This Week - Jan 31, 2014

In the process, a long magazine story went from being one part of a steady diet of journalistic consumption to something artisanal, a treat for connoisseurs...There’s a lot of excellent magazine-length journalism being done now, and Grantland publishes plenty of it. The problem is that long-form stories are too often celebrated simply because they exist. And are long.

— When ‘Long-Form’ Is Bad Form (Jonathan Mahler for The New York Times)

But my love of Rdio doesn’t rest on any of these things. I don’t need my primary, go-to, heroic music listening application to be exotic or brilliant. Instead, what I need is an app that — at its root — helps me store, listen to, and discover wonderful, life-enriching, hot, sad, happy, beautiful music. And you do that job so well. In fact, it is partly because you are simple that you are wonderful.

— Rooting For Rdio (Aaron Schildkrout for Medium)

We shout as if everything from our breakfast scrambles to our dogs are tantamount to the “Rocky” moment at the top of the stairs, or being on the bow of the ship like whatshisname in the movie “Titanic.” Never have we been so emphatic.

— You Can Tell Everybody This Is Your Song (Carrie Brownstein for The New York Times)

In honor of this beautiful, sadsack town and its perennially self-conscious, downtrodden population, we’ve put together a series that delves into what makes Angelinos of all classes, races, and backgrounds miserable and/or consider moving to San Francisco.

— Los Angeles Is Miserable: An Introduction (Dave Schilling for Vice)

Would you prefer these 'empowered cyclists' drive cars instead? As if they then wouldn't contribute to traffic at all? It's almost as if you forgot that the leading cause of traffic is traffic. More specifically, motherfucking cars.

— Sorry, L.A. Times, Bikes Are Not to Blame for Santa Monica Traffic (Devin Feldman for LA Weekly)