In a shameless act of cross-promotion between new and old media, a narrated slideshow was recorded so that iTunes users could download it as a podcast--which, of course, would promote the audiobook version of the atlas (available on iTunes for $15.95, natch). Mike DiCenzo, a senior writer for The Onion who bears more than a passing resemblance to Jason Schwartzman, and Chet Clem, the paper's editorial manager (whose celebrity doppelgänger is not as readily identifiable) led the audience on a tour of various countries on each continent, each with their own snarky (or in some cases, downright offensive) tagline. The United States, for instance, is dubbed "The Land of Opportunism," Puerto Rico is "In a Parade Right Now," and in Malawi, readers are invited to "Come for the Food Shortages, Stay Because You’ve Died."

A second slideshow, led by Mike Lowe, the book's head graphic editor, was called "Our Dumb World: Graphics for You." In Japan, Godzilla has been mollified with luxury consumer goods and now roams the streets in a magenta cashmere scarf, Louis Vuitton tote in hand. Thirty-eight Albanians commute to work in the "cabbage mines" via one single donkey, and Bhutan is the only remaining place in the world where not only do dragons still exist, but they have been domesticated to pull plows through fields.

During the Q&A, audience members, inevitably, tried to one-up each other with Onion-style questions. One asked: "What was the least-dumb country?" (The authors, eager to please, were quick to respond with "Where are you from, sir?") Mr. DiCenzo and Mr. Clem added that their least-favorite country was Montenegro, simply because it had the gall to separate from Serbia during the two years it took to write the atlas, an event that cost them "a good twenty minutes of [their] lives [they] would never get back." They said their favorite hate mail produced by the book so far was a flurry of letters from angry consumers demanding to know the whereabouts of the free globe the cover of the book says is inside. For those people, The Onion's motto of "Tu Stultus Es" – literally "You are Dumb" – has never been more applicable.

The Onion crew alluded to one area of contention in the making of the atlas: some people, they said, think there are too many pictures of animals wearing hats; some think there are not enough. This reporter, of course, was wondering: "Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?"

New York Mag inspires us to finish The Brothers Karamozov starting tonight. We swear!

Jay-Z will come out of his 23^rd retirement to perform at the Hammerstein Ballroom on Nov. 13.

iTunes revs up their film archives. Selma Blair’s boobs, which star in Ed Burns’ new movie Purple Violets, are going to look mighty tiny on the iPod screen.

A documentary about Karl Lagerfield will screen at Film Forum tomorrow night, with the director on hand for discussion about black clothes and Nicole Kidman.

The new iPhone lets callers surf the net, access iTunes, and do other fun Internet stuff. In political terms, it may also be the gadget the pushes the issue of city- or region-wide access to wifi technology.

If my understanding is correct, the Apple iPhone will work wherever there's cell phone reception, but it really designed to get up to full revs when it's in wifi range.

The Economic Development Corporation is still conducting a feasibility study about whether or not to build a wifi system for the city, something that is already in place in Philadelphia, San Francisco and Albany.

New York City is currently moving to create a wifi system, but it would for use only by the fire and police department.

As internet activist Andrew Raisej likes to say, "We're leading in Broadway, but not with broadband."

In other net news, Hillary Clinton released a statement reaffirming her dedication to Net Neutrality.

In an aptly timed statement, she said, "It is clear that we must continue to build on the innovations brought forth by the Internet. This means ensuring more affordable broadband access and ensuring that there continues to be open, unimpaired and unencumbered Internet access for both its users and content providers."

-- Azi Paybarah

At an appearance this morning in midtown at the Personal Democracy Forum, he gave a lengthy policy speech without once referring to the fact that he's not technically governor yet.

Nor did that fact come up in a subsequent question-and-answer session with ABC News political director Mark Halperin and with members of the tech-obsessed audience.

Spitzer's talk on New York's "digital divide" and the need for state government to facilitate universally accessible, affordable broadband technology went over well enough, drawing repeated applause in an auditorium filled with people balancing computers on their laps.

When the clapping died down after one line about a "comprehensive statewide broadband initiative," Spitzer said, "If that line didn't work here, I was going to give it up."

He went on to lay out a vision of the near future that was heavily inspired, by the sounds of it, by Personal Democracy founder Andrew Rasiej: upstate farmers remotely controlling milking machines, fire and police dispatchers receiving marching orders from anywhere in the field and constituents complaining to their elected officials through wireless broadband technology.

