Photo by nwhitford on Flickr. 

I started Is Greater Than in late 2007 with little direction or ambition, as a response to the sadness and frustration I felt after the end of Punk Planet magazine, where I served as an intern and a reviews editor during its last year. Despite my brief tenure at the magazine, I had been a long-time reader, and it had a huge impact on my thinking. I credit Punk Planet with inspiring me to leave the soul-sucking customer service jobs I had held for 13 years, and pursue a writing and editing career. My only real hope with Is Greater Than was that I could in some small way try to carry on the legacy of politically-minded cultural coverage that Punk Planet excelled in. 

As a result of that excessively vague mission, Is Greater Than has seen multiple permutations in the past four years, from a overtly political direction in the early days to its recent incarnation, in which politics still inform the coverage but the focus is more squarely on culture, literature, art, life and music. 

When starting a blog or online magazine, every seasoned blogger or journalist or media pundit will tell you that the key to building traffic is specialization, focusing on a topic with a laser focus and excelling in your coverage of that. I read this sentiment many times while starting Is Greater Than, but specialization seemed incredibly boring to me. I’m a generalist, as are most of the people I know and whose work I respect. Of course it’s essential to develop a unique perspective, and really know your shit — something I learned the hard way with a series of very earnest, but misinformed takes on topics such as Constitutional Law during the 2008 election — but I wanted to edit a site that included contributors with a wide array of interests.

That probably hurt Is Greater Than’s traffic in the long term — aside from a couple spikes when posts received the attention of major blogs, we settled into a pretty consistent average of a couple hundred visitors a day — but it made editing the site much more interesting and rewarding.

I still think general-interest coverage can work online, but it requires a strong, well-articulated, unified point of view. (Or lots of startup money.) My primary regret with Is Greater Than is that we didn’t identify a distinct POV early on. The importance of that is something I’ve learned over these four years, as well as many other things — how to set an editorial direction, work with writers of varying backgrounds and levels of experience, write CSS and PHP, manage databases, and the importance of knowing what you’re talking about before hitting the publish button.

Unfortunately, it’s now time to bring Is Greater Than to an end. There are multiple reasons for this: other personal and professional projects dominating my time and attention, my need to focus on a number of other developing projects, and a WordPress installation buckling under four years of relative neglect. It’s sad to end it, but it’s time to move on.

I can’t fully express my gratitude to the many people who have read, supported, edited, interned for, and contributed to Is Greater Than. A full list of our contributors can be found on the about page, but there are a few people I’d like to specifically mention, for their support and/or work for the site: former editors Brigid Barry, Gabriel Levinson, and Laura Pearson; long-running contributors Matthew Beck, Laura M. Browning, Leland Cheuk, Leilani Clark, Lynette D’Amico, Levi Fuller, Matt Gajewski, Cat Johnson, Peter Koht, Janina Larenas, Tom LG, Lavinia Ludlow, Erica Phillips, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Kai Smart, Kira Wisniewski, R. John Xerxes, and Michael Zapata; and Daria Davis, Anne Elizabeth Moore, and Dan Sinker, without whose work and support, I might still be serving coffee drinks for minimum wage. If you’ve enjoyed the site over the past few years, be sure to follow those links and keep abreast of their excellent work.

As for me, my primary gig, where I use many of the skills I’ve learned here, is editing the science, technology and civicsystem channels of Shareable.net, an online magazine about the sharing economy. If you’ve enjoyed reading Is Greater Than, I urge you to check out Shareable. We cover a broad scope of topics I think are relevant to IGT readers — collaborative consumption, culture and community, social media, open source software, activist efforts around the world, and much more.

In addition, I’m an working freelance writer covering the politics and culture of technology, underground movements, music, books, art and comedy for a variety of publications. Links to my work and more can be found on my site at paulmdavis.com. I’m also focusing more on my music, exploring podcasting, and dusting off the old domain 12ptplan.com to use as a place for longer-form blogging and musings. It’s pretty bare right now, but won’t be for long. Follow the RSS for 12 Pt. Plan here. You can also keep abreast of my activities, as well as any random smart-ass thoughts that come to mind, on Twitter at paulmdavis.

