,” Randall says. “A lot of nasty people figured they could just take what they wanted.
“How was I supposed to stop them?”
“Ooh look, it’s chasing things!”
His first step was to try to protect his interests. (While National Geographic owns the footage—and was happy for Randall to use it—the performance is his.)
Unfortunately the copyright and trademark process is lengthy and once complete still places the burden of enforcement on the owner. And those rights are relatively easy to circumvent: A trademarked phrase like “Honey Badger Don’t Care” can be changed to “Honey Badger, He Don’t Care.”
“From a legal aspect,” Randall says, “it’s been mind numbing.”
Randall soon decided that what he could protect and leverage was his voice and style of delivery, especially since that voice had become an entity in itself.
“It took me a while to realize that the performance really drives everything, and that my voice and my sense of humor is something I can protect and capitalize on,” he says.
He tested that approach by producing 3,000 Talking Honey Badger Dolls. (A portion of the proceeds went to Animals Asia, an organization committed to rescuing bears from bile farms.)
“We sold all 3,000 crazy fast,” Randall says. “That’s when we realized the Honey Badger was much bigger than just t-shirts.”
After that came a free soundboard app and the Honey Badger Don’t Care game app. He starred in a commercial for Wonderful Pistachios. Then he published a book with the original filmmakers, Colleen and Keith Begg, writing the foreword. He’s created a number of other wildlife videos, all in his signature narrative style, for a YouTube channel that has racked up over 55 million total views.
And now an animated TV series is in development and he’s pitching studios on the idea of a wildlife comedy. “Imagine a film like March of the Penguins but with me as the narrator,” he says. “How crazy would that be?”
“Whattya say, stupid?”
Within weeks he had started fielding offers and requests, some to support wildlife organizations but most for commercial enterprises.
“I got so many offers,” Randall says. “What started as ten emails a day has turned into hundreds, most of them wanting me to do something just for ‘the exposure.’ Some people definitely try to take advantage of me. It took putting a management team in place to really understand the value of what I created.”
In hindsight Randall wishes he had acted more quickly to capitalize on the business possibilities of the Honey Badger phenomenon.
“I’m a babe in the woods where all that is concerned,” he says. “I definitely would have taken steps like setting up an LLC a lot sooner. Here it is 2012 and I’m just now finalizing the legalities. But when I made the video how could I have ever predicted I would need to?”
“You think the Honey Badger cares?”
“The Honey Badger trip has been amazing,” Randall says, “but I do think about when the 15-minute clock will stop. I do worry about over-exposure. Still, a lot of the media mentions I can’t control, and I don’t want to. When Betty White says, ‘Honey Badger don’t give a (crap),’ that’s incredible. Spread the word, honey!
“On the commercial side, I get so many offers… so I try to strike a balance. The last thing I want is to go from Honey Badger to Honey Badger whore.”
For example, at one point Sarah Palin’s people reached out.
“That was crazy,” he says. “They asked and I said sure, I can do a video but I can’t promise it will be a pro-Sarah Palin video. For some reason they never called me back. Hmm… I wonder why?”
Actually, Honey Badger does care
According to Randall the Honey Badger isn’t the typical Internet meme. “It’s not the standard ‘million views today, over tomorrow’ kind of thing,” he says. “People are still finding it and watching it. That’s really cool because it promotes the fact that here is this totally badass animal that is endangered in some countries. I’m trying to build a business that exposes people to wildlife by educating and entertaining them… and that also gives back to organizations that will help animals in need.
“So far it’s working. Without the video, think of all the people who would have seen a honey badger and just thought, ‘Eww, what’s that? Is that a skunk on steroids?”
Who in God’s Name Is Mitt Romney? – Frank Rich
We don’t know who Romney is for the simple reason that he never reveals who he is. Even when he is not lying about his history—whether purporting to have been “a hunter pretty much all my life” (in 2007) or to being a denizen of “the real streets of America” (in 2012)—he is incredibly secretive about almost everything that makes him tick. He has been in hiding throughout his stints in both the private and public sectors. While his career-long refusal to release his tax returns was damaging in itself, it resonated even more so as a proxy for all the other secrets he has kept and still keeps.
The whole article is worth reading.
The Caging of America; Why do we lock up so many people?
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
- In this week’s issue, Adam Gopnik writes about mass incarceration and criminal justice in America: http://nyr.kr/A75iOm
Photograph by Steve Liss.
“One of the biggest complaints readers have about my work is that I don’t tell them often enough what they can do. I do think this is an area where journalism sometimes falls short. We describe a really grim situation but don’t really explain to people what they can do about it. So, a few years ago I started doing a year-end list of amazing charities. The first time, I had real anxiety about whether it was appropriate. But the response was so overwhelming, it seemed to be a real service to readers and I’ve continued to do it. It also happens when I’m not especially encouraging people to give. For instance, a few months ago I profiled a group called Room to Read and I later learned they raised $700,000 as a result of people hearing about them from my column.”
– New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in an interview with Fast Company. Journalism In A Digital World And The Age Of Activism. (via futurejournalismproject)