Under questioning from Halperin, Spitzer correctly named the price of a single-tune download from iTunes, but pled ignorance on his monthly bill for internet access at home. When asked about his broader plan, Spitzer declined to get too specific about how the state would farm out the work of assembling the statewide broadband network, or how much any of it might cost.

Still, it's a nice problem for him to have: a genuine wonk, he's talking about governing half a year out from the actual election, even before his policy platform is fully formed.

At some point, he'll have to fill in the pesky details. But the mere fact that Spitzer is now spending his time testing out policy themes in front of specialized audiences doesn't say much for his level of concern about his Democratic opponent, Tom Suozzi, who has been reduced to the old he-won't-debate-me campaign theme in an effort to make voters aware that there still is, in fact, a race to be run. (Surely, the campaign volunteer in the chicken suit can't be far behind.)

"The future of New York," Spitzer said, "doesn't belong to the armies of the status quo."

He seemed pretty confident today that it belongs to him.

***
Hank Stuever, Style reporter

First my screed, then my critique. (Sorry, that's how it goes, and it might run long - I might not get another chance at so many eyeballs.) This forum seems to have a lot of focus-group fallout, calling for: shorter stories, faster formats, oh my it's all too much to handle, I can't possibly read it all, I don't know where to start, I get everything I need from my (pet electronic doodad). And, my favorite, from a critique a couple of days ago, the assistant news editor guy who reads the NYT, WSJ (so navigable! Huh?), then gets online and reads everything else, and then and only then might deign to read The Post, which is, again, too this and too that and is an incredible intrusion on his time. Remarkably, the paychecks navigate their way to his bank account every other Friday, which is another way for me to say that I firmly, firmly believe that if you can be bothered to work here, you can bother to read this paper - the meatspace version, not the Web, the printed result that we all worked so hard to make -- every day before you read someone else's. This is why I can never be allowed to observe focus groups: I will surely bust through that one-way glass window and administer hard spankings to each and every participant who seems incapable of just paging through a newspaper, looking at headlines and pictures, and deciding whether or not there's something worth stopping on.

I think we've overlistened to people who never read the paper, and yet insist it include more about their neighborhoods, lives, and concerns. A newspaper is filled with criminals, celebrities and fools and I for one am happy when it doesn't include my life or neighborhood in theirs.

Then again, no one is interested in my new slogan for The Post: "News Flash: Everything's Not Always About You."

Why are we obsessed with the paper being too much, too large? Our counterparts at McDonalds, Google, iTunes, Comcast Digital, The Cheesecake Factory and Barnes & Noble have already learned: People do not complain because something is too big and they can't possibly read, listen to, watch or eat it all in one sitting. (American consumers so rarely seem to be saying this, except in newspaper focus groups. Otherwise, they seem to enjoy being overwhelmed.)

I have worked at newspapers that fretted, angsted and test-marketed all sorts of "news you can use" and entry points and time-savers. We added geegaws, rails, skyboxes, refers, breakouts, sidebars; we set the articles in ragged-right and whacked the living shit out of them. It helped not one bit, but this identity crisis ultimately created a paper you really could read in 10 minutes. And soon enough, it started to feel like something that wasn't worth the 50 cents they charge for it.

So I really do reach for my air-sickness bag when we start passing around prototypes of a redesigned A1 with rails and time-savers, and an AME wonders (in yesterday's critique) if it might be good idea execute a blanket reduction in story lengths. If we want to redesign the paper to make it look like the coolest thing on the planet, fine, that's an image crisis I can live with. I prefer that if we do, the aesthetic end result reminds me of walking into the Apple Store, and not of a bulletin board in a middle school social-studies classroom.

They will never let me do this critique again.

Now The Transom loves the image of Oprah Winfrey, world's top-earning synergist, stomping on some lil' 20-year-old gal over an allegation of digital manipulation, as it were.

