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A Scorsese in Lagos: The Making of Nigeria's Film Industry

Filmmaker Kunle Afolayan is looking to push the boundaries of moviemaking in Nigeria—but it's still too early to know whether the audiences can support a film with even a $500,000 budget:

"Twenty years after bursting from the grungy street markets of Lagos, the $500 million Nigerian movie business churns out more than a thousand titles a year on average, and trails only Hollywood and Bollywood in terms of revenues. The films are hastily shot and then burned onto video CDs, a cheap alternative to DVDs. They are seldom seen in the developed world, but all over Africa consumers snap up the latest releases from video peddlers for a dollar or two. And so while Afolayan’s name is unknown outside Africa, at home, the actor-director is one of the most famous faces in the exploding entertainment scene known — inevitably — as 'Nollywood.'

"On a continent where economies usually depend on extracting natural resources or on charity, moviemaking is now one of Nigeria’s largest sources of private-sector employment."

AUTHOR: Andrew Rice
PUBLISHED: Feb. 24, 2012
LENGTH: 18 minutes (4712 words)
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How I Found the Human Being Behind Horse_ebooks, The Internet's Favorite Spambot

A weeklong investigation to discover who created the Twitter account that spits out "context-free nonsense" and in doing so has now amassed more than 40,000 followers and a devoted fanbase:

"The feed's strangely poetic stream has been embraced like a life-preserver by internet users drowning in a sea of painfully literal SEO headlines and hack Twitter comedians. Since it appeared in August 2010, word of Horse_ebooks has spread steadily, propelled by blog posts and Twitter chatter by internet obsessives. But unlike many internet culture phenomenons, it never truly went viral. Horse_Ebooks is too weird, too much of an acquired taste to break into exponential growth.

"But these same qualities that have relegated Horse_ebooks to relative obscurity have inspired a passionate Twitter fanbase rivaled only by Beliebers. Followers have fashioned an elaborate fandom based on Horse_ebooks, comics, fan-fiction, merchandise, and inside-jokes. A browser plug-in that turned the text of any website into Horse_ebook-isms was the latest craze among fans. A characteristic Horse_ebook superfan boast is: 'I unfollowed Horse_ebooks, because my friends retweet all its tweets anyway.' We're so deep into Horse_ebooks, you couldn't escape it if you tried."

AUTHOR: Adrian Chen
SOURCE: Gawker
PUBLISHED: Feb. 24, 2012
LENGTH: 8 minutes (2141 words)
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The Book of Jobs

A review of Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs, and a different perspective on the dark side of Steve:

"Sometimes the repetition serves a purpose: The drug LSD, referred to 33 times, is clearly important to Jobs. (The FBI thought the same, according to documents released this month.) 'How many of you have taken LSD?' Jobs taunts an audience of Stanford business school students. 'Are you a virgin? How many times have you taken LSD?' he demands of an Apple interviewee. Bill Gates would 'be a broader guy if he had dropped acid.' Tripping was 'one of the two or three most important things he’d done in his life.' People who had never dropped acid 'would never fully understand him.' The generations that followed his own were more 'materialistic' and less 'idealistic' for not having tripped; also, they all looked like 'virgins.' In the binary world within Steve’s reality, having consumed LSD was the key determinant of whether a colleague or employee was deemed 'enlightened' or 'an asshole.'

"To iSummarize: Steve Jobs had a litmus test for evaluating workers: It was a lot like a literal litmus test."

AUTHOR: Moe Tkacik
SOURCE: Reuters
PUBLISHED: Feb. 22, 2012
LENGTH: 14 minutes (3705 words)
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