I’m incredibly proud of the work we have done over the past four years, and though the site will cease publishing, the archives are not going anywhere. Most of all, thanks to you, the readers, whose interest, support and feedback have made it an incredibly rewarding experience.

Uli Westphal

Combatting air pollution with…glowing artificial trees?

MIT publishes back issues of its Technology Review dating back to 1969.

Much was made of how social media affected Egypt’s uprisings, but not about the role Google Earth played. 
Akashic Books’ Johnny Temple on what you need to do before getting a book published.

Amanda Hocking is a 26-year-old millionaire who has made her money writing young adult novels and selling them for .99 on the Kindle.

Could there be an art market for animated gifs?

Drunken NES, a breathalyzer game for the 8-bit Nintendo.

A tale of the loneliest whale in the world.

“Baghdad. Finished” by Jeff Severns Guntzel: Personal narrative of an American in Baghdad, before and after the invasion.

“Last Evenings on Earth” by Mike Zapata: A Chicago native muses upon the city he loves,

“This One’s A Classic” by Paul M. Davis: A calamitous tour goes from bad to worse when the band van breaks down in the middle of nowhere.

“Measuring the Measure of Mankind”, art by Carrie Sieh

“Sergei the Creeple”, short fiction by Deb R. Lewis: Realizing your limits on in a bloody ice hockey rink.

“Substitute”, fiction by Matt Wood: A substitute comes to term with the porous lines separating student from teacher.

“Faking It”, fiction by Megan Stielstra: Faking to make it with a fake ID.

“Kites”, fiction by Brigid J. Barry: A couple considers their relationship while watching another couple fly kites.

“The Day I Went Temporarily Blind”, fiction by Thomas Mundt

The project analyzes the lyrics of over 40,000 songs for metaphors, similes, cultural references, phrases, memes and socio-political ideas. For each, it registers a date and a geographical location. Hemphill has raised more than $8,000 in funding for the project on Kickstarter, from 349 people. The idea is so that important questions can be answered, like who was the first to mention “haters,” or which is the most popular champagne/sneakers/porn star to rap about? The database can also be used to determine the answers to more complex questions, such as which rapper has the smartest songs, or which city spawns the most monosyllabic rap?

Hemphill has put together a video to illustrate more about the project:

It’s a great set of originals (and yes, we’re biased) given a unique sound thanks to his unconventional backing band arrangement: drums courtesy of Eric Redpath, fiddle by Andy Lentz, and Cooper on guitar, bass, banjo, and vocals. A pay-what-you-want preview of what will hopefully end up being a full album, it’s worth checking it out and throwing him a few shekels at Bandcamp.

Do you know the difference between introversion and fear? Common mistakes introverts make.

Is Apple’s aggressive new stance on third-party iOS eBook readers monopolist?

To understand numbers, we must first have language.

McSweeney’s dispels all the end-of-the-publishing-industry doomsaying, stating that book sales have reached all-time highs. But the situation for booksellers may be more dire.

DIY urban development.

Gleaning, the act of collecting leftover crops from farmers’ fields, served as an ancient form of welfare. We haven’t come so far since then.

Geocoded data from Facebook and Twitter, mapped.

This iPad owner is still coveting the NoteSlate, a bare-bones e-ink digital writing tablet.

Is Greater Than friends Sonnenzimmer speak on a panel in St. Louis about screen printing and the entrepreneurial spirit.

Neal Stephenson offers a short history of the rocket.

Lots of talk about Rupert Murdoch’s foolhardy iPad newspaper The Daily. I write about how it demonstrates a basic misunderstanding of both the iPad’s potential and social media at Shareable and follow-up at my personal blog.

Sparrow is a fascinating new OS X email client that takes design cues from Twitter and Gmail, not traditional email.