But according to a published one-sided correspondence between Ms. Diamonds and Bill Bastone, the document-loving honcho of The Smoking Gun, and one of the best reporters in the biz, no such hubbub can be proved. Mr. Bastone wrote to Ms. Diamonds:

Oh, tarnation. Nothing like real reporting to mess up a good scandal.
—Choire Sicha

2. The Al Franken Show
5. Podfinder with Adam Curry
7. Queer Eye Hip Tips
11. Z100 Phone Taps with Elvis Duran
13. ABC News--The Shuffle with Jake Tapper
17. The Mac Observer's Mac Geek Gab
21. Adam Curry: Daily Source Code
30. KCRW's The Treatment with Elvis Mitchell
41. Open Source Sex
86. CNN Marketplace Update

--Leon Neyfakh

I first played poker as a 10-year-old at sleepaway camp; I got cleaned out by a bunkful of hobbit-sized card sharps who'd been playing since they were 9. So I wasn't surprised last month when Sam, my 8-year-old son, started asking me to play with him. I wasn't happy about it, either.

When I was Sam's age, I'd spend Sunday mornings in the fall sitting on the edge of my father's bed, watching him pencil in the betting lines on the day's football games. His handicapping system included circles and stars and other hieroglyphic notations that marked which games were interesting, which were locks and which was going to be the big play of the day.

After he had made his decisions, we would call his bookie. Or rather, he would call, while I thrilled to the secret language he employed, with its inverse logic, where a "dime" meant a $1,000 bet, but a "dollar" only put you down for a $100. "It's Charlie Havana," he'd say to a guy named Pacey P. on the other end of the phone, "gimme three dollars on Houston laying four, two dollars on the Cowboys plus six and a dime on the Vikes." Pacey P. would read my dad's action back to him, and my father would draw final circles and stars around the teams on which he'd actually laid down bets. And then he would set his pad on the night table by his bed. I always picked up the pad the moment he let it go. I was fascinated by this palimpsest of my father's doodles and notes to himself, as if the secret to the man would be uncovered if I stared long enough into his handwriting.

My son is like that with me. The family computer is in his bedroom, and at night I make business calls sitting in front of it. He lies down on his bed, pretending to read Harry Potter or to watch a Knicks game, but I know that he is listening. Even if he doesn't understand everything I am saying, I can see that he is clocking me close, picking up clues, measuring, figuring, comparing. I try not to curse on these calls, or lie in an obvious manner. Or raise my voice. I am aware of the influence of my actions and try to modulate accordingly.

Here's the problem: Sam knows that I co-wrote the film Rounders . It was partially based on my experiences playing poker in New York's underground card clubs, and its growing popularity on video and DVD is often credited with starting the current poker craze. Mostly, I am proud of this. But ….

I remember the start of the 1981 football season. I was 15, and still spent Sundays hanging around with my old man. As the first games of the season were about to start, I saw that my father's pad had nothing written on it. When I asked him about it, he told me that he had decided not to wager anymore, that there were better things to do with our weekends. "Like what?" I asked him. "We'll figure it out," he said.

I've tried, over the years, to get a straight answer from him as to why he stopped betting. What I like to think is that he began to notice how keenly interested I was and wanted to wave me off before I really started gambling myself.

Or maybe he had hit a bad losing streak and just decided he'd had enough. Either way, it was too late for me: The hook had already lodged. I spent years playing cards, shooting dice, betting on anything anytime I thought I might have an edge. Even after it had become clear to me that in the long run, you never really do have an edge, I kept at it. I once bet the best basketball player on Long Island that I could beat him at HORSE if he'd give me a three-letter spot, and lost HOR to HORSE. I played the captain of my college's squash team in squash, for money, even though I had never held a racquet until that afternoon. I have bet on ball games between teams I knew nothing about, and have walked out of more gaming establishments with empty pockets and maxed-out A.T.M. cards than I really care to count up.

Before Sam was born, I used to imagine that I would make him into a world-champion poker player. I know that's not the kind of thing most fathers wish for, but the way I had it figured was this: Someday my kid was gonna find himself sitting at a card table; I wanted him to be the boss. I decided that by the time he was 5, I'd make sure he'd mastered the basics-when to fold, when to press the action, how to spot a bluff. I told myself that I wouldn't let anyone make him a sucker, get him on the wrong side of a big play.

That was before I'd ever actually seen him, ever actually held him in my arms, ever comprehended his potential.

Recently, after years of abstention, I ended up spending three days in a row at an L.A. poker casino. I did not win. Upon my return to New York, I attended a Gamblers Anonymous meeting for the first time. Toward the end of the meeting, one speaker there stood up and told the following story: "My grandfather died when my father was 13. He jumped from their apartment building's roof. The only thing he left my father was a note that said: 'Don't drink. Don't gamble.' Didn't work. I buried my own dad broke and destroyed. Today I came here because I don't want to end up like they did."

The other night, I came home from work to find Sam waiting for me in the front hall, carrying a deck of cards and a box of plastic chips. I silenced the part of myself that still wanted to teach my boy how to set a bear trap with a full house against an ace-high flush. "Let's play chess," I suggested, "or read together, or make song lists on iTunes that we can burn onto discs for Mom." He agreed. But he didn't set down the cards right away. He held onto them for a moment, hoping I'd change my mind.

But recently, this conversation between technology and music has become more like a shouting match-less polite and more aggressive.

Over the last 60 years, the majority of music we have heard has been delivered to us not live, but in prerecorded form. And the evolution of those prerecorded formats, as much as any musical genius, has determined what music actually sounds like.

The standard pop-song length of three minutes was famously molded and bound by the 78, a distribution format which allowed for three-minute songs and not much more. With the advent of 331¼3 r.p.m. records in the late 40's, we got longer songs.

But as the means of distributing and using music have multiplied, our attention to music-and our appreciation of it-have shrunk.

Nothing puts the stamp on our shrinking musical attention span as much as Apple's new online song catalog, iTunes Music Store. The store is essentially Napster, with the minor caveat that you have to pay 99 cents for each song you download. But my sources in the preteen world have uncovered an interesting development: The kids aren't actually paying for the songs. After all, how many kids have a credit card? And even if they did, a buck a song is steep, especially when you can get them for free on LimeWire and Kazaa.

No, instead of buying, they're listening to the free 30-second previews that are available on the Web site. And they're listening to them over and over again.

These previews get right to the essence of the songs. They're usually cut from somewhere in the middle and contain a bit of the verse and a bit of the chorus, or the hook, which is the part that everyone recognizes.

You might ask how anyone could possibly find enjoyment in just 30 seconds of a song? But there's a lot to suggest that 30 seconds of a song is just about all we need these days. In fact, everything from TV commercials to children's toys, from radio jingles to cell-phone ringers, from song-form changes to the rise of sampling, has been subtly training us to read and receive our music in increasingly smaller chunks.

For instance, have you noticed how few new pop songs contain bridges? Historically, the bridge is the section where a song goes somewhere new-sometimes to a different key and maybe to a new theme lyrically-and it has pretty much disappeared from the Top 40 (though not the country charts), which makes your 30 seconds even more representative.

Dance music, more than any other genre, has also changed the nature of pop music. Dance tracks tend to be longer and more repetitive than conventional songs. The dance-track composer relies on texture and production-adding found sounds, sampling, dropping instruments in and out of the mix and, of course, that old standby, turning up the volume-to move things along.

The rise of sampling, first in rap music, then in R&B and now virtually everywhere, has placed further emphasis on the hook-which is like heading straight to the climax without foreplay.

Musical A.D.D.

Modern composition, as composition professors often lament, has become a vertical exercise rather than a horizontal one. A lot of this can be traced to the way music, particularly modern pop music, is composed today, which is increasingly on a computer using music software. Composing on a computer does have some advantages. It allows writers access to an infinite number of sounds and tracks playing at the same time. A composer can pile sound upon sound with almost unlimited potential to create texture (or fix a flat voice). Listen to any current hit on the Top 40 and you'll find probably 50 or more different tracks playing at the same time. The typical pop song from the 50's probably had less than 2 tracks.

But this technological advancement has changed the priorities of composition. The emphasis, which was once on development and theme, on modulations that took place over the course of a song or a musical piece, has shifted to sound design and texture-variables that can be piled up and reduced in a manner of seconds. It's the difference between developing a musical idea (recasting it, changing keys and repeating it) and putting a sound through different filters, or playing a beat four bars with a bassline, four bars without.

If our musical attention span could be diagnosed, we would all get treated for musical Attention Deficit Disorder. Think of all the places you hear music-in stores, on TV, on the radio, in elevators, on cell phones, at the gym-and think about how you hear this music. Is it a complete experience, or is just background noise?

Not only are we becoming desensitized to music by our environment, we are also making choices-actually training ourselves to hear music differently. The thousands of small radio audience-research firms across the country go to two major production houses, Hooks Unlimited in Atlanta and Autohook in Woodbury, Conn., to get CD's containing 10-second snippets of hundreds of songs. Radio stations evaluate a song's life span by playing these excerpts from songs-the 10-seconds are always the hook or the most recognizable part-to test audiences. Just 10 seconds!