Deb Olin Unferth, in defense of the much-maligned memoir.

Ahem…Naomi Campbell interviews Vladimir Putin.

2011 has already been a year of major transformation for the publishing industry.

A short (long) history of the death ray.

EMI, now owned by Citigroup

Can Patrick Leahy put a stop to the Patriot Act’s anti-reader provisions?

Shot in the late ’50s, a short documentary about Disney’s “Imagineers” and their animatronic marvels.

“Suddenly, what had seemed awfully productive to me now seemed like pure laziness and inefficiency. This person wrote 3 million pages of a novel yesterday. That person stayed up all night long writing six essays for various prestigious publications. This friend was somehow interviewed by three publications while managing to read and review four books simultaneously and dash off a few dozen short stories and her sixth novella to boot. They’re giving readings! They’re planning readings! They’re selling books! They’re stacking up publication credits like cord wood! The as-of-late familiar feeling came rushing back, and I found myself panicking, thinking, I’m so behind! I need to catch up! I found myself thinking about pulling a few all-nighters myself (as if my old-ass body could handle that anymore), about all the books I still need to read, about the growing list of story ideas and the novel that I have no time for and the short story collection I need to put together–and then I glanced at my giant, mutating to do list for work and I was totally overcome by the whole thing.” – The Influence of Anxiety: The Modern Writer’s Neverending Race

From Oaxaca to LA: Booming Banda Philharmonic

An exhaustive list of “metagames”: video games about video games.

Does Facebook encourage users to put a positive spin on their sad, desperate existences, and as result increase their sense of isolation?

Schadenfreude/man’s hubris alert: Dubai’s man-made islands are sinking into the sea.

Nostalgia for the vintage Internet aesthetics of Myspace?

Texas proposes cutting library funding to zero.

Remembering the Bay Area’s Filipino Mobile DJ crews of the ’90s.

Google faces off with EMI lawyers about the legality of MP3tunes, a media cloud storage platform.

Errol Morris directs a 30-minute film (YouTube link) about the history of International Business Machines.

The Parking Lot Movie, viewable now on Netflix, provides an existential look at parking lots.

The strangest, most frightening and disturbing fetus props at the DC anti-abortion rally March for Life.

Typographic maps. Via

Orson Welles’ unfinished 1972 film “The Other Side of the Wind” emerges from legal limbo and may finally see release.

Over at Shareable, I interviewed my former editor and friend Dan Sinker about how he built the Chicago Mayoral Election Scorecard.

Good tells the story of the invisible immigrant bicyclist.

The story of a bonobo chimp and his mixed-species family.

A Cornell psychologist claims to have found strong evidence for ESP, delighting believers and horrifying scientists. But sometimes the line between respected science and pseudoscience is more porous than we might like.

“The idea at one time was that cable would eventually replace PBS wholesale, that arts channels would broadcast the arts and history channels would broadcast history programming and so on. That would leave PBS with no natural niche, and the government, sufficiently impressed that public funding was no longer necessary, would be persuaded to cut off the federal cash and wander off on its merry way, leaving PBS to wither on the vine. But now, after nearly two decades of actually testing this theory in the wild, we know what happens to cable networks that program the arts or history programs: They eventually start programming shitty reality shows. And that leaves, well, PBS.” – From the AV Club blog post “Hi, we’re PBS. You may have heard of us?”

“The Mirror Man”, a film about the life and work of Jorge Luis Borges.

Over at Shareable, I take a look at screen printing cooperatives like Chicago’s Spudnik Press and the Austin Screen Print Cooperative, which make screen printing accessible, fun and communal.

Finally! Amazon allows Kindle users to access and copy their notes and highlights on the web.

The surreal, slapstick Japanese intro to 30 Rock. Hijinks ensue!

At Shareable, Douglas Rushkoff argues that net neutrality and Wikileaks are sideshows that distract from the need to build our own Internet.

Is the doctoral degree process little more than a pyramid scheme?

On Wonkette, the WONK-BOT TSA-1138′s daily terror alert updates may be the funniest thing of the new year:

If terror birds falling from the sky aren’t terrifying enough, we now have schizophrenic nerds with swords to worry about.

Gerry Shandling and Jeffrey Tambor’s hysterical ’90s talk show parody The Larry Sanders Show is now available on Netflix Instant Watch.

Austin artist Ryan Rhodes creates amazing letterpress-esque designs heavy on typography.

Conventional wisdom watch: people do pay for online content. But not iPad magazines. (Maybe if the iPad magazines were the same price as print subscriptions and offered the sharing functionality of Instapaper and Reeder that might change.)

The world’s most revolutionary cell phone? It’s not the one you think.

A New Year’s regimen for the perpetually exhausted.

15. “Kites” by Brigid J. Barry

The first fiction piece we ran after the relaunch, a meditation on memories of lost moments on the beach.

14. “In Through the Out Door” by Leilani Clark

Leilani finds new reading and writing inspiration by considering the zines of her youth.

13. “Chocolate Orange and Meyer Lemon Manjar” by Janina Larenas

Janina’s recipes are always popular and this delicious concoction from Central and South America rose near the top.

12. “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” by Michael Zapata

Michael Zapata returns to Chicago, his home and his muse.

11. “Baghdad, Finished” by Jeff Severns Guntzel

Jeff Severns Guntzel’s moving memoir about his time in Baghdad prior to the invasion.

10. “Eerily Engaging: The Work of Stacie Willoughby” by Cat Johnson

Cat Johnson profiles a Santa Cruz artist who almost single-handedly created the visual identity for the town’s live-music community.

9. “Buying Art on the Disney Cruise” by Deb R. Lewis

Deb Lewis and her partner enter a surreal world when they embark on a Disney cruise with their daughter.

8. “Ok Matchmaker” by Kira Wisniewski

After a harsh breakup, Kira Wisniewski throws herself into the unfamiliar world of online dating.

7. “Windows Which Open Wide” by Lynette D’Amico

Lynette D’Amico is introduced to the unforgiving life of a Chicago homeowner.

6. “How to Build a Schooner With Your Son on a Saturday Morning at Home Depot” by Cory Fosco

A short story about rediscovering a time-proven way of connecting with a child.

5. “Soldier’s Lament, Forgotten War” by Tom LG

A look back at a hillbilly classic from the trenches of the Korean War.

4. “Wine Spritzers: Not the Wine Cooler of Childhood Memories” by Janina Larenas

Janina’s seasonal cocktail was a hit in during the dog days of summer.

3. “Memory Walls” by Lynette D’Amico

Considering the unspoken demarcations of walls and barriers.

2. “The Coming Cunts” by Lavinia Ludlow

More than just a case study in SEO 101 (and frustrating wankmining web browsers), Lavinia Ludlow’s hilarious and affecting short story got a lot of attention earlier in the year.

1. “Reconsidering The Ampersand” by Cat Johnson

A big hit with design blogs, Cat Johnson’s typographic examination rose to the top of the class in 2010.

Stunningly brilliant author/blogger Geeta Dayal on Wikileaks, the David Wojnarowicz/Smithsonian controversy, music, Foucault and a whole lot more.

The Department of Homeland Security continues to shut down the country’s greatest terrorist threat, hip-hop mp3 blogs.

Sites of urban disrepair in Detroit become swampland.

Few musicians come out of the gate with a sound and aesthetic as fiercely realized as Company Flow did in the mid-’90s.

“The only concern I would have is if too many people come in and it becomes this nuclear Disneyland.” Chernobyl, The Tourist Spot.

Want to burn a book you find offensive without the inconvenient mess? There’s an app for that.

The AV Club rounds up the worst films of the year.

Lifelong zinester Ayun Halliday presents The Zinester’s Guide to NYC.

Reuters eschews local reporting in favor of bargain-rate blogging from content farms such as Examiner.com. Expect service-minded local coverage from the Denver UFO Examiner.

The considerable difference between iOS and Android app economies.

Two more days to submit to Is Greater Than’s Year-End Equation! Do it now.

Who were the cowboys behind the cowboy songs?

If you’re a fan of Brian Eno and/or unconventional songwriting/recording processes, you must read Geeta Dayal’s 33 1/3 book on Brian Eno’s Another Green World.

A brief history of the New York Times gender essentialist trend piece.

Earlier in the week I salvaged my personal blog from the sinking Tumblr ship. Some recent posts about Mark Pilkington’s gripping debunking of UFO’s and intelligence community disinformation Mirage Men, lewd 18th Century verse, and a brand-new (hip-hop heavy) mixtape. Over at Shareable, I examined whether retailers are complicit in the sale of conflict minerals and thedebate over gender identification and social media

For Instapaper addicts, here’s an interesting way to automate content collection using the top links on Twitter and bit.ly. Seems like it would pull in a lot of chaff, but worth a try.

There are worse fates than being locked in a pub for eight days.

Top ten National Geographic stories you may have missed this year. If you don’t, you should subscribe to this amazing magazine (not a paid endorsement).

New holiday hero: “Krampus, a hairy, seven-foot-tall, horned fiend…accompanies Saint Nick on Christmas Eve to beat the hell out of naughty children with whips and branches from a birch tree.” Related: a Facebook fan page for Le Père Fouettard, a French character who accompanies St. Nicholas in his rounds during St. Nicholas’ Day  dispensing lumps of coal and/or floggings to the naughty children while St. Nick gives gifts to the well behaved.

Kazakh president seeks the elixir of life.

Jonathan Franzen’s decade-in-the-making appearance on Oprah.

Eggshelland, an annual Easter display made up of thousands of hand-painted eggs.

A guitar fashioned from an 8-bit NES.

“Written On The Forehead“, a new song from P.J. Harvey’s forthcoming album Let England Shake.

Anne Elizabeth Moore’s Revision Street project comes to a premature end (haitus?).

“…we know that the cuteness epidemic—with its manifestations of craftiness, color-saturation and childishness—in contemporary art has been a terrible, demeaning thing…There’s nothing cute about our trash, or our purchasing, or our engagement with environmental disaster, or you know, our impending deaths—or our overwhelming forced involvement with capitalist superstructures and brands. The cute things? They are what beg us not to think about these things.” Choire Sicha on the cute crafts aesthetic

Steven Spielberg in a 1970′s UFO documentary.

Are PR firms gaming Amazon’s book reviews? (Is that even up for debate?)

An exhibition of photography of Las Vegas in 1968.

Beleaguered legacy online magazine Salon may be looking for a buyer.

Once again, Maura Johnston and Christopher Weingarten take a hatchet to the worst songs of the year.

The Big Picture’s 2010 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar.

Epic Wikipedia Cranky Kong Talk thread is epic. And troubling.

A Master’s class in online commerce.

David Byrne on why there are no good songs about city planning.

How a 15-minute writing exercise can close the gender gap in physics.

X event/news item/cultural artifact/personal experience was > Y event/news item/cultural artifact/personal experience
(short explanation)

Last year we lapsed, but not this one. Anyone with the inclination should submit an equation–it can be something serious or funny, whatever you want to do with it. Keep your explanatory blurb short—three sentences or less. Feel free to submit multiple equations, but if there’s a ton of submissions I may have to pick one per person.

Interested? Submit them to isgreaterthan@gmail.com as inline email, Word docs or textfiles by Friday, December 17. It will run on the 31st. Be sure to include a concise personal bio with one link to whatever best encompasses what you do.

Know some savvy or funny person that would be good for this? Please spread the word.

Previously:

http://isgreaterthan.net/2008/12/is-greater-than-year-end-equations-2008-edition/

http://isgreaterthan.net/2007/12/is-greater-thans-2007-year-end-recap-in-equations/