And don't think the labels-and, to a lesser extent, the artists-are unaware of this.

Hit Clip's a Hit

If you want to see what the future sounds like, listen to a Hit Clip. For anyone who doesn't have an 11-year-old daughter, the Hit Clip is a small MP3 player made by Hasbro for kids and young teenagers. Hasbro has sold over 25 million of them, and McDonald's and Oscar Mayer have given them away for promotions.

The attraction of the Hit Clip was that it played 50-second samples from hit songs. Songs-'N Sync, Britney Spears, etc.-that are already simplified in the way described above.

Commercials are another story. Have you noticed how many old hits are cut up and edited for commercial use? Have you noticed how "Getting Better," the Beatles song used in the Philips electronics commercial, goes suddenly from verse to chorus without the break that you hear in the original recording? The same surgery was performed on Sly and the Family Stone's "Everyday People" for a Toyota commercial. That's editing, baby.

This kind of editing is more than just obnoxious. Whether we recognize it or not, we're being robbed of the song's original design. As a result, our expectations of what music can do are degraded.

All of which makes those 30-second previews on the iTunes store the perfect (if slightly twisted) way to listen to modern music.

The iTune preview doesn't need to be downloaded. You can play it right on the site, which makes it particularly speedy and convenient. Say, for instance, there's some song that's been bugging you and you need to hear it. You can quickly find it, play it and scratch that itch.

'Give It To Me … ' Free!

This happened to me the other day, in fact, with Rick James' "Give It to Me Baby," which I had heard at the gym and really needed to hear again. I clicked on a button at the iTunes site, and there it was: "You say I'm so crazy / Coming home intoxicated…. " Great bassline, tight drum groove-the whole deal.

But after 30 seconds, I really didn't need much more. I played the clip a few times and got the groove in my head. The song doesn't actually go anywhere. The same two chords show up in both the verse and the chorus, and the drums and bass don't change at all. The elemental thing about the song is the feel, which you get in those 30 seconds.

On the other hand, some songs and genres aren't nearly as fulfilling in this truncated format. High-concept rock bands fare particularly poorly: Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb," for example, barely gets going before petering out.

Yet strangely, such ostensibly complex bands as the Smiths (sadly, only two songs available right now) and R.E.M. sound great in 30 seconds. Then again, when you think of their compositional style-which, in both cases, is based on a distinctive guitar player's grooves-it makes sense. R.E.M.'s "Catapult," off of Murmur , was just right.

With Jackson 5 songs, 30 seconds is more than enough, but with Michael Jackson's solo work, the tunes sound horribly incomplete. That must be the Quincy Jones difference right there, making each section of those songs on Off the Wall and Thriller distinct and necessary. Simon & Garfunkel, with their short, catchy and sometimes annoying folk ditties, sound all right, but Paul Simon's solo stuff is too episodic to be excerpted.

Likewise, New Edition's "Popcorn Love" and "Mr. Telephone Man" are well served in 30 seconds, but Bobby Brown's glorious "Roni" is just too much song: The pre-chorus alone is that long.

Surprisingly, most of Nirvana in 30 seconds is an exercise in frustration. The music is so frenetic you'd think that small bites would be sufficient, but it turns out that there are just too many sections to the songs. Furthermore, Kurt Cobain's lyrics frequently follow a narrative that you want to follow, too. So when the songs are cut off, you're left wanting more.

Annoyingly, Journey's "Any Way You Want It" doesn't even make it to the chorus before fading out, giving you a severe case of musical blue balls.

But then it's Liz Phair to the rescue. A few seconds of her cooing "I want a boyfriend" on "Fuck and Run," and you're rocking out again.

Speaking of frustration, the only good part to the Doobie Brothers' "Minute By Minute" is that tasty gospel-keyboard introduction, but the hook-centric iTunes preview serves up the lame chorus. Yet, when I needed-for some inexplicable reason-to hear the Dixie Chicks' "Wide Open Spaces," I got enough without getting annoyed.

Unfortunately, the iTunes library is far from complete, even when it comes to the basics. There's some Elvis Costello, for instance, but only late, "arty" Elvis. There's no Beatles except an album of outtakes. No Led Zeppelin, either, except for a piss-poor cover band that may or may not be a goof.

Worse still, no The Stylistics. For shame, iTunes, for shame. Then again, how could anyone set the mood with the Isleys in just 30 seconds? But along those lines, thankfully, there's 93 selections of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes.